Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 87 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
This session walks the whole first division of Ezekiel, the oracles of judgment against Israel in chapters 1 to 24. Dr. Essex shows that the book's strangeness has reasons: every sign-act preaches, every proverb the people quote gets corrected, and the prophet who cannot speak except when God opens his mouth becomes the message himself. Listen for the honest moments where Essex says of the 430 days what Feinberg said before him: no one knows, and the secret things belong to the Lord.
The first division of Ezekiel, 1:4 through 23:49, presents the rebellion of the house of Israel and the coming judgment, and it divides by Ezekiel's own chronological headings into three collections: chapters 1 to 7 under the fifth year of Jehoiachin's exile, 593 BC; chapters 8 to 19 under the vision date of September 592 BC; and chapters 20 to 23 under 591 BC. Chapter 24 then opens the next heading with the siege itself in 588 BC. Within the larger book, the oracles against the nations, with Tyre and Egypt bearing the brunt, stand between judgment and the restoration oracles that begin at chapter 33.
The call runs from 1:4 through chapter 3, and its governing image arrives at the end: the prophet as watchman. After the vision of the glory, the voice says: son of man, human being, stand on your feet. The Spirit enters him and sets him on his feet, and the commission is blunt: I am sending you to a rebellious people, stiff-faced and hard-hearted, and the word rebel saturates chapters 2 and 3, one who does the opposite of whatever Yahweh says. Whether they listen or not, they will know that a prophet has been among them: Ezekiel is responsible for obedience, not for their response. Do not fear them, though thistles and thorns are with you and you sit on scorpions; and open your mouth and eat the scroll, taking God's word into himself before he speaks it.
Ezekiel is not sent to a people of unintelligible speech: he goes to the house of Israel and to Israel alone, and even the oracles against the nations in chapters 25 to 32 are given for Israel's benefit. The bitter irony of 3:6: had God sent him to the Gentiles, they would have listened, but the house of Israel will not listen to Ezekiel because they are not willing to listen to Yahweh. So God makes the prophet's face as hard as their faces, as he had strengthened Jeremiah. Lifted by the Spirit, Ezekiel goes in bitterness in the rage of his spirit, read two ways: traditionally, embittered at Israel's rebellion; or, as Block argues after fifteen years in the book, embittered at Yahweh for a calling he did not relish, as Jeremiah sometimes did not. Either way, the hand of Yahweh was strong upon him, and he sat seven days among the exiles, causing consternation before he said a single word.
The watchman stood at the lookout to warn the city of an advancing army; so the prophet must relay Yahweh's warning. If he warns and the wicked man, or the righteous man turned wicked, does not respond, the hearer dies in his iniquity and the watchman is clear; if he fails to warn, the blood is required at the watchman's hand, language reaching back to Genesis 9. The interpretive question is what life and death mean here. Duguid reads spiritual death with eternal consequences visible from the New Testament. Essex, with the majority and the study Bible note, takes it as physical life and death in the historical context: the generation under Josiah had held an outward conformity that collapsed after 609, so the whole house, exiles and Jerusalemites alike, now stands wicked, and when Babylon brings death from 588 to 586, the blood will lie on those who refused the faithful watchman's warning, not on Ezekiel.
At 3:26 Yahweh makes Ezekiel's tongue stick to the roof of his mouth: he cannot rebuke at will, and only when God opens his mouth may he say, thus says the Lord. God will control what his prophet communicates, because God understands the depths of their rebellion in a way even Ezekiel cannot. Essex adds the wry application: some of us might wish the Lord kept our tongues to the roofs of our mouths until he had a clear message for us to speak. The result among the exiles: when Ezekiel finally speaks, Yahweh is speaking.
Before Ezekiel speaks, he acts. First sign, 4:1 to 3: a brick inscribed Jerusalem, with siege wall, ramp, camps, and battering rams arranged against it, a child's miniature of the real siege to come, a sign to the house of Israel. Second sign, 4:4 to 8, the most controversial: 390 days on his left side, facing north, for the iniquity of the house of Israel, and 40 days on his right side, facing south, for the house of Judah, a day for a year, 430 years in all. What the years mean divides every commentator. Block and Dyer look to the past: roughly 430 years back from the destruction reaches the era of Solomon, the fountainhead of the apostasy of both kingdoms. Duguid takes the 390 as Israel's rebellion in the land and the 40 as the present exile. Cooper and Alexander look ahead: 430 years from 597 BC lands at 167 BC and the Maccabean crisis, when a measure of independence returned. Feinberg lists the views and declines to choose, and Essex stands with Feinberg: I don't know, and no one can be dogmatic; the sign plainly concerns judgment for accumulated sin, but the key to the number is, for now, a secret thing that belongs to the Lord. Ask Ezekiel in the millennium.
