Panel essay · Ezekiel · November 2–8, 2026 · LDS scholar
Written by an AI persona in the voice of a Latter-day Saint academic — not a real scholar.
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. The river from the temple is temple blessing. Each reading has Restoration authority behind it, and each sits on top of a text that first meant something to a deported priest in the 590s and 580s BC. Reading honestly means telling the two apart: what the evidence supports, what it does not, and where Restoration claims actually rest.
Ezekiel dates his call by two clocks. One is clear: "the fifth year of king Jehoiachin's captivity" (1:2), which puts it around 593 BC. The other, "the thirtieth year" (1:1), is unexplained. Guesses include Ezekiel's own age (the age a priest began serving) or a count from some event in Judah. Nobody knows.
The place, by contrast, is unusually well attested. Ezekiel lives "among the captives by the river of Chebar" (1:1), at "Tel-abib, that dwelt by the river of Chebar" (3:15). Cuneiform texts recovered at Nippur by the University of Pennsylvania's expedition name a navigable canal there called nāru kabari, "great canal," the Babylonian equivalent of Ezekiel's Chebar. The fifth-century Murashu business archive from the same region adds evidence of Judean settlement nearby. Most accept the identification, though not all (Jewish Encyclopedia, "Chebar"; Joshua Brumbach, "Jews, Exile, and the Murashu Archive of Nippur"). More recently, Laurie E. Pearce and Cornelia Wunsch published 103 cuneiform tablets from a settlement called Al-Yahudu, "Judah-town," dating from 572 to 477 BC. The tablets record Judean exiles with Yahwistic names leasing land, paying taxes, and doing business in the Babylonian countryside (Documents of Judean Exiles and West Semites in Babylonia in the Collection of David Sofer, CUSAS 28, 2014). Ezekiel's audience was a farming community of displaced Judeans, not a prison camp.
That setting is what makes chapter 1 so startling. Ezekiel sees "the likeness of a throne" and on it "the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it," and then concludes: "This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD" (1:26, 28). Latter-day Saints, who believe God has a body, will notice the human form at the center. They should also notice the qualifiers piled on it: Ezekiel refuses, three words deep, to say he has seen God directly. Later Jewish tradition took the chapter's danger seriously. The Mishnah forbids expounding "the Design of the Divine Chariot" except to someone "wise and understands most matters on his own" (Mishnah Hagigah 2:1, Sefaria translation). The Talmud says the book itself nearly left the canon because "its contents, in many details, contradict matters of Torah." It was saved only when Hananiah ben Hezekiah went up to an upper room with three hundred jugs of oil and resolved the contradictions (Shabbat 13b). The chapter's real point is not God's anatomy but geography: "the glory of the LORD" (3:23) appears in Babylon, at a canal, among the deported.
Ezekiel 3:17–21 and 33:1–9 make the prophet "a watchman unto the house of Israel": warn, and he has "delivered thy soul"; fail, and "his blood will I require at thine hand." Restoration scripture takes up the same image. The Lord's parable has the nobleman "set watchmen round about them, and build a tower" (D&C 101:45). Another revelation spreads the duty to every member: "it becometh every man who hath been warned to warn his neighbor" (D&C 88:81).
The oddity in Ezekiel is that this watchman is told he will be mute. "I will make thy tongue cleave to the roof of thy mouth, that thou shalt be dumb" (3:26). The muteness lifts only when a refugee arrives with the news "The city is smitten" (33:21–22). Edwin C. Broome Jr.'s mid-century Journal of Biblical Literature article compared Ezekiel's writing to that of a schizophrenic. In Seeking Ezekiel: Text and Psychology (1993), David J. Halperin offered a psychoanalytic reading of a gifted but tormented man. Critics have pushed back; Stephen Garfinkel's "Another Model for Ezekiel's Abnormalities" (Journal of the Ancient Near Eastern Society 19, 1989) offers one alternative. A common objection is that an edited, highly patterned book is a poor basis for diagnosing a man dead 2,600 years. More likely the muteness is itself a sign-act: until Jerusalem fell, the watchman's silence was part of his message.
