November 2–8, 2026 · Come, Follow Me
"A New Spirit Will I Put within You" · the Church's lesson page
Nathan and Eli open the week at a Babylonian canal with the panel's academic: a throne on wheels, a priest who sits silent seven days, a new heart, and bones that breathe. Then the hard questions: Papyrus 967 without the new-heart passage, the two sticks and the writing-board debate, and a book the sages nearly withdrew.
This week's reading follows a priest who never served in the temple he trained for. Ezekiel was deported to Babylonia with King Jehoiachin, and in "the fifth year of king Jehoiachin's captivity" (1:2), by a canal called the Chebar, "the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God" (1:1). He eats a scroll, sits speechless among the exiles for a week, is made a watchman and then struck dumb, and does not speak freely again until a refugee arrives with the news "The city is smitten" (33:21). After that the book turns toward hope: shepherds judged and replaced, a stony heart taken out and a heart of flesh put in, a valley of bones that stands up, two sticks joined into one, and a river that runs out of the temple and heals the Dead Sea.
The LDS scholar names the problem every Latter-day Saint brings to this block. Latter-day Saints come to Ezekiel already sure what three of its passages mean. The stick of Joseph is the Book of Mormon, the dry bones are the resurrection, and the river is temple blessing. His method for the week is the method of this guide: Reading honestly means telling the two apart: what the evidence supports, what it does not, and where Restoration claims actually rest. The academic scholar starts with the shape of the book. Ezekiel looks like the most orderly of the prophetic books. It moves from judgment on Jerusalem (chapters 1–24) to oracles against the nations (25–32) to restoration (33–48), and it carries dates. But the best evidence that the book kept growing comes not from theory but from manuscripts, and you will meet that evidence in Session 4.
The rabbi points out that Jews do not usually meet Ezekiel front to back. In the synagogue we meet it in pieces, set into the calendar. Chapter 1 on Shavuot, the bones at Passover, the clean water on the Sabbath of the red heifer, the two sticks with the story of Judah and Joseph, and 3:12 every day in prayer. The honest questioner begins with the Talmud's memory that the sages almost withdrew this book, and draws a lesson from it: the questions below are not modern inventions, and asking them is not a sign of weak faith. The doctrinal connector traces the many places Restoration scripture names or echoes Ezekiel, and notes that sometimes the later scripture adds to Ezekiel; sometimes it repeats him almost word for word. The practical disciple notices that a book of wheels and visions keeps handing the reader ordinary jobs: watching, warning, feeding, telling the truth, waiting through a dry stretch, wading in.
The block skips a great deal. Chapters 4–32 hold Ezekiel's sign-acts and judgment oracles against Jerusalem (including the departure of the glory from the temple in chapters 8–11, which the lesson mentions) and his oracles against the nations. Chapter 35 is skipped. Chapters 38–39 (the Gog oracles) and 40–46 (the temple vision that chapter 47 completes) are also outside the block. Several essays reach into those chapters for context, and this guide notes them where they matter.
The five sessions follow the book's own turn from catastrophe to restoration. Session 1 (Ezekiel 1) stands by the canal and looks at the throne vision, with a Wrestle on the "spaceship" reading and the rabbi's account of why this chapter is chanted aloud and never explained. Session 2 (Ezekiel 2–3) eats the scroll, sits seven days in silence, takes the watchman charge, and wrestles with the watchman's blood and God's stumblingblock. Session 3 (Ezekiel 33 and 34) hears "turn ye, turn ye," wrestles with whether the turn is fair, listens to the "very lovely song," and judges the shepherds. Session 4 (Ezekiel 36 and 37:1–14) receives the new heart, wrestles with "not for your sakes," and ends with a capstone that reads one verse, 37:12, "I will open your graves," six ways. The six-outlooks essay chose that verse because if any verse in the block can carry several readings at once, this is a good candidate. Session 5 (Ezekiel 37:15–28 and 47) joins the two sticks, with the week's most important Wrestle for Latter-day Saints, and wades into the river.
The questions at the end of each session are not a quiz. Most have more than one defensible answer, and several ask about your own week rather than the text.
"Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month, as I was among the captives by the river of Chebar, that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God" (1:1). The LDS scholar observes that Ezekiel dates his call by two clocks. One is clear: the fifth year of Jehoiachin's captivity (1:2), around 593 BC. The other, "the thirtieth year," is not explained. The academic scholar reports the common guess that it gives the prophet's age, since thirty was the age priestly service began (Numbers 4:3), and adds that verse 2 looks like an editorial gloss converting the date into regnal years. Of all the theories, none has won general agreement.
The rabbi offers an older answer. The Aramaic Targum counts thirty years from the day the high priest Hilkiah found the book of the law in the temple in Josiah's day (2 Kings 22). Whatever its history, the Targum's choice is a statement of faith: it dates the vision of God's glory in exile from the rediscovery of the Torah.
The place is better attested than the date. Excavations at Nippur turned up the business archive of the Murashu family, and its contracts mention a "great canal" (in Akkadian, nāru kabari) that most historical geographers identify with the Chebar. The academic scholar calls the identification probable rather than proven, and concludes that Ezekiel's "river" was almost certainly an irrigation canal. More recently, the Al-Yahudu ("Judah-town") tablets, published by Laurie Pearce and Cornelia Wunsch in 2014, show Judean families with Yahwistic names leasing land, paying taxes, and doing business between 572 and 477 BC. The LDS scholar draws the conclusion: Ezekiel's audience was a farming community of displaced Judeans, not a prison camp. The academic scholar draws a sharper one. That is Ezekiel's audience: deportees settled on royal land, not chained, but uprooted and asking whether their god had been defeated. Scholars who read the book as trauma literature, such as Daniel Smith-Christopher and Ruth Poser, find it closer to refugee testimony than to calm theology.
Hold that question, "had their god been defeated?", while you read the rest of the chapter. Chapter 1 is the answer.
"A whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself" (1:4). Out of it come four living creatures, each with four faces, a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle (1:10), and beside them wheels, "as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel" (1:16), their rims "full of eyes" (1:18). "Whithersoever the spirit was to go, they went" (1:20). The noise of their wings is "like the noise of great waters, as the voice of the Almighty" (1:24).
The imagery is strange but not invented from nothing. Human-headed winged bulls and lions, the lamassu, guarded the gates of Assyrian palaces; the Metropolitan Museum has a pair from Nimrud. In chapter 10 Ezekiel identifies his creatures as cherubim, the guardians of the throne in the Jerusalem sanctuary. The academic scholar says Ezekiel builds from a shared iconography of divine kingship, then strips it of any fixed location. Temple cherubim stand still; these have wheels and go wherever the spirit goes. That mobility is the theological claim. Mesopotamian texts often explained a disaster as a god abandoning his city, and Daniel Block has argued that Ezekiel adapts that motif when the glory leaves Jerusalem in chapters 8–11. Chapter 1 is the mirror image: the god is not gone, and not beaten; he has come to Babylonia.
The honest questioner puts it the same way: Ezekiel's four faces (man, lion, ox, eagle) take a royal image from Mesopotamia and turn it into the bearers of Israel's God, who has now come to Babylon.
