Topic 13 of 33 - Your Place in the Learning Journey
Ezekiel Among the Exiles
Ezekiel is the strangest book in the Old Testament - and one of the most theologically profound. Ezekiel was a priest who was deported to Babylon in the first deportation of 597 BCE, and he ministered to the exile community on the Chebar canal for at least twenty-two years. His visions are elaborate, his symbolic actions bizarre (he lay on his side for 390 days, ate food cooked over dung, shaved his head and divided the hair in thirds), and his theological claims radical. Yet beneath the strangeness runs a consistent and deeply serious engagement with the questions the exile raised.
The book opens with one of the most spectacular visions in all of scripture - the vision of the divine chariot, with its four living creatures, its wheels within wheels, its crystal expanse, and the figure like a human being enthroned above it all. This vision has fascinated and troubled Jewish interpreters for centuries - the rabbis warned that it should not be studied by anyone under thirty. What it establishes theologically is crucial: God is not confined to the Temple in Jerusalem. God can appear on a chariot, can move, can be present in Babylon as much as in Judah. The exile has not removed God from the picture.
Ezekiel's most famous passages address the exile's central theological crisis directly. The vision of the valley of dry bones in chapter 37 - where God asks whether the bones can live, and then breathes life back into them - is a direct promise of national restoration. The vision is explicitly interpreted: the bones are the whole house of Israel, their hope has dried up, but God will open their graves and bring them back to their land. The second half of the book (chapters 40-48) is an elaborate vision of a restored Temple - a vision so detailed that it reads like architectural plans. This vision was never literally fulfilled, but it served as a promise that the Temple's destruction was not the end of God's purposes.
Ezekiel's influence on later apocalyptic literature - including Daniel and Revelation - was enormous. His four living creatures reappear in Revelation 4. His vision of Gog and Magog (chapters 38-39) is reworked in Revelation 20. The symbolic, visionary style of his writing established a template that later writers drew on extensively. Reading Ezekiel is essential preparation for reading the apocalyptic literature of both Testaments.