Panel essay · Ezekiel · November 2–8, 2026 · Academic scholar
Written by an AI persona in the voice of a non-Latter-day-Saint Hebrew Bible academic — not a real scholar.
Ezekiel looks like the most orderly of the prophetic books. It is told in the first person, and its oracles carry dates counted from the deportation of King Jehoiachin in 597 BCE ("the fifth year of king Jehoiachin's captivity," 1:2). It moves cleanly from judgment against Jerusalem (chs. 1–24), to oracles against the nations (25–32), to restoration (33–48). That tidiness has divided scholars. Walther Zimmerli's two-volume Hermeneia commentary argued that a core of the prophet's own words had been extended and reinterpreted, layer upon layer, by a circle of disciples, an "Ezekiel school." Moshe Greenberg's Anchor Bible commentary answered with what he called a "holistic" reading, treating the book as a largely coherent product of one mind and era. Most current work sits between them: a book rooted in the prophet's experience among the exiles of the early sixth century, shaped and expanded over the following generations.
The best evidence that the book kept growing comes not from theory but from manuscripts.
The Greek translation of Ezekiel (the Septuagint) is roughly four to five percent shorter than the Hebrew Masoretic Text (MT), and Emanuel Tov argued that many of these differences reflect the literary growth of the Hebrew book, not careless translation. The most dramatic witness is Papyrus 967, a Greek codex of the third century CE discovered in 1931.
First, the papyrus lacks 36:23c–38, the very passage this week's lesson is named for: the sprinkling of clean water, the "new heart" and "new spirit," the removal of "the stony heart out of your flesh" (36:25–27). Second, its chapters run in a different order: chapters 38–39 (the Gog oracles) come before chapter 37, so that the valley of dry bones leads directly into the temple vision of chapters 40–48. Johan Lust's 1981 article in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly used this sequence to propose that chapter 37 originally stood in an end-time setting and that the Masoretic arrangement reflects a later reworking. Ingrid Lilly's 2012 monograph went further and treated Papyrus 967 and the MT as two "variant literary editions" of Ezekiel. She concluded that the papyrus generally reflects a Hebrew original rather than Greek innovation, and that in the MT, 36:23c–38 serves as an introduction to chapter 37.
This should not be overstated. The Hebrew scroll from Masada, older than the papyrus, preserves 36:23–35 in substantially the MT form, so the longer text was circulating in Hebrew by the first century BCE or CE. Whether the papyrus preserves an older edition or an abbreviated one is debated. Still, notice how closely 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 setting in 1:1–3 is concrete: "among the captives by the river of Chebar," at a settlement called Tel-abib (3:15). Late nineteenth-century excavations at Nippur turned up the business archive of the Murashu family (fifth century BCE), published by H. V. Hilprecht and A. T. Clay, and two of its contracts mention a nāru kabari, "the great canal." Most historical geographers identify this with Ezekiel's Chebar, a large canal running past Nippur, though the identification is probable rather than proven. Ezekiel's "river" was almost certainly an irrigation canal.
The exiles themselves have become far more visible. The Al-Yahudu tablets, published by Laurie Pearce and Cornelia Wunsch in 2014, are cuneiform documents dating from 572 to 477 BCE. They come from a Babylonian settlement called "the town of Judah," and they record Judean families leasing land, paying taxes, and giving their children names built on Yahweh. That is Ezekiel's audience: deportees settled on royal land, not chained, but uprooted and asking whether their god had been defeated. Daniel Smith-Christopher's A Biblical Theology of Exile and Ruth Poser's Das Ezechielbuch als Trauma-Literatur both read the book as literature of that catastrophe, closer to refugee testimony than to calm theology.
The oddest thing about the vision in chapter 1 is its prose. Ezekiel almost never says what he saw. He says what it resembled: "the likeness of four living creatures… this was their appearance; they had the likeness of a man" (1:5), "the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone… the likeness as the appearance of a man" (1:26), and finally "This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD" (1:28). Three layers of qualification sit between the prophet and the deity. For a priest trained in the holiness rules of the Jerusalem temple, this hedging is reverence put into grammar.