Search online for Ezekiel 1 and the spaceship reading appears quickly, from Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods to Josef Blumrich's The Spaceships of Ezekiel (1974), written by an engineer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. The honest questioner states its case fairly. Its best case is that the text does sound mechanical: a whirlwind with fire, a wheel within a wheel, rings full of eyes, wheels lifted from the earth, and a roar like many waters.
The text's own answer. He gives three replies. First, Ezekiel qualifies almost every noun, and the vision ends with "This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD" (1:28). An engineer describing hardware does not stack qualifiers like that; a priest afraid of claiming he saw God directly does. Second, Ezekiel names the creatures himself when the vision returns: "I knew that they were the cherubims" (10:20). Third, the images draw on the guardian figures he could have seen in Mesopotamia. He adds a detail that tells you something about the method behind the spaceship reading: critics note that Blumrich even rendered "visions" in 43:3 as "vehicular structure."
What is left. The fair question underneath the fringe reading is a good one: what is Ezekiel describing? The honest questioner's answer is the text's own, a glory he can only point toward. The next section shows how carefully he points.
"And above the firmament that was over their heads was the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone: and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it" (1:26). Then: "This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face" (1:28).
Read those verses slowly and count the buffers. The rabbi does: Ezekiel never says he saw God. He says he saw the appearance of a likeness of the glory. Every noun is held at a distance by another one. The academic scholar explains why a man like Ezekiel would write that way. For a priest trained in the holiness rules of the Jerusalem temple, this hedging is reverence put into grammar.
The LDS scholar speaks to his own community. Latter-day Saints, who believe God has a body, will notice the human form at the center. They should also notice what Ezekiel will not say: Ezekiel refuses, three words deep, to say he has seen God directly. And he moves the emphasis to where the chapter puts it. The chapter's real point is not God's anatomy but geography: the glory of the LORD appears in Babylon, at a canal, among the deported.
The doctrinal connector sets Ezekiel beside the Book of Mormon's first chapter. The Book of Mormon opens a few years before Ezekiel 1, and the openings rhyme. In the first year of Zedekiah, Lehi "saw the heavens open, and he thought he saw God sitting upon his throne" (1 Nephi 1:8). A few years later and several hundred miles east, Ezekiel writes that "the heavens were opened" and sees "the likeness of a throne." Lehi's "he thought he saw" hedges the way Ezekiel's stacked "likeness" and "appearance" do: real, and beyond exact description.
The Jewish tradition treats this chapter as the most dangerous text in the Prophets. Mishnah Hagigah 2:1 forbids expounding the "Design of the Chariot" (maʻaseh merkavah) even to a single student unless he is wise and understands on his own.
The Talmud remembers that the whole book was nearly withdrawn. Hananiah ben Hezekiah went up to an upper room with three hundred jugs of oil and worked until he had reconciled Ezekiel with the Torah. The academic scholar says plainly that the contradictions are real: the sacrificial laws of Ezekiel 40–48 do not match those of Numbers, and that temple was never built as described. Hagigah 13a adds a second, frightening reason: a youth who came to understand the hashmal, the KJV's "amber" (1:4, 27), was burned by fire from it. When the sages wanted to hide the book, Hananiah answered them: "If this youth happened to be wise, are all people wise enough to understand this book?"
And yet Ezekiel 1 is read in synagogues as the haftarah for the first day of Shavuot, the festival of revelation. The rabbi calls this tension the key to the whole tradition. We chant the most dangerous chapter in the Prophets aloud, on the festival of revelation, to everyone in the room, and we are forbidden to explain it. The vision is meant to be heard as awe and kept back as doctrine.
Two medieval readers lower the temperature in different ways. Rashi says Ezekiel's "visions of God" were a lesser sight, since all the prophets except Moses saw through a dim glass. Ezekiel is not Moses, and Babylon is not Sinai. Rava in the Talmud compares Ezekiel to a villager who saw the king and describes every detail of the palace, while Isaiah, the city dweller, saw the same thing and mentioned only the king. It is a gentle joke at the expense of Scripture's most detailed vision: the details are not the point. Maimonides made the chariot a name for metaphysics and then fenced it: no one should stroll in that garden until he has filled himself with the bread and meat of what is permitted and forbidden. The rabbi's summary: The chariot is real, and it is for people who already know how to keep the Sabbath.
Think deeply.
The voice from the throne addresses Ezekiel as "son of man" (2:1), and keeps doing so through the whole book. The lesson's Scripture Helps asks why. The rabbi answers from the Hebrew: ben ʼadam means simply "human being," a mortal set before the throne and then sent to "a rebellious house" (2:3). The commission is unusual for what it does not promise. "And they, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear, (for they are a rebellious house,) yet shall know that there hath been a prophet among them" (2:5). Ezekiel is told not to fear "though briers and thorns be with thee, and thou dost dwell among scorpions" (2:6). Success is not defined as being heeded. It is defined as having spoken.
"An hand was sent unto me; and, lo, a roll of a book was therein... and there was written therein lamentations, and mourning, and woe" (2:9–10). He is told to eat it. "Then did I eat it; and it was in my mouth as honey for sweetness" (3:3). Then "the spirit lifted me up, and took me away, and I went in bitterness, in the heat of my spirit" (3:14). The academic scholar notes that chapters 2–3 make Ezekiel a man of unusual bodily experience: he eats a scroll, sits stunned for a week, is bound, and is struck dumb.
The doctrinal connector sets the scroll beside two others. Lehi is handed a book whose contents are "Wo, wo, unto Jerusalem" (1 Nephi 1:13), and John in Revelation 10 eats a little book that is sweet in the mouth and bitter in the belly. The Doctrine and Covenants explains John's book: "it was a mission, and an ordinance, for him to gather the tribes of Israel" (D&C 77:14). Read back into Ezekiel 2–3, that definition makes the eaten scroll a commission, not only an experience: the prophet takes the message into his body before he takes it to Israel, and tastes woe as honey. Lehi, too, reads woe and ends by praising God "because thou art merciful" (1 Nephi 1:14). Judgment and mercy come in the same book.
The lesson asks why the Lord might have commanded Ezekiel to eat a scroll. One answer from these readings: a message you mean to carry to others has to be swallowed first. It can be sweet to receive and bitter to deliver.
"Then the spirit took me up, and I heard behind me a voice of a great rushing, saying, Blessed be the glory of the LORD from his place" (3:12). The rabbi says this is the verse Jews know by heart without knowing it is Ezekiel. It is recited in the Kedushah, paired with Isaiah's "Holy, holy, holy" (Isaiah 6:3), and the Posen Library's survey notes that the Tosefta and the Jerusalem Talmud show the two verses said responsively in prayer by the third century.
Then he asks you to think about where the verse was first heard. Not in Jerusalem, but by a canal in Babylonia. In the additional Sabbath service, just before this verse, the angels ask one another where the place of God's glory is. They do not know either, so they bless it "from his place," wherever that is. For a people about to spend two and a half millennia away from the temple, the verse became a portable sanctuary.
"Then I came to them of the captivity at Tel-abib, that dwelt by the river of Chebar, and I sat where they sat, and remained there astonished among them seven days" (3:15). The lesson's introduction quotes this verse, and the practical disciple builds his essay on it. The word "astonished," mashmim, comes from a root meaning to be desolated or appalled, and the same root later describes the land itself, laid "most desolate" (33:28) and "desolate in the sight of all that passed by" (36:34). Before saying anything to the exiles, Ezekiel takes on their condition.
