Panel essay · Ezekiel · November 2–8, 2026 · Honest questioner
Written by an AI persona that surfaces the hard questions honestly — not a real person.
The Babylonian Talmud keeps a strange memory about this book. Rav Yehuda, citing Rav, says that one man, Hananiah ben Hezekiah, should be "remembered for the good." Without him "the book of Ezekiel would have been suppressed because its contents, in many details, contradict matters of Torah." He went up to an upper room with three hundred jugs of oil for lamplight and stayed there until he had worked out every difficulty (Shabbat 13b; the story is told again in Hagigah 13a and Menachot 45a). The Mishnah also restricts the opening chapter. One may not expound "the Design of the Divine Chariot" even to one person unless he "is wise and understands most matters on his own" (Mishnah Hagigah 2:1).
The questions below are not modern inventions, and asking them is not a sign of weak faith. A canonical tradition nearly set this book aside, kept it, and then told its readers to go carefully. What follows states this week's hardest questions as strongly as I can and lays out the range of answers, without forcing conclusions.
Search online for Ezekiel 1 and the spaceship reading appears quickly, from Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods (German original 1968) to its most technical form, The Spaceships of Ezekiel (English 1974) by Josef F. Blumrich, an engineer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. Its best case is that the text does sound mechanical: a "whirlwind… out of the north" with "fire infolding itself" (1:4), "a wheel in the middle of a wheel" (1:16), rings "full of eyes" (1:18), wheels that are "lifted up from the earth" (1:19), and noise "like the noise of great waters" (1:24).
The text's own answer is strong. First, Ezekiel hedges almost every noun. The creatures have "the likeness of a man" (1:5), the throne is "the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone," and the figure on it is "the likeness as the appearance of a man" (1:26). The account 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 comes back: "I knew that they were the cherubims" (10:20). Third, the scene draws on images he could have seen. Composite winged guardians with human heads and animal bodies stood at Assyrian palace gates, like the Metropolitan Museum's lamassu from Ashurnasirpal II's palace at Nimrud. 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. Critics note that Blumrich even rendered "visions" in 43:3 as "vehicular structure." The fair question underneath, what is Ezekiel describing?, gets the text's own answer: a glory he can only point toward.
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." The phrase appears in Restoration scripture: the Lord speaks of Moroni, "to whom I have committed the keys of the record of the stick of Ephraim" (D&C 27:5). An earlier text, 2 Nephi 3:12, promises that what is written by Joseph's descendants and by Judah's descendants "shall grow together." It never mentions Ezekiel or sticks. This week's lesson goes further and describes the two sticks as objects "which many scholars interpret as wooden writing boards joined by a hinge."
The strongest case against the Book of Mormon reading comes straight from 37:18–22. The people ask, "Wilt thou not shew us what thou meanest by these?" and God explains the sign: "I will take the children of Israel from among the heathen… I will make them one nation… 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" (37:21–22). The sign interprets itself as the reunion of the northern kingdom (Joseph/Ephraim) and the southern kingdom (Judah). The Hebrew word is ʻets, an ordinary word for wood, tree, or stick. The closest biblical parallel is Numbers 17:2, where Moses is told to "write thou every man's name upon his rod," one rod per tribe. A named piece of wood is a known way to represent a tribe, not obviously a book.
The best-known Latter-day Saint answer is the writing-board argument. Keith H. Meservy of BYU first made it in the 1970s and gave it fullest form in "Ezekiel's Sticks and the Gathering of Israel" (Ensign, February 1987). In 1953 Max Mallowan found hinged, wax-covered writing boards at Nimrud, and the cuneiform label on one cover calls it a wooden tablet. Meservy argued that Ezekiel's writing, joining, and labeling match scribal practice with such boards, so the sticks are records. Brian E. Keck answered him in "Ezekiel 37, Sticks, and Babylonian Writing Boards: A Critical Reappraisal" (Dialogue 23, no. 1, 1990):
Keck concluded that the theory "does not hold up to a close inspection." As far as I could find, the hinged-board reading has been argued mainly in Latter-day Saint publications. The lesson's "many scholars" is generous.
Faithful responses differ. Meservy himself keeps the gathering reading and treats the Book of Mormon as the means of gathering: "The appearance of the Book of Mormon was crucial to the gathering." 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 original audience would have understood the sign as two kingdoms, and they treat D&C 27:5 as a later prophetic use of Ezekiel's image, not a claim about what Ezekiel meant in 587 BC. A critic will say the second view gives up the proof-text; its holders answer that the Book of Mormon never needed one. Either way, the text supports the kingdoms reading in its own words, and an honest teacher should read 37:21–22 aloud alongside 37:16.
The chapter heading says "Israel will inherit the land in the Resurrection," and many Latter-day Saints read 37:1–14 as a resurrection text. The passage again explains itself: "these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost" (37:11). The "graves" God opens (37:12) are the exile, and the result is "I shall place you in your own land" (37:14). On a plain reading this is about a nation brought back, not bodies raised.
