Ezekiel

What This Book Is

A priest in exile given wild visions, strange sign acts, and finally a valley of dry bones and a river running out of a new temple.

Overview

Ezekiel was a priest, trained for a temple he would never serve in. Deported to Babylon in an early wave, he receives his call by a canal hundreds of miles from Jerusalem, and the vision is disorienting: wheels within wheels, four living creatures, and above them a throne and a figure like a man. Whatever else it means, it says that God is present in Babylon, which the exiles badly needed to know.

He is then told to do things. Lie on his side for months. Shave his head with a sword and divide the hair. Cook over dung. Build a model siege of Jerusalem in the street. Most disturbingly, when his wife dies he is told not to mourn publicly, as a sign to a people about to lose what they loved most.

The first half insists that Jerusalem will fall and that the exiles should stop expecting a quick return. In chapters 8 to 11 he is carried in a vision to the temple, shown what is happening inside it, and then watches the glory of God rise up and leave the building. It is one of the most devastating scenes in Scripture.

After the city falls, the tone turns. God will be the shepherd himself. He will give a new heart and a new spirit. In the vision everyone knows, a valley of dry bones is asked whether it can live, and breath comes into them.

The book closes with a detailed vision of a new temple, and a river flowing out of it that gets deeper the further it goes, with trees on the banks whose leaves are for healing.

Structure

• Chapters 1 to 3: The callWheels, creatures, a throne, and a scroll that tastes sweet.
• Chapters 4 to 24: Judgment on JerusalemSign acts, sermons, and the glory departing the temple.
• Chapters 25 to 32: The nationsOracles against surrounding powers.
• Chapters 33 to 39: RestorationA true shepherd, a new heart, and a valley of dry bones.
• Chapters 40 to 48: The new templeA measured sanctuary, and a river that deepens as it flows.

Themes

Why It Matters

Ezekiel answers the exile's deepest fear, that geography had separated them from God. His visions insist otherwise. The book is also the source of some of Scripture's most quoted images: the shepherd who seeks the lost, the heart of stone replaced with a heart of flesh, the dry bones, and the healing river that reappears in the last chapter of Revelation. It is strange reading, and the strangeness is doing theological work.

How to Read It

• Read chapter 1 for what it does rather than for a diagram. It is meant to overwhelm.
• Read chapters 10 and 11 alongside chapter 43 to see the glory leave and return.
• Read chapter 37 when hope feels dead, and chapter 34 when leaders have failed you.
• Take the sign acts seriously; they were public, costly, and often humiliating.

Key Verse

Did You Know?

• Ezekiel is called son of man more than ninety times, a title Jesus later takes for himself.
• The dry bones vision in chapter 37 became a well known spiritual sung in the American south.
• The river in chapter 47 reappears, with its healing trees, in the closing chapter of Revelation.

Where to Start Reading