The order matters for anyone who has to correct others. A watchman who has never sat where the people sit will usually warn them about the wrong things, in the wrong tone. He asks a set of questions worth reading slowly: Whom am I trying to correct whom I have never simply sat with? When did I last visit a ministering family without steering toward a lesson? Am I willing to be "astonished" by someone's situation, instead of arriving already sure what is wrong?
"At the end of seven days" the word comes (3:16): "Son of man, I have made thee a watchman unto the house of Israel: therefore hear the word at my mouth, and give them warning from me" (3:17). If the watchman fails to warn, the wicked man "shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand" (3:18). If he warns and is ignored, "thou hast delivered thy soul" (3:19).
The passage appears again almost word for word in 33:1–9. The academic scholar reports that its first appearance is widely regarded as an editorial anticipation of chapter 33, binding the commission to the book's turning point. Read this way, the book's architecture is making a point: the watchman's job begins before Jerusalem falls and is renewed after.
Restoration scripture takes up the same image, the LDS scholar notes: the nobleman in the parable sets "watchmen round about them" and builds a tower (D&C 101:45). The doctrinal connector adds that the Book of Mormon applies it to an office. Jacob says he and Joseph labored "with our might" so that the people's "blood might not come upon our garments" (Jacob 1:19). Then the revelation of D&C 88 widens it: "it becometh every man who hath been warned to warn his neighbor" (88:81). Ezekiel had one watchman for the house of Israel; here everyone warned becomes a watchman to someone else. Elder Ezra Taft Benson's 1973 address "Watchman, Warn the Wicked" opened with Ezekiel 3:17. But the doctrinal connector insists on the limit the text sets: the watchman answers for the warning, not the response. No one answers for another's agency, only for staying silent.
The honest questioner says the watchman passages are often taught as a simple call to duty, but they carry two difficult ideas.
Someone else's death charged to you. "His blood will I require at thine hand" (3:18). Both the silent watchman and the wicked man are guilty. Taught carelessly, it can be crushing to anyone told that a relative's spiritual state is on their head. D&C 88:82 restates the idea more gently: once warned, "their sins are upon their own heads." And the very next verse in Ezekiel limits the charge. The watchman answers for speaking, not for the hearer's response, which is the text's own guard against scrupulosity.
The practical disciple reads the same limit pastorally. The passage also holds a mercy for anxious people. You cannot make your adult child choose well. You can say, clearly and in love, what you see, and then let go of an outcome you never controlled.
A stumblingblock God sets. The second difficulty is easy to read past. "When a righteous man doth turn from his righteousness, and commit iniquity, and I lay a stumblingblock before him, he shall die" (3:20). The Hebrew mikshol is just a thing that trips you, and here God puts it in the path. Some read it as permissive (God allows the test), some as the trial that reveals character, and some say plainly that Ezekiel does not separate God from the disaster that fell on Jerusalem. The honest questioner does not pick one for you. He only notes that the text does not soften the line, and neither should a teacher who reads it aloud.
The glory appears again "as the glory which I saw by the river of Chebar" (3:23). Then comes the strangest order in the commission: "they shall put bands upon thee... And I will make thy tongue cleave to the roof of thy mouth, that thou shalt be dumb, and shalt not be to them a reprover... But when I speak with thee, I will open thy mouth" (3:25–27). The muteness lifts only when the refugee arrives (33:21–22), a span of some seven years in the book's own chronology.
Was Ezekiel ill? Modern readers have tried to diagnose him. Edwin C. Broome Jr. argued in 1946 in the Journal of Biblical Literature that the signs fit paranoid schizophrenia with catatonic episodes, and David J. Halperin's Seeking Ezekiel (1993) offered a psychoanalytic reading. The academic scholar reports that most biblical scholars remain unpersuaded by such diagnoses, because the muteness sits in literary frames at structural points and the sign-acts follow conventions other prophets share. The LDS scholar puts the objection briefly: a common objection is that an edited, highly patterned book is a poor basis for diagnosing a man dead 2,600 years. Trauma readings change the question. Trauma readings such as Poser's shift the question from the prophet's pathology to a community's: what kind of speech, or silence, fits a catastrophe?
The honest questioner refuses to make this a test of faith. A believer need not deny that Ezekiel suffered to believe he was called; a man who lost his city and his wife (24:16–18) and kept speaking may be more credible for it.
What the silence says. The LDS scholar's reading: More likely the muteness is itself a sign-act: until Jerusalem fell, the watchman's silence was part of his message. The practical disciple draws a lesson for anyone who loves to correct. Ezekiel speaks "from me" (3:17), when the Lord opens his mouth. The watchman is not a running commentary on everyone's faults. A parent who warns about everything is eventually heard about nothing.
Think deeply.
Chapter 33 is the hinge of the book, and it opens by repeating the watchman charge from chapter 3. This time the metaphor is a real city wall. The academic scholar notes that chapter 33 makes the military metaphor explicit: a lookout who "seeth the sword come, and blow not the trumpet" bears the blood (33:6).
The practical disciple says there are two ways to fail, and most of us lean toward one. The second, constant warning, was the subject of Session 2. The first is silence: a friend's drinking getting worse, a coworker rounding numbers toward a lawsuit, and you say nothing because it would be awkward or because things seem peaceful. He points to the parable in D&C 101, where the servants ask, "What need hath my lord of this tower, seeing this is a time of peace?" (101:48). The tower has to be built in quiet years, exactly when it feels least necessary.
Then comes the news the whole first half of the book has been waiting for. "In the twelfth year of our captivity... one that had escaped out of Jerusalem came unto me, saying, The city is smitten" (33:21). The night before, "the hand of the LORD was upon me... and my mouth was opened, and I was no more dumb" (33:22). The six-outlooks essay names what the refugee's report meant: Jerusalem had fallen and the temple was gone. The rest of this week's reading answers the grief that followed.
The exiles' own words come first. "If our transgressions and our sins be upon us, and we pine away in them, how should we then live?" (33:10). God's answer is an oath: "As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?" (33:11).
What follows is a principle the hearers call unfair. A righteous man who "trust to his own righteousness, and commit iniquity" will find that "all his righteousnesses shall not be remembered" (33:13). A wicked man who turns, and "restore the pledge, give again that he had robbed," will find that "none of his sins that he hath committed shall be mentioned unto him" (33:15–16).
The doctrinal connector shows that the Doctrine and Covenants restates both halves. "He who has repented of his sins, the same is forgiven, and I, the Lord, remember them no more" (D&C 58:42). "Unto that soul who sinneth shall the former sins return" (D&C 82:7). Together they are Ezekiel 33:12–16 compressed: God judges where a person now faces, not the sum of the past. The standard is a changed person, not a balance sheet. He adds Elder D. Todd Christofferson's line that being born again "is more a process than an event," and draws the conclusion: the "day that he turneth" (33:12) may be a direction held for years.
