📖 Ezekiel

יְחֶזְקֵאל Yechezqel — 'God strengthens' — or 'may God strengthen.' The book is named for its prophet, a deported priest, and it is the only prophetic book set entirely OUTSIDE the land of Israel.
Ἰεζεκιήλ (Iezekiel) — The Greek Septuagint of Ezekiel is noticeably shorter than the Hebrew (by some four to five percent) and one important papyrus omits a long stretch of chapter 36 — evidence, as in Jeremiah, that the book circulated in more than one edition before the text settled.

The strangest book in the Old Testament — a priest with no temple, sitting by an irrigation canal in Iraq, who sees the throne of God on wheels; and who then watches the glory leave Jerusalem, and promises it will come back.

Chapters

1 of 48 chapters translated · 2.1%

Gold chapters are published — click one to read it. The rest are still ahead.

123456789101112131415161718192021222324252627282930313233343536373839404142434445464748

Chapter by chapter

Ezekiel 1A deported priest sits beside an irrigation canal in southern Iraq — five years into the exile, in the year he should have begun serving at an altar he will never see again — and the heavens open. A storm out of the north, four living creatures with four faces each, wheels within wheels whose rims are full of eyes, a vault of terrible ice over their heads, and above the vault a sapphire throne with something on it that looks like a human being. Ezekiel never once says he saw God: he says he saw the appearance of the likeness of the glory of Jehovah, and fell on his face. The vault is the same word as Genesis 1, and the light around the throne is the war-bow of Genesis 9.

About the book

Where it sits

One of the Major Prophets (with Isaiah and Jeremiah), placed after Jeremiah and Lamentations; in the Hebrew canon, among the Latter Prophets. ⚠ Its place was not automatic: the Talmud reports that the book was nearly withdrawn from public use because its temple laws contradict the Torah, until Hananiah ben Hezekiah 'burned three hundred jars of oil' reconciling them (Shabbat 13b) — and the Mishnah restricts the chariot vision of chapter 1 more tightly than any other passage in Scripture (Hagigah 2:1).

Genre

PROPHECY of an unusually extreme kind: vast symbolic VISIONS (the chariot, the valley of dry bones, the measured temple), SIGN-ACTS performed on the prophet's own body (lying bound on one side for months, shaving his head with a sword, refusing to mourn his wife), long prose oracles, ALLEGORIES (the two sisters, the vine, the great eagle), laments over the nations, and a closing law-code and temple blueprint. It is the Old Testament's principal quarry for later apocalyptic — Daniel and Revelation both build with its stone.

Author

EZEKIEL son of Buzi, a priest (1:3), deported to Babylonia in 597 BC with King Jehoiachin and called as a prophet five years later. The book is overwhelmingly first-person and remarkably unified in style and vocabulary — which has made it, unusually among the prophets, a book most scholars are willing to credit largely to the man it names, with later editing of the temple vision and the oracles against the nations.

Date written

Precisely dated, and almost uniquely so: fourteen oracles carry a day, month and year counted from Jehoiachin's exile, running from 593 BC (the call, 1:1-2) to 571 BC (29:17) — a ministry of just over twenty years spanning the fall of Jerusalem in 586, which arrives at its exact midpoint and splits the book in two. ⚠ The one date the book does not explain is its first: 'the thirtieth year' (1:1), counted from something unnamed.

Place

Babylonia — the Judean deportee settlements along the nāru kabaru, the 'Great Canal' near Nippur, which the book calls the river Chebar. Ezekiel never returns to Jerusalem in the flesh; he is carried there in visions (8:3) and watches it fall from five hundred miles away.

Audience

The FIRST wave of exiles — the court, the craftsmen and the priests taken in 597, living in their own villages in southern Mesopotamia and confident that the disaster was temporary and Jerusalem would stand. Half of Ezekiel's work is destroying that confidence; the other half, after the city falls and hope dies with it, is rebuilding a future for the same people. The turn is exact: at 33:21 a fugitive arrives with the news, and the book changes direction in a single verse.

How it's laid out

1-3The call — the chariot vision by the Chebar, the scroll he is told to eat, and the appointment as a watchman.

4-24Judgment on Jerusalem — sign-acts, allegories, and the great vision (chs 8-11) in which the glory of Jehovah leaves the temple; ending on the night the city is besieged and his wife dies.