The imagery itself is not invented from nothing. Composite winged guardians were fixtures of Mesopotamian royal architecture: the human-headed winged bulls and lions (lamassu) that flanked Assyrian palace gates, such as the ninth-century BCE pair from Nimrud now in the Metropolitan Museum. Ezekiel's creatures combine human, lion, ox, and eagle (1:10). In chapter 10 the same beings are identified as cherubim, the throne-guardians of the Jerusalem sanctuary (cf. 1 Kings 6:23–28). Othmar Keel's Jahwe-Visionen und Siegelkunst (1977) set Ezekiel 1 and 10 beside ancient Near Eastern seal art, offering what its subtitle calls a new interpretation of these descriptions of divine majesty. Ezekiel builds from a shared iconography of divine kingship, then strips it of any fixed location. These guardians have wheels, "full of eyes round about" (1:18), and go "whithersoever the spirit was to go" (1:20). That mobility is the theological claim. Mesopotamian texts often explain disaster as a god abandoning his city. Daniel Block has argued that Ezekiel adapts exactly this motif in chapters 8–11, where the glory leaves Jerusalem. Chapter 1 is the mirror image: the god is not gone, and not beaten; he has come to Babylonia.
The "thirtieth year" of 1:1 remains a puzzle. Verse 2 seems to be an editorial gloss converting it to Jehoiachin's reign, around 593 BCE. A common suggestion is that it gives the prophet's age, thirty being the age at which priestly service began according to Numbers 4:3. None has won general agreement.
Later Judaism treated this chapter as dangerous. Mishnah Hagigah 2:1 forbids expounding the "chariot" (merkavah, though the word never appears in Ezekiel 1) even to a single student "unless he is a sage who understands on his own." The Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 13b; Hagigah 13a) remembers that the whole book was nearly withdrawn from use because its words contradicted the Torah, until Hananiah ben Hezekiah sat in an upper room with three hundred jars of oil and worked through the passages until he had reconciled them. The contradictions are real: the sacrificial laws of Ezekiel 40–48 do not match those of Numbers, and the temple Ezekiel describes was never built as he describes it. Even so, Ezekiel 1 is read in synagogues as the haftarah for the first day of Shavuot, the festival of revelation.
Chapters 2–3 make Ezekiel a man of unusual bodily experience. He eats a scroll that tastes "as honey for sweetness" (3:3) though it is full of "lamentations, and mourning, and woe" (2:10). He sits "astonished" for seven days (3:15). He is bound and struck dumb, "and thou shalt be dumb… But when I speak with thee, I will open thy mouth" (3:26–27). The muteness ends only when the refugee arrives with the news "The city is smitten" (33:21–22), a span of some seven years in the book's own chronology.
That pattern has tempted modern readers to diagnose. David J. Halperin's Seeking Ezekiel: Text and Psychology (1993) opens with a chapter titled "Broome and His Critics," surveying earlier attempts, from August Klostermann's nineteenth-century proposal of catalepsy to E. C. Broome's mid-twentieth-century psychiatric profile in the Journal of Biblical Literature. Halperin's own psychoanalytic reading finds in the book an anxiety centered on female sexuality. Most biblical scholars remain unpersuaded by such diagnoses. The muteness appears in literary frames placed at structurally significant points, and the sign-acts follow conventions shared with other prophets (Isaiah walking naked, Isaiah 20; Jeremiah's yoke, Jeremiah 27). 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 watchman passage (3:16–21) is nearly identical to 33:1–9. Its first appearance is widely regarded as an editorial anticipation of chapter 33, binding the commission to the book's turning point. Chapter 33 makes the military metaphor explicit: a lookout who sees "the sword come" and blows no trumpet bears the blood (33:6). It then joins this to chapter 18's argument about individual responsibility. The exiles' complaint, "If our transgressions and our sins be upon us, and we pine away in them, how should we then live?" (33:10), is answered with the book's most famous appeal: "I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked… turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?" (33:11). 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. 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.
