Communications of the Book of Ezekiel

Communication in the book of Ezekiel is dominated by Yhwh’s commands to his prophet Ezekiel. Nonetheless, the book hardly reports the prophet’s compliance with those commands. Paying attention to this phenomenon, I distinguish communication in the book of Ezekiel at the discourse level from that of the book at the reading level. Blocked communication, symbolized as “the iron wall,” is the communication at the discourse level. Here, the literary audience (audience-character) is continuously overridden by both the sender and messenger and evaluated as rebellious. However, the book of Ezekiel strategically extends its influences beyond the discourse level and actively reaches out to the implied readers. This unlimited invitation at the reading level can be expressed as “the voice in the air.” The book invites the implied audience/readers to transform themselves through the reading experiences to join the projected restored world in the land and eventually to become a messenger. Overall, I argue that the communication aspects of the book of Ezekiel fits well in one of the book’s intentions that encourages the unaddressed next generation of exiles, rather than the contemporaries of the character Ezekiel, to prepare the former for Yhwh’s restoration plan.

Where There’s Fire There’s Smoke

What critics emphasize in their study of the Bible in art depends on a wide range of issues, including the artist’s sociohistorical context, the purpose for which the art is created, and critics’ own interpretive interests. Because all approaches treat biblical art as interpretation in its own right, critics must first address the relationship between text and image. This chapter applies Cheryl Exum’s method of visual criticism to establish a genuine dialogue between biblical texts and their artistic representations in order to interpret figural representations as artistic solutions to textual cruxes. This method is used to elucidate a difficult scene—the painting of Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones in the Dura-Europos Synagogue. This scene will be examined in light of textual problems in MT Ezekiel 9:1–6, rabbinic textual interpretation of Ezekiel 8-9, and the iconography of idolatry in the cycle of synagogue paintings. The scene does not focus on every detail in these chapters; rather, it produces evidence of idolatry, in the display of bowls and incense burners and, more dramatically, in the portrayal of the executioners’ search for the protective Tau as they carry out the divine command of judgment. The artists’ selection of these two episodes indicates a keen engagement of the artists with questions of identity and idolatry in the religiously plural city of Dura-Europos. Thus explained, the scene clarifies the contribution of the Ezekiel painting to the synagogue cycle’s emphasis on Jewish identity in a polytheist context.

Ezekiel’s Map of Future Past

Attention to the spatial elements in the book of Ezekiel reveal a coherent plan that maps sin onto the spaces of city and temple which become the focus of correction in the visionary chapters that end the book (chs. 40–48). The book displays great disdain for all urban settings, including foreign cities, for their corrupt politics, trade and crime. These charges especially apply to Jerusalem. The temple also exhibits similar corruption in terms of personnel, iconography and impurity. The final vision reaches back first into the pre-urban history of Judah, the wilderness period, in order to find a setting free from such corruptions, but ultimately it returns to an Eden-like state as the only viable solution to the problems of innate sin and desecration. This is an Eden with no free-will and no human agency, the only way to safeguard sacred space.

Ezekiel and Israel’s Legal Traditions

This chapter discusses the similarities and differences in form, content, and vocabulary between the book of Ezekiel and the commands, motivations, and sanctions in the Pentateuch. It considers how legal traditions in the broad sense—that is, not just “laws,” but also statements about obligation, benefits, and punishments—are used in the book of Ezekiel. The logic of the book is deeply indebted to priestly ideology and its notions of purity and holiness. This chapter also examines the possibility, nature, and direction of dependence, both conceptual and literary, between the book of Ezekiel and Israel’s legal traditions (Deuteronomic, Priestly, and Holiness) that were textualized and incorporated into what became the Pentateuch.

The Mesopotamian Context of Ezekiel

The book of Ezekiel explicitly locates its material in Babylon between the years 593 and 571 BCE. The book’s language and imagery correspond to that setting. This chapter surveys the rich research of the book’s Mesopotamian context in three areas: comparative cultural elements, iconography and imagery, and philological research. The abundance of the evidence demonstrates that the prophet’s activity took place mainly in Babylonia, influencing the language, metaphors, content, and rich imagery of the book that bears his name and is essential for reconstructing the book’s composition.

Ezekiel and Israelite Literary Traditions

This chapter argues, following Pickering’s notion of material agency, that literary devices are material agents, with which humans collaborate. This accords with the traditum–traditio distinction employed by Fishbane, a dialectic in which tradents seek to appropriate divine authority and power in managing the vital significance of tradition. The chapter applies this model initially to Ezekiel’s image of “not good” laws given by Yahweh, suggesting that the prophet and his editors present these laws as emblematic of an ongoing dialectic they perceived in the management of the Israelite traditum, the community’s complement of devices for living successfully. The chapter argues that the array of scholarly interpretations of the laws supports this assessment and provides an optic for considering the relationship of the entire book to the Israelite traditum and the ways scholarship has engaged it. These include questions regarding non-native ‘foreign’ elements; genre and design features; literary variants; and the adaptation of existing material.

Ezekiel in the Jewish Tradition

After a brief survey of early rabbinic ambivalence toward this controversial prophetic book and its use in synagogue liturgy, this chapter traces the history of rabbinic interpretation of the repetition of “I said to you, ‘Through your blood, live’” in Ezek 16:6. The midrashic tradition ascribes redemptive power to these “two bloods”—of circumcision and of the paschal lamb. This chapter argues that the “bloods” of the verse become metonyms for all of the commandments through which Jews realize their covenant with God. Both blood and circumcision (or lack thereof) were weighty symbols for Christians, too; so as Jews migrated into Christendom in larger numbers in the eleventh century, they had to address Christianity’s competing claims to the same covenant. The addition of this verse to the Jews’ circumcision liturgy upon their arrival in northern Europe can be explained in light of these shared symbols.

Ezekiel as a Written Text: Archiving Visions, Remembering Futures

This chapter focuses on Ezekiel as a text, i.e., a collection of writings meant to be read again and again. As a text, it presents a range of ideas in dialogue with one another—and sometimes in tension—thus providing ample space for continual discussion and reinterpretation of its ideas among its original communities of readers in antiquity. Ezekiel would have functioned as a kind of archive of speech and vision—an idea that challenges commonly held notions of prophetic literature’s function and understandings of its generic intersections with other Judean texts in antiquity. As a written text, Ezekiel would have stood as an organized resource for thinking about the past, and about divine communication in and through that past, in an open-ended way that left room for future possibilities.

Ezekiel in Its Historical Context

This chapter surveys the historical background for the composition of the book of Ezekiel, covering roughly three centuries—from the reign of Hezekiah until the early Persian period. This background is essential to the book’s proper interpretation, given one of its most characteristic and prevalent features: oracles that are dated. The present chapter not only recounts the rise and fall of successive Assyrian and Babylonian empires, but also shows how the book has addressed the context of that evolving environment. The book’s explicit chronology thus ties this political history to the experience of the Judean exiles in Babylon.

Text-Critical Issues in Ezekiel

This chapter helps to orient the reader to the most important textual witnesses to the book of Ezekiel, and to the recent scholarly discussion about them; it then presents several representative text samples, to illustrate Ezekiel’s text history. Research on this book’s complicated textual history has developed significantly in the last half-century. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls provided invaluable new data for understanding the history of the biblical text in the period of the Jewish Second Temple. New paradigms have emerged for research into the Old Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures (a.k.a. “the Septuagint”). All of this has dramatically affected how scholars evaluate the text of Ezekiel.