25-32Oracles against the nations — Ammon, Moab, Edom, Philistia, TYRE (the longest, with its lament over a great ship), Sidon, and Egypt.

33-39After the fall — the watchman renewed, the shepherds indicted, a new heart and a new spirit, the VALLEY OF DRY BONES, and Gog of Magog.

40-48The final vision — a new temple measured cubit by cubit, the glory returning by the east gate, a river running from under the threshold, and the land redivided. The last words are the city's new name: 'Jehovah is there.'

What it's about

THE GLORY (kavod) THAT MOVES — the book's spine. God's presence is seen first in Babylonia (ch 1), watched leaving the temple by stages (chs 10-11), and watched returning at the end (43:1-5). The theological earthquake is that God is not confined to a building — which is exactly what an exile needed to hear and a Jerusalemite refused to.
'THEY SHALL KNOW THAT I AM JEHOVAH' — the recognition formula, some seventy times, attached to judgment and rescue alike; everything that happens in the book happens so that someone will know who God is.
'SON OF MAN' — God's only form of address to the prophet, ninety-three times: a standing reminder of the distance between the human on the throne and the human on the ground.
INDIVIDUAL RESPONSIBILITY — chapter 18 breaks the proverb about fathers eating sour grapes and children's teeth being set on edge: 'the soul that sins, it shall die,' and the one who turns will live.
A NEW HEART — the promise that the problem is internal and the cure must be too: 'I will give you a new heart, and put a new spirit within you; I will remove the heart of stone' (36:26), which is the same insight as Jeremiah's new covenant, and which the dry bones then act out (ch 37).
HOLINESS AND THE NAME — God acts, the book insists uncomfortably often, 'for the sake of my holy name' rather than because Israel deserves it; the priest-prophet's categories are clean and unclean, holy and profane, all the way through.

Key words & people

Words this book turns on — each links to its dictionary entry:

kavodraqiademutchashmal

People & places — each links to the encyclopedia:

Ezekiel the river Chebar Jehoiachin (Coniah / Jeconiah)Babylon

The source text

Translated from the pointed Hebrew Masoretic Text (as printed by Mechon-Mamre). ⚠️ Ezekiel's Hebrew is famously difficult: heavily Aramaic-influenced, with a large vocabulary of rare and unique words (chashmal, bazaq, and the technical architectural terms of chapters 40-48 among them), and grammar that in the vision passages goes genuinely unstable — genders and numbers slipping inside single verses, as they do all through chapter 1. Translations quietly regularize this; the notes flag it where it falls. The Greek Septuagint is several percent shorter than the Hebrew and occasionally clearly better, and the Masoretes left an unusual number of ketiv/qere (written/read) notes in this book. This translation follows the Masoretic Hebrew and reports the significant divergences.

Looking forward

Ezekiel supplies the New Testament with some of its largest furniture. 'SON OF MAN,' God's address to the prophet here, is the title Jesus uses of himself more than any other (though its apocalyptic weight comes from Daniel 7). The chariot vision's four living creatures reappear around the throne in Revelation 4, its measuring-reed and river of life in Revelation 21-22, and Gog and Magog in Revelation 20. The indictment of Israel's SHEPHERDS in chapter 34, and God's answer — 'I myself will search for my sheep… I will set up over them one shepherd' — stands directly behind John 10, 'I am the good shepherd.' And the promise of a new heart and a new spirit (36:26), acted out in the valley of dry bones, is the Old Testament's clearest statement of the thing Jesus tells Nicodemus must happen to a person (John 3).

Where the debates are

The UNITY of the book (how much of the temple vision and the nations-oracles is the prophet's own hand), and its two EDITIONS (the shorter Greek against the longer Hebrew). Then the prophet himself: the extremity of his symbolic acts and visionary states has attracted every kind of psychological explanation, from ecstatic trance to catalepsy to schizophrenia — a discussion that says at least as much about its own eras as about him, and that the ancient world would not have recognized as a question. Also debated: whether he prophesied partly in Palestine (a minority view, generated by how vividly he describes Jerusalem from five hundred miles away), the identity of Gog of Magog, and above all what to make of the TEMPLE of chapters 40-48 — a literal building to be built, an idealized symbol, or a vision of the age to come; it has never been built, and its laws do not match the Torah's, which is the fact that nearly cost the book its place in the canon.