Third sign, 4:9 to 17: bread of mixed grains, eaten by weight with anxiety, water by measure, baked over human dung, for God will break the staff of bread in Jerusalem. Ezekiel protests, the one recorded protest of the section: Lord Yahweh, I have never been defiled from my youth; and God concedes cow's dung in its place, scarcely an improvement, the sign of siege scarcity and defilement standing. Fourth sign, 5:1 to 4: the prophet shaves head and beard, a shameful act, weighs the hair in scales, burns a third, strikes a third with the sword, scatters a third to the wind, and hides a few strands in the hem of his garment: Jerusalem's destruction, the sword, and the scattering among the nations, with a remnant preserved from total annihilation.
Chapters 6 and 7 turn from sign to oracle. Set your face against the mountains of Israel: the mountains, because there stood the high places, the hills and green trees and leafy oaks where Judah offered soothing aroma to idols. The slain will lie among the idols around the altars, and the mountains God gave for vines, olives, and grain will become desolate as the wilderness, so that they will know that I am Yahweh. Chapter 7 declares the imminence: an end, the end is coming on the four corners of the land, and in the historical moment Ezekiel spoke, it was.
In September 592, thirteen months into the sign-acts, the hand of the Lord falls on Ezekiel as he sits in his house before the elders, and he is carried in vision, body remaining in Babylon, to see the temple as it actually was: gross abominations and idolatry practiced inside Yahweh's own house, full justification for its destruction. In chapter 9 the executioners pass through the city, marking for protection, like a new Passover, all who grieve over the abominations; the silence of the text implies how few grieved. Because of it all, in chapters 10 and 11 the glory departs, and with the glory goes the protection: temple and city lie open to the Babylonian onslaught. Ezekiel tells the exiles everything, so from 592 BC the exiles knew the glory had already left the building their hopes were pinned on.
Chapters 12 to 19 form the correction of the house of Israel in exile: they have heard everything and changed nothing. Two more sign-acts open the section: Ezekiel packs an exile's baggage and sets out as on a journey, and digs through the wall carrying his belongings on his shoulder, because the wall of Jerusalem will be breached and the people will go out through it into exile; then he eats his bread with trembling and drinks water with anxiety, the horror of a land stripped of its fullness because of the violence of all who live in it.
The section then corrects the people's proverbs and evasions one by one. The days are long and every vision fails (12:22): no longer; in your days, O rebellious house, I shall speak the word and perform it, which grounds chapter 13's condemnation of the false prophets and diviners. The elders sit before Ezekiel to consult Yahweh with idols set up in their hearts (14:1 to 11): should I be consulted by them at all? Repent, or become the proverb yourselves. Surely righteous men in our midst will shield us (14:13 to 14): even if Noah, Daniel, and Job, the biblical Daniel, already in exile, stood in the land, their righteousness would deliver only themselves, as Jeremiah's presence did not save Jerusalem. And the vine of chapter 15: how is vine wood better than forest wood? It is not; fruitless vine wood is good for one thing, burning, and so Jerusalem.
Chapter 16 tells Jerusalem's history as the story of an adulterous wife, so graphic that some commentators have called it nearly pornographic, though, Essex notes, it is no worse than Proverbs 7, and the ugliness is the point: the prophets consistently intertwine idolatry and abominable sexual practice, each leading to the other. The proverb everyone will quote (16:44): like mother, like daughter; the present generation repeats the lewdness of its whole ancestry, and the accumulated penalty now falls. Chapter 17's riddle of the two eagles: the first great eagle, Babylon, crops the top of the cedar and plants seed that thrives; a second eagle, Egypt, entices the planted seed, Judah, to bend its roots toward him; and the parable warns what the first eagle will do to a seedling that trusts the second. Zedekiah's Egyptian hope will destroy him.
The seventh proverb, shared with Jeremiah 31:29: the fathers eat the sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge, meaning: our fathers sinned, we merely bear the consequences, we are not responsible. Yahweh forbids the proverb: all souls are mine; the soul who sins will die, death here as in chapter 3, the physical death of the coming destruction falling on each for his own wickedness. Liberal commentators claim Ezekiel here reverses the Torah's corporate solidarity, contradicting the second commandment's visiting of iniquity to the third and fourth generation. Essex answers from the text of Exodus 20:5 and 6: the iniquity is visited on the generations of those who hate me, those who continue the fathers' practice, while loving kindness flows to thousands of those who love me; and Deuteronomy 24:16 already forbade judges to punish sons for fathers' sins. Ezekiel is complementary to the Torah, not contradictory: influence is real, but repentance was always possible, and any wicked man can break the cycle and live.