Chapter 34 uses the oldest royal metaphor in the ancient Near East. Hammurabi's law code, eighteenth century BCE, calls the king "the shepherd of the oppressed and of the slaves." Ezekiel turns the metaphor into an indictment of Judah's ruling class: "Ye eat the fat, and ye clothe you with the wool… but ye feed not the flock" (34:3). 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" (34:16). The chapter's sharpest turn comes in 34:17–22, where the fault is no longer only with the shepherds but within the flock. Fat sheep foul the water and shove the weak aside with "side and with shoulder."
"My servant David" (34:23; 37:24–25) is the language of restored dynastic 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," rather than melek, "king," a title Ezekiel uses for the future ruler throughout chapters 40–48, where the prince's role is carefully subordinated to the temple. Yet 37:22 and 37:24 say "king," one of the small seams scholars use to trace the book's growth.
The dry bones vision interprets itself: "these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost" (37:11). The Hebrew ruach does three jobs in fourteen verses, as "breath" (37:5), "wind" (37:9), and "spirit" (37:14). The pun is the theology: the same force that animates a body moves the air and comes from God. In context the vision promises national restoration, return to "the land of Israel" (37:12), not the resurrection of individuals.
That reading did not stay put. Devorah Dimant has shown that the Qumran text known as Pseudo-Ezekiel (4Q385), from the second century BCE, already reworks the vision into a resurrection of the righteous at the end of days. The rabbis disagreed among themselves. In Sanhedrin 92b, Rabbi Eliezer holds that the dead Ezekiel raised stood, sang, and died; Rabbi Judah calls it "in truth… a parable"; another sage says they went up to the land and raised families. Around the mid-third century CE, the synagogue at Dura-Europos in Syria painted the scene as its largest wall panel. It is still the haftarah for the Sabbath of Passover week. 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 "two sticks" sign-act (37:15–28) is a symbolic action of a familiar prophetic kind. The text again interprets itself: "I will make them one nation… they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more" (37:22). The northern kingdom ("Joseph, the stick of Ephraim") had been absorbed by Assyria in 722 BCE, and the hope here is for a reunited Israel under one Davidic ruler. The Hebrew ʻets means tree, wood, or a piece of wood. The closest biblical analogy is the tribal names written on staffs in Numbers 17:2–3. In Latter-day Saint tradition the sticks have long been read as books, the Bible and the Book of Mormon. Keith Meservy, in Ensign articles of 1977 and 1987, argued that they were hinged wax-covered writing boards like the ivory and wooden boards found at Nimrud, which D. J. Wiseman published in Iraq in 1955. Brian Keck's 1990 critique in Dialogue argued that the Akkadian evidence had been misread: the element Meservy linked to Hebrew ʻets is a silent written determinative, not a spoken word. He also found that Hebrew usage points to wood, not documents. Outside that tradition the writing-board reading has no currency; the text's own gloss, reunion of the two kingdoms, is the standard interpretation.
Chapter 47 is the culmination of the temple vision. Water trickles "from under the threshold of the house eastward" (47:1) and deepens at each thousand-cubit measure, ankles, knees, loins, until it is "a river that I could not pass over" (47:5). It freshens the Dead Sea, so that fishermen spread nets "from En-gedi even unto En-eglaim" (47:10). The image belongs to a widespread ancient idea of the temple mountain as the cosmic source of life, and within the Bible to the river of Eden (Genesis 2:10), the river of Psalm 46:4, and the streams of Joel 3:18 and Zechariah 14:8. Jon Levenson's Theology of the Program of Restoration of Ezekiel 40–48 (1976) read these chapters as a theological program rather than a building plan, joining Sinai, Zion, and Eden in a single sacred geography. Two details keep the vision from being pure fantasy. The salt marshes "shall not be healed; they shall be given to salt" (47:11), probably a practical nod to the value of salt for temple offerings (43:24) and daily life. And in 47:22–23 the "strangers that sojourn among you" receive land inheritance "as born in the country," going beyond anything in Torah legislation. The week's reading ends, fittingly, with Ezekiel revising Torah law, the very thing that sent Hananiah ben Hezekiah up to his upper room.