Here is the sign-act in 37:16–17. Ezekiel is to "take thee one stick, and write upon it, For Judah, and for the children of Israel his companions," then another "For Joseph, the stick of Ephraim," and "join them one to another into one stick." The Hebrew word is ʻets, which simply means "wood." It can be a tree, timber, or a stick. The inscription "For Judah" (Hebrew li-Yehudah) uses the ordinary preposition of belonging, the same one found on seals and owners' marks. The passage then explains itself. "I will take the children of Israel from among the heathen... And I will make them one nation in the land... and they shall be no more two nations, neither shall they be divided into two kingdoms any more at all" (37:21–22). 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 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 The Evening and the Morning Star in 1832. Through Parley P. Pratt and others it became standard by the mid-1830s. Hugh Nibley defended it in a 1953 Improvement Era series, "The Stick of Judah and the Stick of Joseph." Then Keith Meservy, a BYU professor of ancient scripture, gave the reading its archaeological form. In a 1974 symposium address, and later in the Ensign (September 1977; February 1987), he noted that in 1953 Max Mallowan found sixteen hinged, wax-coated writing boards in the sludge of a well at Nimrud (biblical Calah). Ezekiel, he argued, "most likely" meant boards like these, joined to fold like a book. 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 ("Ezekiel's Sticks and the Gathering of Israel," Ensign, February 1987).
His theory reached the 1979 Latter-day Saint edition of the Bible. The current footnote to 37:16 still reads, "HEB wood. Wooden writing tablets were in common use in Babylon in Ezekiel's day." This week's lesson goes further, saying the sticks are what "many scholars interpret as wooden writing boards joined by a hinge."
That needs qualifying. In 1990 Brian E. Keck critiqued the theory in Dialogue ("Ezekiel 37, Sticks, and Babylonian Writing Boards: A Critical Reappraisal"). He showed that the Akkadian term Meservy leaned on, iṣ leʼu, begins with a written sign that was never pronounced. It marks the noun as "wooden" but is not a spoken cognate of Hebrew ʻets, and a Hebrew-speaking deportee would have known only the spoken word. "Meservy's argument is clever," Keck wrote, "but unfortunately it is based on erroneous linguistic data." Keck also pointed out that the surviving boards were luxury objects made of ivory, walnut, and beeswax, used largely for palace omen texts. An Aramaic Targum does render ʻets with a word that can mean "tablet," but Keck judged that equation lexically weak. Outside Latter-day Saint circles, the writing-board reading has little support. The "many scholars" behind it are mostly Latter-day Saint scholars.
The most useful recent contribution comes from inside the faith. In "The Sticks of Judah and Joseph: Reflections on Defending the Kingdom" (in They Shall Grow Together, BYU Religious Studies Center, 2022), Spencer grants that biblical scholars broadly agree the passage predicts the reunion of the two kingdoms, then turns to the Restoration texts. Lehi's prophecy has "the fruit of the loins" of Joseph and of Judah "write" (2 Nephi 3:12). The peoples write, and their writings "grow together." 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 D&C 27 does not equate the sticks with records, he writes, the writing-board evidence "seems to be beside the point," and there may be "less reason than often assumed for Latter-day Saints to argue that Ezekiel's 'sticks' are equivalent to writings or books or records." The evidence supports him.
A smaller caution: the Bible Dictionary calls the Book of Mormon a record of "one portion of the tribe of Ephraim" ("Ephraim, stick of"), but the Book of Mormon says Lehi "was a descendant of Manasseh" (Alma 10:3). The popular reading has always needed more explanation than it admits.
"Son of man, can these bones live? And I answered, O Lord GOD, thou knowest" (37:3). The vision turns on ruach, which is breath, wind, and spirit at once: "Come from the four winds, O breath" (37:9), and "shall put my spirit in you" (37:14). The text explains its own image. "These bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost" (37:11). In its own setting, this is a vision of national revival after 586 BC.