The practical disciple makes it concrete. A pledge was collateral taken from a borrower, so repentance here means giving back what you took: credit for someone else's work, hours billed and not worked, a borrowed sum that quietly became yours. What do I need to give back, and to whom? The other half warns the long-faithful. One version is treating past service as a credit balance: thirty years of callings, so this grudge or this shortcut does not count. Ezekiel says it counts. Each person is judged "after his ways" (33:20), by where they are going now, not where they used to be.
The lesson itself asks: "What would you say to someone who feels that the people described in Ezekiel 33:12–19 are not being treated fairly?"
The objection. The honest questioner states it sharply. A lifetime of righteousness is forgotten if a person sins at the end, and a lifetime of wickedness is forgotten if the person turns. Standing seems to depend on where you happen to be at the moment of judgment. And the book also seems to pull two ways. Chapter 18 insists "the son shall not bear the iniquity of the father" (18:20), yet God also says to Jerusalem, "I... will cut off from thee the righteous and the wicked" (21:3). Joel Kaminsky's study of corporate responsibility argues that texts like Ezekiel 18 do not abolish corporate judgment the way they are often said to. The academic scholar agrees that the tension is real: the same book that insists on judging "every one after his ways" (33:20) also narrates the corporate destruction of a city and holds a lookout liable for others' deaths.
A response from the context. Read 33:10 again. The people are not asking for a theory of justice. They are pining away. The doctrine of the turn is a response to despair. It tells a generation that thinks it is doomed by its fathers' sins and its own past that the future is still open. Ezekiel 33 is then not a full theory of judgment but a summons to people at a decision point. The academic scholar reports the same consensus: scholars generally read the individualism of chapters 18 and 33 as pastoral, addressed to a generation convinced it was paying for its parents' sins, rather than as a systematic doctrine of retribution.
What remains. The honest questioner will not let the answer go too far. That does not dissolve the tension with 21:3. The lesson's cross-references (Matthew 21:28–31, the two sons; Luke 18:9–14, the Pharisee and the publican) point in the same pastoral direction: what matters is which way you are walking when the call comes. Whether that is fair depends partly on whether you hear it as a verdict or as an invitation.
The exiles are talking about Ezekiel "by the walls and in the doors of the houses... saying, Come, I pray you, and hear what is the word that cometh forth from the LORD" (33:30). They "sit before thee as my people" (33:31). Then: "lo, thou art unto them as a very lovely song of one that hath a pleasant voice, and can play well on an instrument: for they hear thy words, but they do them not" (33:32).
The people are not hostile. They are eager. The Hebrew word behind "much love" and "very lovely song," ʻagabim, occurs only in these two verses and carries the sense of a love song; some modern translations render it "a sensual song." The prophet has become entertainment, enjoyed like a well-sung ballad, and then everyone goes home and their "heart goeth after their covetousness" (33:31).
Two essayists turn the verse on the reader of this guide. The practical disciple: It is possible to love scripture study the way one loves a good podcast: the insight, the Hebrew word, the clever connection. The rabbi: That warning hangs over every study guide, this one included. He says the rabbis fenced the chariot of chapter 1 for exactly this reason, so no one would mistake fascination for faithfulness. The practical disciple offers a test: before you close the chapter, write down one thing you will do differently by Saturday. If you cannot name one, you may have been listening to a lovely song.
"Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks?" (34:2). Chapter 34 uses the oldest royal metaphor in the ancient Near East. Hammurabi called himself the shepherd of the oppressed. Ezekiel turns the title into an indictment: "Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the wool... but ye feed not the flock" (34:3). Then the list of what they did not do: "The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost; but with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them" (34:4).
The failures listed in 34:4 are answered item by item when God takes over: "I will seek that which was lost, and bring again that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick" (34:16). The LDS scholar notices that the chapter has God say "I, even I, will both search my sheep" (34:11) and then install a human shepherd from David's line, holding divine and human shepherding together without reconciling them.
Lost and driven away. The lesson asks what the difference is between a sheep that is "lost" and one "driven away" (34:16). The practical disciple goes to the Hebrew: the lost one wandered off or is perishing; the driven-away one was scattered or banished. One drifted; the other was pushed. A relative who quietly stopped coming and one who left after being shamed in a class will not come back the same way. The first may need to be found. The second may need someone to repair what was done.
With cruelty. The word "cruelty," perek, occurs only six times in the Hebrew Bible. Twice it describes how Egypt made Israel serve "with rigour" (Exodus 1:13–14), and three times Leviticus 25 forbids Israelites to rule one another that way. Ezekiel 34:4 is the sixth. So the charge is not only neglect. The shepherds treated God's people the way Pharaoh did. A parent or leader who rules by intimidation has, in Ezekiel's vocabulary, become a taskmaster.
A checklist. Ezekiel's shepherds could probably have produced a fine report of visits. What they skipped were the five verbs: strengthen, heal, bind up, bring back, seek. That is a usable checklist for any ministering assignment. The lesson pairs the chapter with Elder Gerrit W. Gong's "Ministering" (April 2023), which asks councils and quorums to help the Good Shepherd do exactly those things. The doctrinal connector notes the widening: Ezekiel's target was kings and priests; Gong's reading spreads the shepherd's duty to every member, as D&C 88:81 spreads the watchman's.
The chapter's sharpest turn comes in 34:17–22, where the fault is no longer only with the shepherds but within the flock. Some sheep eat the good pasture and "tread down with your feet the residue"; they drink the clear water and "foul the residue with your feet" (34:18). They "thrust with side and with shoulder, and pushed all the diseased with your horns" (34:21). The practical disciple: Most of us are not bishops, but all of us are sheep. Do I dominate the class discussion so the quieter person never speaks? Do I share a grievance in the hall that fouls the water for someone newer?
"And I will set up one shepherd over them, and he shall feed them, even my servant David" (34:23). The promise returns in 37:24–25. David had been dead four centuries. Who is meant? The lesson's Scripture Helps asks the same question.
In its setting. The academic scholar reads it as the language of a restored Davidic monarchy, paralleled in Jeremiah 30:9 and Hosea 3:5. It is not, in its original setting, a prediction of a supernatural messiah, though later Jewish and Christian readers developed it that way. The vocabulary is restrained. In 34:24 and 37:25 David is a nasiʼ, "prince," not a melek, "king," the same title Ezekiel gives the ruler in the temple vision. The honest questioner draws the inference: Ezekiel seems wary of kings even while promising one. But 37:22 and 37:24 do say "king," and that is one of the small seams scholars use to trace the book's growth.
In Restoration reading. The Church's chapter heading reads "David (the Messiah)." The LDS scholar mentions speculation about a separate latter-day leader named David, an idea that has sometimes been misused, and says the heading points to Christ instead. The doctrinal connector shows the Book of Mormon reading "one shepherd" as Christ: "there shall be one fold and one shepherd; and he shall feed his sheep, and in him they shall find pasture" (1 Nephi 22:25), echoing Ezekiel's "good pasture" (34:14). Alma's shepherd calls in the name of Christ and asks, "of what fold are ye?" (Alma 5:39). A Davidic prince over a restored people and a Son of David over all the sheep can be read as one promise at two scales. The rabbi's reading of this promise appears in Session 5, where it returns.
Think deeply.
This session reads chapter 36 and the first half of chapter 37 (37:1–14). The second half, the two sticks, opens Session 5.