No repentance follows the corrections, so chapter 19 closes the collection with a lamentation for the princes of Israel, Zedekiah and his entourage, who will suffer the coming judgment. Chapters 20 to 23, under the 591 BC heading, indict the defective leadership. When the elders come to inquire, Ezekiel is directed to catalog Israel's rebellion further back than any other prophet reaches: on the very day God chose Israel and made himself known in Egypt, he commanded them to cast away the idols of Egypt, and they refused, so that God resolved to pour out wrath in Egypt itself and refrained only for the sake of his name and his oath to Abraham. The exodus was pure grace to a nation of practicing idolaters, which explains how quickly Sinai produced a golden calf once Moses disappeared. The pattern holds through the wilderness and the land: a Joshua, a David, a Josiah restrains the idolatry for a season, and the moment the godly leader is gone the nation reverts. Israel is idolatrous from beginning to end, and the elders have allowed it.
Chapters 21 and 22 declare the judgment imminent: God's sword is polished and ready against the wicked, and Jerusalem's desolation is the culmination of the whole history of rebellion. Chapter 23 retells the story as two sisters, daughters of one mother, who played the harlot in Egypt, where chapter 20 said it all began: Oholah is Samaria, Oholibah is Jerusalem, and Jerusalem, refusing to learn from her sister's fate, will suffer the same judgment, told again in the graphic register of chapter 16. Then chapter 24, January 588 BC: this very day the king of Babylon has laid siege to Jerusalem, the boiling pot is set on the fire, and Ezekiel's wife dies with grief forbidden, God's own response to a city receiving the judgment due her.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all twenty-two are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What are the three dated collections of Ezekiel's first division?
2. What does the word rebel fundamentally mean in Ezekiel's commission?
3. What ironic comparison does Yahweh make about Ezekiel's audience in 3:6?
4. How does Block interpret Ezekiel going in bitterness in the rage of his spirit?
5. How does Essex understand the life and death of the watchman passage?
6. What restriction did God place on Ezekiel's speech?
7. In the sign of the brick, what did the brick represent?
8. In the sign of the sides, what does each day represent?
9. Where does Essex finally land on the meaning of the 430 days?
10. Against which sign did Ezekiel protest, and what concession followed?
11. What became of the three portions of hair in the sign of Ezekiel 5?
12. Why does Ezekiel prophesy against the mountains of Israel?
13. In the vision of chapter 9, who receives the protecting mark?
14. What did the exiles know from 592 BC because Ezekiel told them his vision?
15. What did Ezekiel's packed baggage and digging through the wall signify?
16. What is the point of naming Noah, Daniel, and Job in chapter 14?
17. What is vine wood good for, in the parable of chapter 15?
18. In the riddle of the two eagles, who are the eagles and the seed?
19. How does Essex answer the claim that Ezekiel 18 contradicts the second commandment?
20. How far back does chapter 20's catalog of rebellion reach, further than any other prophet?
21. What repeated pattern does chapter 20 expose in Israel's history?
22. Who are Oholah and Oholibah?
All twenty-two correct. Lecture 12 is complete.
Ezekiel was told from the outset that his hearers would not listen, and that his job was faithfulness, not results. Where do you most need that distinction between obedience and outcomes, and what would change if you believed it?
God controlled Ezekiel's tongue so that he spoke only when given a word. Essex admits many of us might wish for the same. What would it look like to hold your tongue until you have something worth saying, especially in conflict?
Essex stands with Feinberg on the 430 days: I don't know. What does it cost a teacher to say that, and why might honest uncertainty about a detail actually strengthen confidence in the interpreter and the text?
The mark in chapter 9 went to those who grieved over the abominations around them. What is the difference between grieving over sin and merely disapproving of it, and what do you honestly grieve?
The sour-grapes proverb let a generation blame its fathers. Where are you tempted to explain your own patterns entirely by what was done to you, and how does Ezekiel 18's open door of repentance speak to that?
Ezekiel 18:32
Read Ezekiel 2 and 3 for the commission, then chapters 4 and 5 with this study sheet beside you, naming what each sign preaches. Then read chapter 18 in full, watching how the chapter dismantles the sour-grapes proverb case by case, and finish with chapter 20's catalog beside Exodus 32 to feel how far back the idolatry runs. Next session: the oracles against the nations, with Tyre and Egypt bearing the brunt, and the turn to restoration at chapter 33.