Ancient interpreters already argued over how far to take it. In Sanhedrin 92b, Rabbi Eliezer says the revived dead "stood on their feet and recited song to God and died." Rabbi Eliezer son of Rabbi Yosei HaGelili says they "ascended to Eretz Yisrael and married wives and fathered sons and daughters." Rabbi Yehuda ben Beteira stands up and claims to be descended from them, holding the phylacteries his grandfather left him. Against both, the conclusion credited to Rabbi Yehuda, as Rabbi Nehemya clarifies it, is: "In truth, it was a parable." In the mid-third century AD, the synagogue at Dura-Europos painted the scene in its largest panel, near the Torah niche, with the hand of God reassembling bodies (Smarthistory, "Synagogue, Dura-Europos").
Latter-day Saint scripture takes the literal side of this old argument. Joseph F. Smith's vision describes Ezekiel as having been "shown in vision the great valley of dry bones, which were to be clothed upon with flesh, to come forth again in the resurrection of the dead" (D&C 138:43). That is 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. Still, the text gives the later reading something to hold onto. Verse 12 abruptly shifts the image from bones lying in a valley to "I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves." An image of national return built on God reversing death is hard to contain. Rabbi Yehuda's formula, "truth and a parable," may be the fairest description of what the passage does in both traditions.
In both 34:23–24 and 37:24–25, God promises "one shepherd... even my servant David." In the sixth century BC this most naturally meant a restored ruler from David's line (compare Jeremiah 30:9). The Church's chapter heading reads it as "David (the Messiah)." Some Latter-day Saint writers have also speculated about a separate latter-day leader named David, as in Victor L. Ludlow's Encyclopedia of Mormonism entry "David, Prophetic Figure of Last Days"; that idea has sometimes been misused, and the heading points to Christ instead. The firmer exegetical point is that chapter 34 has God say "I, even I, will both search my sheep" (34:11) and then installs a Davidic shepherd, holding divine and human shepherding together without reconciling them.
In 47:1–5 water seeps "from under the threshold of the house" and, measured every thousand cubits, rises to the ankles, the knees, the loins, then "a river that I could not pass over." Elder Dale G. Renlund noticed the strangest thing about it: "though the small stream had no tributaries, it grew into a mighty river." He applied it to sealings that reach "backward and forward through the generations," saying that temple blessings "have a stunning capacity to heal" ("Family History and Temple Work: Sealing and Healing," April 2018). 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. At the April 1843 conference, Willard Richards recorded him saying that Jerusalem must "be rebuilt" and Judah "must return," with "the timple— water come out from under the temple— the waters of the dead sea be heald" (Discourse, 6 April 1843–B, Joseph Smith Papers). But the temple of chapters 40–48 was never built as described, and its rules differ from the Torah's, the kind of conflict Shabbat 13b says nearly cost the book its place in the canon. And the river belongs to a long biblical tradition of water flowing from God's dwelling: Eden's river (Genesis 2:10), the waters of Zechariah 14:8 and Joel 3:18, and the river of Revelation 22:1–2, whose tree has leaves "for the healing of the nations," borrowed directly from "the leaf thereof for medicine" (47:12). Restoration scripture continues it: "in the barren deserts there shall come forth pools of living water" (D&C 133:29). The text puts its weight on theology, not hydrology.
"The miry places thereof and the marshes thereof shall not be healed; they shall be given to salt" (47:11). This need not be grim: in this same temple, "the priests shall cast salt upon" the offerings (43:24), and salt was a real economic resource on the Dead Sea shore. A healed world keeps what the sanctuary still uses. More striking: when the land is divided, the "strangers that sojourn among you, which shall beget children among you" are to be "as born in the country among the children of Israel; they shall have inheritance with you among the tribes" (47:22). The Torah protected the resident alien; here the outsider receives land. Abraham is told that "as many as receive this Gospel shall be called after thy name" (Abraham 2:10). That link needs no speculative archaeology.
The scholarship removes some popular readings: the sticks were almost certainly not wax tablets, and the dry 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.