Chapter 36 begins with the mountains of Israel and then turns to why Israel was scattered. In exile the people "profaned my holy name, when they said to them, These are the people of the LORD, and are gone forth out of his land" (36:20). Then the line that frames the lesson's title: "I do not this for your sakes, O house of Israel, but for mine holy name's sake, which ye have profaned among the heathen" (36:22). It is repeated in 36:32, with "be ashamed and confounded for your own ways."
The honest questioner names the discomfort. Read cold, it sounds like a ruler protecting his reputation "among the heathen" (36:20–23). He offers three responses that can be held together.
Historical. Ezekiel 20 tells Israel's whole history in these terms, and Moses argued with God the same way (Exodus 32:12). In the ancient Near East a deported people's god looked defeated; God's "name" is the public evidence of who he is. The rabbi agrees and does not find the passage cold at all. Exile had made God's name a joke among the nations. God's reputation and Israel's fate are bound together, so He cannot abandon Israel without abandoning His own name. Later Jewish ethics made sanctifying the Name a duty of every Jew, and in Ezekiel 36 God Himself acts under that rule.
Theological. "Not for your sakes" means not because you earned it. The restoration rests entirely on God's character, which is what grace means. Read this way, the hard line is the doorway to the gift that follows.
Pastoral. This is the uncomfortable one. Some readers, including people who grew up hearing that they were a disappointment to God, will still hear contempt in 36:31–32. That reaction should not be argued away too fast; the passage can be read as grace and heard as shaming.
A Restoration answer. The doctrinal connector says Restoration scripture does not soften this, but it relocates the name. After King Benjamin's people experience the mighty change, they are told, "ye shall be called the children of Christ... for ye say that your hearts are changed through faith on his name" (Mosiah 5:7). In Ezekiel, God restores Israel to vindicate his name among the nations; in Mosiah, the changed people receive the name themselves, and acting for the name's sake and for the people's sake become the same act.
"For I will take you from among the heathen, and gather you out of all countries, and will bring you into your own land. Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and ye shall be clean... A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you: and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh. And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep my judgments, and do them" (36:24–27).
The doctrinal connector reads the sequence. The order matters: water, then a new heart, then the Spirit, then obedience. God acts first. The Book of Mormon names the experience: Benjamin's people say the Spirit "has wrought a mighty change in us, or in our hearts" (Mosiah 5:2), and Alma asks, "Have ye experienced this mighty change in your hearts?" and then, "can ye feel so now?" (Alma 5:14, 26). Moses 6:59–60 joins water, Spirit, and blood in the plan of salvation. Ezekiel's sprinkled water and indwelling spirit become, in Restoration theology, baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost. The lesson points you to the same pairing with Alma 7:14–16.
Shabbat Parah. Chapter 36 is read in the synagogue on the Sabbath of the red heifer, alongside Numbers 19, whose ashes in water purify a person defiled by the dead. The pairing tells you how the rabbis heard 36:25: as the purification the heifer pointed toward, given by God directly.
Yom Kippur. The most famous use of 36:25 closes the Mishnah's tractate on the Day of Atonement. Rabbi Akiva cries out, "How fortunate are you, Israel," and asks who purifies them: "your Father in Heaven." He adds Jeremiah 17:13, reading it as a pun, "the mikveh of Israel is the LORD": as a ritual bath purifies, so God purifies Israel. Just before that, the Mishnah insists that Yom Kippur does not atone for wrongs done to another person until you appease that person. The rabbi's conclusion is a corrective for any reader who wants the new heart without the apology: The grace of 36:25 comes after the work of repair, not in place of it.
The stony heart. Rashi glosses the new heart as an inclination renewed for the better, and the Talmud lists "stone" among the seven names Scripture gives the evil inclination, citing this verse. The stony heart is not the total depravity of human nature. It is the inclination every person wrestles with, and God promises to soften it.
The new spirit and the law. The rabbi says this is what Christian readers most often miss. Verse 27 gives the spirit so that Israel will "walk in my statutes" and "keep my judgments." The new spirit is given in order to keep the law, not to supersede it. The heart of flesh is a heart able at last to do the Torah.
The practical disciple asks what a heart of flesh is for. A stone heart registers nothing; it can hear a lovely song and stay unmoved. A heart of flesh can be hurt. Verse 31 describes what happens after the cleansing: "Then shall ye remember your own evil ways... and shall lothe yourselves in your own sight." The painful memory comes after the water, not before it. For someone in the middle of repentance who is suddenly sick about the past, the pain may be a sign the new heart is working, not proof that they are beyond help.
Every verb is God's: I will sprinkle, give, take away, put. Discipline matters, but no one performs his own heart transplant. What is left for the disciple? Verse 37: "I will yet for this be inquired of by the house of Israel, to do it for them." Ask, specifically and repeatedly.
The academic scholar brings a manuscript fact most readers never hear. The Greek translation of Ezekiel is several percent shorter than the Hebrew, and the most dramatic witness is Papyrus 967, a third-century Greek codex found in 1931. First, the papyrus lacks 36:23c–38, the very passage this week's lesson is named for: the clean water, the new heart, the new spirit. It also puts chapters 38–39 before chapter 37, so the bones lead straight into the temple vision. Ingrid Lilly treats the papyrus and the Hebrew as two variant literary editions of the book.
This should not be overstated. A Hebrew scroll from Masada, older than the papyrus, preserves 36:23–35 in substantially the familiar form, and scholars still debate whether the papyrus is older or abbreviated. Either way, look at how 36:27 ("I will put my spirit within you") anticipates 37:14 ("And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live"). In the MT the "new spirit" passage works like a hinge: the moral transformation of 36 is staged visually in the bones of 37. If 36:23c–38 was added, it was added by someone reading chapter 37 very closely.
"The hand of the LORD was upon me, and carried me out in the spirit of the LORD, and set me down in the midst of the valley which was full of bones... and, lo, they were very dry. And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest" (37:1–3). Ezekiel prophesies, and "there was a noise, and behold a shaking, and the bones came together, bone to his bone" (37:7). Sinews, flesh, and skin cover them, "but there was no breath in them" (37:8). He prophesies to the wind, and "the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army" (37:10).
The Hebrew ruach does three jobs here: breath (37:5), wind (37:9), and spirit (37:14). The academic scholar: The pun is the theology; the same force that animates a body moves the air and comes from God. Then verse 11 interprets the vision: "these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts."
What it meant first. In context the vision promises national restoration, return to "the land of Israel" (37:12), not the resurrection of individuals. The LDS scholar agrees: In its own setting, this is a vision of national revival after 586 BC. He treats D&C 138:43, where Ezekiel is the one shown the bones that were "to come forth again in the resurrection of the dead," as a later, revelatory reading, not evidence that Ezekiel himself taught a doctrine of individual bodily resurrection, which first appears unambiguously in the Hebrew Bible in Daniel 12:2. But he adds that the text invites the later reading. An image of national return built on God reversing death is hard to contain. The honest questioner makes the same point from the other side: The image has no force unless bodily revival is imaginable; its stated subject is a people who think they are finished.