The rabbis argued this. In Sanhedrin 92b, Rabbi Eliezer says the dead Ezekiel revived sang a song to God and died. Rabbi Yehuda says it was "truth and it was a parable"; when Rabbi Nehemiah objects that it cannot be both, the answer comes back: "In truth, it was a parable." Rabbi Eliezer son of Rabbi Yose the Galilean says it was literal: they went up to the land, "married wives and fathered sons and daughters." Then Rabbi Yehuda ben Bathyra stands and declares that he descends from them and that he holds phylacteries his grandfather left him from them. The image has no force unless bodily revival is imaginable; its stated subject is a people who think they are finished. Whether a vision that uses resurrection as a picture also teaches it is a question worth leaving open.
The watchman passages (3:16–21; 33:1–9) are often taught as a simple call to duty, but they carry two difficult ideas. The first is that someone else's death can be charged to you: "the same wicked man shall die in his iniquity; but his blood will I require at thine hand" (3:18; 33:8). Both men are guilty. Taught carelessly, it can be crushing to anyone told that a relative's spiritual state is on their head. Restoration scripture repeats the idea in a gentler way: "it becometh every man who hath been warned to warn his neighbor," after which "their sins are upon their own heads" (D&C 88:81–82). The verse that follows the warning matters just as much: "if thou warn the wicked, and he turn not… thou hast delivered thy soul" (3:19). The watchman answers for speaking, not for the hearer's response, which is the text's own guard against scrupulosity.
The second difficulty is easy to miss. In 3:20 a righteous man turns to iniquity, "and I lay a stumblingblock before him, he shall die." The Hebrew mikshol is simply 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 text does not soften the line.
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?" A life of righteousness "shall not be remembered" if the person sins at the end (33:13), and a life of wickedness is forgotten if the person turns (33:16). Standing seems to depend on where you happen to be at the moment of judgment. The book also seems to pull two ways. Chapter 18 insists that "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 S. Kaminsky's Corporate Responsibility in the Hebrew Bible (1995) argues that texts like Ezekiel 18 do not abolish corporate judgment the way they are often said to. Paul M. Joyce's Divine Initiative and Human Response in Ezekiel (1989) works on the same tension from the side of divine initiative.
The best response may come from reading 33:10 closely. The exiles are saying "our sins be upon us, and we pine away in them, how should we then live?" 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: "turn ye, turn ye… for why will ye die?" (33:11). Ezekiel 33 is then not a full theory of judgment but a summons to people at a decision point. That does not dissolve the tension with 21:3.
The lesson's title text, "A new heart also will I give you" (36:26), is wrapped in a statement that unsettles many readers: "I do not this for your sakes, O house of Israel, but for mine holy name's sake" (36:22), repeated in 36:32 with "be ashamed and confounded for your own ways." God goes on to say Israel "shall lothe yourselves in your own sight" (36:31). Read cold, it sounds like a ruler protecting his reputation "among the heathen" (36:20–23).
Three responses can be held together. The first is historical. Ezekiel 20 tells Israel's whole history this way ("I wrought for my name's sake, that it should not be polluted before the heathen," 20:9), and Moses used the same argument with God (compare 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 second is theological. "Not for your sakes" means not because you earned it. The restoration rests entirely on God's character, which is what grace means. The new heart is then pure gift: "I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes" (36:27). The third is pastoral, and it is the uncomfortable one. Some readers, including people who grew up hearing "you are 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.
Ezekiel sits "astonished" for seven days (3:15). He is bound, and his tongue cleaves to the roof of his mouth (3:25–26) until the fugitive arrives and "my mouth was opened" (33:21–22). In 1946 Edwin C. Broome Jr. argued in the Journal of Biblical Literature ("Ezekiel's Abnormal Personality," JBL 65) that these signs fit paranoid schizophrenia with catatonic episodes. David J. Halperin's Seeking Ezekiel: Text and Psychology (1993) builds on Broome, starting with a chapter called "Broome and His Critics." His psychoanalytic reading presents, in his publisher's words, "a marvelously gifted yet profoundly disturbed man." Critics reply that diagnosing an author from a stylized ancient text has no real clinical basis. Many scholars now prefer communal trauma readings: Daniel L. Smith-Christopher's A Biblical Theology of Exile (2002) reads Ezekiel as a refugee text, and Refael Furman surveys this shift in "Trauma and Post-Trauma in the Book of Ezekiel" (Old Testament Essays, 2020). 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.
Chapter 47 belongs to the temple vision of chapters 40–48, a temple never built as described, whose laws differ from the Torah; this is why the sages wanted to suppress the book. Menachot 45a, for example, notes that Ezekiel 46:6 requires one bull for the new-moon offering where Numbers 28:11 requires two. The river vision also includes a detail that is easy to skip: "the miry places… shall not be healed; they shall be given to salt" (47:11). Some see a practical touch (salt was valuable); others, a troubling hint that some things are left out of the healing.
Then there is "my servant David," shepherd and king (34:23; 37:24). David had been dead four centuries. The Church's heading reads "David (the Messiah)," and Christians have long read Christ here. The alternative readings are a restored Davidic dynasty or an ideal ruler. Notably, 34:24 calls him a "prince" (nasiʼ), not a king, which is the same modest title Ezekiel gives the ruler in the temple vision. Ezekiel seems wary of kings even while promising one.
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.