How it grew. The academic scholar notes that a Qumran text, Pseudo-Ezekiel, already reworked the vision into a resurrection of the righteous by the second century BC, and that if Lust is right about the Papyrus 967 order, this drift toward the end-time may have begun inside the history of the book itself. The doctrinal connector shows how closely the scene fits Restoration teaching on the body: the Bible Dictionary holds both readings together, and Alma promises that "every limb and joint shall be restored to its body" (Alma 40:23). Ezekiel's two-stage scene fits that body-and-spirit doctrine closely.
The rabbi's reading. At Passover the haftarah is this vision, chosen because it portrays redemption from servitude. Egypt and the valley are the same story told twice. Around 1878 the poet Naftali Herz Imber answered "our hope is lost" with a refrain, "our hope is not yet lost." The line deliberately reverses Ezekiel, and the poem became "Hatikvah," Israel's national anthem. In the third-century synagogue at Dura-Europos, the longest continuous painted panel, beside the Torah niche, shows the scattered limbs, the prophet, and the bodies standing. A diaspora congregation read the chapter as its own story.
A dry season. The practical disciple reads verse 11 from inside. Anyone who has been through depression or a faith crisis will recognize the language. Ezekiel's answer, "O Lord GOD, thou knowest," is neither optimism nor refusal. He does not pretend to optimism, and he does not say no. That is an honest prayer for a hard week. Then the stage between flesh and breath: you are back at church, reading again, going through the motions, but there is no breath yet. The vision suggests this is not failure. It is the middle. And the breath comes when Ezekiel does what he is told, "Prophesy unto the wind" (37:9). The disciple's part in a dry season is often small: keep speaking the word to bones that cannot yet hear it, including your own.
The Talmud's argument. In Sanhedrin 92b the rabbis argue openly. Rabbi Eliezer says the dead Ezekiel revived stood, sang a song to God, and died. Rabbi Eliezer son of Rabbi Yosei HaGelili says they went up to the land, married, and had children. Rabbi Yehuda ben Beteira stands up and says he is descended from them and holds the phylacteries his grandfather left him. And Rabbi Yehuda says it was "truth and it was a parable"; when Rabbi Nehemiah objects that it cannot be both, the answer is, "In truth, it was a parable."
Three readers of that page. The rabbi: I love this page because it refuses the false choice modern readers bring. The tradition hears resurrection here too, and affirms it in the second blessing of every Amidah. Rabbi Yehuda's "truth, and a parable" is not evasion: the parable is true because the God who restores a nation can restore a body. The LDS scholar: Rabbi Yehuda's formula, "truth and a parable," may be the fairest description of what the passage does in both traditions. The honest questioner keeps the door open on purpose: Whether a vision that uses resurrection as a picture also teaches it is a question worth leaving open.
Both sides of the veil. The lesson asks what the bones suggest about gathering Israel on both sides of the veil. The doctrinal connector, drawing on President Russell M. Nelson's 2006 "The Gathering of Scattered Israel," concludes that so "I will open your graves" (37:12) works on three levels: exiles brought home, the dead raised, and the dead reached by temple ordinances. The capstone takes that verse slowly.
"Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel" (37:12).
The six-outlooks essay borrows a method from Donald W. Parry of BYU, a member of the team that edited the Dead Sea Scrolls, who teaches six questions a reader can put to the same passage: its meaning in its own day, what it foretells, whether it is fulfilled more than once, how it applies to us, what it says to me, and what it teaches as doctrine. The essayist is careful about voices. What follows applies his framework. It is not a report of his reading of this verse.
One textual detail first. In the vision the bones lie unburied "in the open valley" (37:2), "these slain" (37:9), a battlefield after the fighting. In verse 12 the dead are suddenly in graves. Ezekiel moves from one picture of death to another, from bodies left out on the ground to bodies sealed inside the earth. Every outlook has to deal with that change.
1. The near view. Read verse 12 as an answer to verse 11, "Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost." This is not Ezekiel's metaphor. It is what the exiles were saying to one another, and the oracle replies to it. The despair had a cause: the refugee's news in 33:21. But the deportees were not literally dead. The Al-Yahudu tablets show them farming and naming their children after their God. The exiles were alive and getting on with their lives. So the graves are figurative. They describe exile as a kind of death: being cut off from the land, the temple, and the dynasty, the things that had made Israel a people. Ezekiel's phrase for the destination, "the soil of Israel," keeps the promise tied to actual ground. And every verb is God's: the exiles do not raise themselves. Cyrus's decree (Ezra 1:1–3) brought a return, but many families stayed in Babylonia. So the return happened, but it was partial.
2. The distant view. The wording reaches beyond the moment: open graves, people coming up, flesh on bone, breath entering a body. Isaiah 26:19 and Daniel 12:2 speak of bodily resurrection plainly, and readers set Ezekiel 37 beside them early. The Qumran work Pseudo-Ezekiel retells the vision as the reward of the righteous. So before the New Testament was written, Jewish readers had already taken the step from "graves" as a figure for exile to graves as graves. At Jesus' death "the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection" (Matthew 27:52–53). Matthew does not cite Ezekiel, but the wording is close. D&C 138:43 makes the distant reading explicit, and the chapter heading says "Israel will inherit the land in the Resurrection." That heading is an editorial summary, not scripture, but it shows how the Church currently reads the chapter.
3. Dual fulfillment. Can both be right? The Sanhedrin 92b argument from the Wrestle above is the classic case. The rabbis did not resolve the dispute, and the Talmud kept both sides. The liturgy keeps both too. The festival of the first redemption is paired with this text, so the reading looks back to the Exodus and forward to a final redemption in the same service. At Dura-Europos, a congregation living in diaspora chose to paint dead bodies coming back to life. Add Hatikvah, and the verse has at least three readings people have treated as fulfillments: Cyrus's return, an expected resurrection, and a twentieth-century national return. The outlook does not make you choose. It asks the reader to say which kind of fulfillment each one is.
4. Likening. Nephi named this practice: "I did liken all scriptures unto us, that it might be for our profit and learning" (1 Nephi 19:23). The Qumran community did a stricter version, the pesher, which applies a prophecy line by line to the sect's own day. The lesson does the Latter-day Saint version when it asks what the bones suggest "about gathering Israel on both sides of the veil," phrasing that comes from President Nelson's 2018 "Hope of Israel" devotional. Nelson's devotional does not cite Ezekiel. The lesson connects the two. Read this way, missionary work brings the living into covenant belonging and temple work does the same for the dead. The connection is a likening, not exegesis of what Ezekiel meant, and that is legitimate within this outlook as long as it is labeled honestly.
5. Personal reading. The people speaking in 37:11 are not described as rebels. They are grieving, and they have concluded from the evidence that they are finished. A reader in a hospital corridor, at the end of a marriage, or after a relapse may recognize "our hope is lost" before recognizing anything about Babylon. The verse does not argue with the despair. It accepts the graves and then says "I will open." Ezekiel's only words in the scene are "O Lord GOD, thou knowest." For a personal reading, that may be the place to start: a person may be unable to say whether these bones can live, and still be willing to leave the question with God.
6. Reading for doctrine. Parry gives this outlook the most weight. The essay finds four doctrines. Resurrection is bodily and restorative: "bone to his bone," sinews, flesh, and skin, the doctrine Alma states in Alma 40:23. A body without breath is not yet alive: "the spirit and the body are the soul of man" (D&C 88:15), and Ezekiel shows the two arriving separately. The body is rebuilt first and is inert until the breath comes. God does the raising, as he gives the new heart and sprinkles the water in chapter 36. Ezekiel's account of grace starts with God acting. And the purpose is knowing God: "ye shall know that I am the LORD, when I have opened your graves" (37:13). The recognition formula runs through the whole book, and here the event that brings about that knowledge is the reversal of death.
These doctrines hold whichever fulfillment you prefer. Whether the graves are Babylonia, the cemeteries of the last day, or the despair of verse 11, the same God does the same thing in the same order: body, breath, return, and knowledge of him. The other five outlooks can disagree with each other, and the doctrine stays the same under all of them.
Think deeply.
This session reads the second half of chapter 37 (37:15–28) and chapter 47. Chapters 38–46 lie between them: the Gog oracles and the measured temple of Ezekiel's last vision, whose river you will wade into here.
"Son of man, take thee one stick, and write upon it, For Judah, and for the children of Israel his companions: then take another stick, and write upon it, For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim, and for all the house of Israel his companions: And join them one to another into one stick; and they shall become one in thine hand" (37:16–17). When the people ask what this means (37:18), God explains: "I will make them one nation in the land upon the mountains of Israel; and one king shall be king to them all: and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all" (37:22).
The Hebrew word for "stick" is ʻets, which means wood, tree, or a piece of timber. The academic scholar notes that the closest biblical analogy is the tribal names written on staffs in Numbers 17:2–3, and the honest questioner draws the inference: a named piece of wood is a known way to represent a tribe, not obviously a book. The LDS scholar summarizes the plain sense: Read alone, the passage is about two peoples, the old southern kingdom of Judah and the old northern kingdom headed by Ephraim, becoming one under "David my servant" (37:24).
The rabbi adds the synagogue's reading. The two sticks are the haftarah for Vayigash, the Torah portion that begins, "Then Judah came near unto him," to Joseph (Genesis 44:18). The pairing is the Jewish interpretation in one gesture: the brothers reconciled in Genesis, their kingdoms reconciled in Ezekiel. Rashi identifies the first stick as Judah and Benjamin and the second as Ephraim and the nine tribes that followed Jeroboam.
For Latter-day Saints this is the controversy closest to home. The Church's chapter heading reads "The stick of Judah (the Bible) and the stick of Joseph (the Book of Mormon) will become one in the Lord's hand." The Bible Dictionary calls the stick of Ephraim "a prophetic reference to the Book of Mormon." This week's lesson describes the sticks as objects "which many scholars interpret as wooden writing boards joined by a hinge." All five essays that treat the passage take this seriously, and they agree more than you might expect.
The text's own explanation. The strongest case against reading the sticks as books comes from 37:18–22. The people ask what the sign means, and God tells them. The sign interprets itself as the reunion of the northern kingdom (Joseph/Ephraim) and the southern kingdom (Judah). The text promised in 2 Nephi 3:12, that the writings of Joseph's and Judah's descendants "shall grow together," is often read alongside, but it never mentions Ezekiel or sticks.
Where the Latter-day Saint reading came from. The Latter-day Saint reading has a history worth knowing. Joseph M. Spencer of BYU traces the identification of the stick of Ephraim with the Book of Mormon to William W. Phelps in 1832; through Parley P. Pratt and others it became standard by the mid-1830s, and Hugh Nibley defended it in 1953. Then Keith Meservy of BYU gave it archaeological form. In 1953 Max Mallowan had found sixteen hinged, wax-coated writing boards at the bottom of a well at Nimrud, and Meservy argued in a 1974 address and in the Ensign (1977, 1987) that Ezekiel "most likely" meant boards like these. To his credit, he admitted that "the evidence that writing boards were regularly used in Ezekiel's day is insufficient to show" that this was Ezekiel's meaning. His theory reached the 1979 Latter-day Saint edition of the Bible. The footnote to 37:16 still says that wooden writing tablets were in common use in Babylon in Ezekiel's day.
The critique. In 1990 Brian E. Keck answered Meservy in Dialogue. The Akkadian term Meservy relied on begins with a written sign, a determinative, that was never pronounced; it marks a noun as "wooden" but is not a spoken word a Hebrew-speaking deportee would have known. Hebrew ʻets has no established meaning of "document." And Keck also pointed out that the surviving boards were luxury objects made of ivory, walnut, and beeswax, used largely for palace omen texts. Keck concluded that the theory "does not hold up to a close inspection." The academic scholar reports the wider field: Outside that tradition the writing-board reading has no currency; the text's own gloss, reunion of the two kingdoms, is the standard interpretation. Two essays comment on the lesson's wording. The LDS scholar: The "many scholars" behind it are mostly Latter-day Saint scholars. The honest questioner: The lesson's "many scholars" is generous. The LDS scholar adds a smaller caution. The Bible Dictionary calls the Book of Mormon a record of a portion of Ephraim, but Alma 10:3 says Lehi descended from Manasseh. The popular reading has always needed more explanation than it admits.
The rabbi speaks for his tradition carefully. He knows Latter-day Saints have their own additional scripture behind their reading. I can say only that I know of no classical Jewish interpreter who read the verse as about books, and that Ezekiel's own gloss, right after the sign, is about a divided people and one king.
Faithful responses. Meservy himself kept the gathering reading and treated the Book of Mormon as the means of gathering. On that view the plain meaning (one people) and the Restoration application (two records that gather) become two layers of one prophecy. Other Latter-day Saints accept that Ezekiel's first audience heard two kingdoms and treat D&C 27:5 as a later prophetic use of his image. A critic will say the second view gives up the proof-text; its holders answer that the Book of Mormon never needed one.
The most useful recent work comes from inside the faith. In a 2022 BYU Religious Studies Center chapter, Spencer grants the scholarly consensus about reunion and then reads the Restoration texts closely. D&C 27:5 speaks of Moroni holding "the keys of the record of the stick of Ephraim." Spencer notes that this wording separates the stick, meaning the people, from its record, meaning the Book of Mormon. On his reading, Ezekiel's plain meaning stands, and the Restoration adds that a regathered people has a record belonging to it. If that is right, the writing-board debate is beside the point. The LDS scholar's verdict: The evidence supports him.
The doctrinal connector reaches the same place by another road. Joseph of Egypt's prophecy in JST Genesis 50:31 (repeated in 2 Nephi 3:12) says the fruit of Joseph's loins and Judah's loins "shall write," and the writings "shall grow together." Joseph supplies the two writings; Ezekiel supplies the image of them joined in one hand. And 2 Nephi 29:14 says, "my people... shall be gathered home... and my word also shall be gathered in one." The Nephite record makes the gathering of books and the gathering of people one promise. President Nelson said in 2018 that "if there were no Book of Mormon, the promised gathering of Israel would not occur." So the doctrinal claim does not hang on that dispute; it rests on Joseph's and Nephi's prophecies, through which Ezekiel's sign-act of reunion becomes a sign that Israel will be reunited partly through its records.
A minimum any reader can keep. Two essayists, from opposite directions, give the same instruction. The honest questioner: an honest teacher should read 37:21–22 aloud alongside 37:16. The rabbi: I would ask readers of any tradition to keep 37:22 in view while they read 37:16.
The chapter ends with a cluster of promises: cleansing from idols, "so shall they be my people, and I will be their God" (37:23); "David my servant shall be king over them" (37:24); "a covenant of peace... an everlasting covenant" (37:26); and "my sanctuary in the midst of them for evermore" (37:26, 28).
The rabbi gives the classical Jewish reading of "David." Radak says the King Messiah will be called David because he will be of David's seed, and Maimonides says the Messiah will renew the Davidic dynasty, build the temple, and gather the dispersed. Jewish messianism is Ezekiel 37:21–28 almost line by line: a king from David, a people gathered, a land resettled, a sanctuary in their midst. Latter-day Saints, who read the same verses as Christ and the gathering, are reading the same list. Compare the discussion of "one shepherd" in Session 3.
"Behold, waters issued out from under the threshold of the house eastward" (47:1). A man with a measuring line measures a thousand cubits, and the water is to the ankles; another thousand, to the knees; another, to the loins; another, and "it was a river that I could not pass over" (47:3–5). Chapter 47 is the culmination of the temple vision. Jon Levenson read these chapters as a theological program rather than a building plan, joining Sinai, Zion, and Eden in a single sacred geography. The river belongs to a biblical family: Eden's river (Genesis 2:10), the river of Psalm 46:4, the streams of Joel 3:18 and Zechariah 14:8.
Elder Dale G. Renlund, in the talk the lesson cites, noticed the strangest thing about it: "though the small stream had no tributaries, it grew into a mighty river." The LDS scholar says the observation is exegetically sound: a river deepening with no inflow is not a natural river, and the point is its source in the sanctuary (47:12). Joseph Smith read the chapter literally and geographically, saying in 1843 that the water must come out from under the temple and heal the Dead Sea. But the temple of chapters 40–48 was never built as described, and its laws differ from the Torah's. The text puts its weight on theology, not hydrology.
The rabbi adds the Sukkot water-drawing. The Tosefta says a temple gate was called the Water Gate because the libation flask went through it, and Rabbi Eliezer ben Jacob taught that the water dripping from that flask hinted at the water that would one day come from under the threshold, and then walked through Ezekiel 47 verse by verse. The Sukkot water-drawing became a rehearsal of Ezekiel's river, a small flask anticipating the healing of the Dead Sea.
The practical disciple notices the measuring. Ezekiel is walked through at each stage. He does not start in the deep part. The measured stages are permission to start small. A family that has never done family history does not need a four-generation project. Find one name. Start ankle-deep. The water rises.
The water goes "into the desert, and go into the sea: which being brought forth into the sea, the waters shall be healed" (47:8). The lesson reminds children that the Dead Sea is so salty that nothing lives in it. Now "every thing shall live whither the river cometh" (47:9), and fishermen spread nets "from En-gedi even unto En-eglaim" (47:10). On the banks grow trees "whose leaf shall not fade... it shall bring forth new fruit according to his months, because their waters they issued out of the sanctuary: and the fruit thereof shall be for meat, and the leaf thereof for medicine" (47:12).
The LDS scholar traces the trees to Revelation 22:1–2, whose leaves are "for the healing of the nations," borrowed directly from "the leaf thereof for medicine" (47:12). The doctrinal connector adds Nephi's interpretation of the fountain of living waters as "the love of God" (1 Nephi 11:25). That joins Ezekiel's river to Ezekiel's trees. He notes that the keys of the gathering that Ezekiel 36–37 promises were restored inside a temple, when Moses appeared in Kirtland (D&C 110:11). And he retells the center of Elder Renlund's talk: his former heart-transplant patient Rod knelt at a sealing altar in the St. George temple as proxy for Todd, the young man whose heart still beat in Rod's chest. A replaced heart and a healing river meet in one act of vicarious temple work. Chapter 36's new heart and chapter 47's river turn out to be the same kind of gift.
The practical disciple values the trees for their ordinariness: new fruit every month, ordinary, recurring nourishment rather than one dramatic harvest, which is what discipleship looks like most weeks.
"But the miry places thereof and the marshes thereof shall not be healed; they shall be given to salt" (47:11). In a vision of total healing, one verse leaves something out. Every essay that treats chapter 47 stops here.
A practical touch. The academic scholar says two details keep the vision from being pure fantasy, and this is one: salt was valuable, and Ezekiel's own temple requires it ("the priests shall cast salt upon them," 43:24). The LDS scholar: A healed world keeps what the sanctuary still uses. The practical disciple reports a nineteenth-century commentary reading the marshes as left alone for their excellent salt, and notes that some read this as judgment, some as provision.
A limit to the healing. The honest questioner gives both sides: Some see a practical touch (salt was valuable); others, a troubling hint that some things are left out of the healing. The rabbi: Even the redeemed land keeps its salt marshes; healing in Ezekiel does not erase everything. The doctrinal connector ties it back to the watchman: Even this river does not heal ground that will not take it in, perhaps the same agency that limits the watchman.
What a reader can do with it. The practical disciple's application is gentle and honest. Not every problem in your family will be resolved this side of the veil, and that is no reason to stop wading in.
The chapter ends by dividing the land among the tribes, and then adds a provision: "ye shall divide it by lot for an inheritance unto you, and to the strangers that sojourn among you, which shall beget children among you: and they shall be unto you as born in the country among the children of Israel; they shall have inheritance with you among the tribes of Israel" (47:22).
Four essayists call this remarkable. The LDS scholar: The Torah protected the resident alien; here the outsider receives land. He links it to Abraham 2:10, "as many as receive this Gospel shall be called after thy name," and adds, that link needs no speculative archaeology. The rabbi: The Torah commands love for the stranger (Leviticus 19:34); Ezekiel gives the stranger a share of the land itself. The doctrinal connector sets it beside President Nelson's statement that every child of God on both sides of the veil deserves to hear the gospel: The river runs out to the dead, to the stranger, and to the Dead Sea itself.
The academic scholar notices the irony. Giving land to strangers goes beyond anything in Torah legislation, and the week's reading ends, fittingly, with Ezekiel revising Torah law, the very thing that sent Hananiah ben Hezekiah up to his upper room. The rabbi says Hananiah did not solve everything; some problems outlasted him. Of one verse in the temple code, the Talmud can only say that in the future Elijah will interpret it.
The panel ends close together, with a book the sages kept instead of hiding. The honest questioner: The sages kept the book, and Hananiah ben Hezekiah worked through its difficulties instead of covering them. That is still the way to read it.
The LDS scholar weighs the week. The scholarship removes some popular readings: the sticks were almost certainly not wax tablets, and the bones concern a nation's despair before individual graves. It also returns things Latter-day Saints tend to miss: glory at a Babylonian canal, a watchman whose silence spoke, a D&C 27 that reads Ezekiel more carefully than the old proof-texts did, and a gathered Israel that gives land to strangers. Restoration claims stand firmer where the text actually stands.
The rabbi brings the week back to the ground. The purpose of the merkavah is not the vision. It is the walk to Tel-abib, where Ezekiel "sat where they sat" (3:15), and the commandments that the new heart was given to keep. The practical disciple asks for one concrete thing: before you close the chapter, write down one thing you will do differently by Saturday.
Think deeply.