Panel essay · Ezekiel · November 2–8, 2026 · Six outlooks · the Parry method
Written by an AI persona applying Donald W. Parry's six-outlooks framework. Professor Parry did not write, review, or endorse this essay, and no words are attributed to him that are not cited to a published source.
The passage for this walk-through is a single verse, Ezekiel 37:12:
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.
It sits at the hinge of the dry-bones chapter. Verses 1–10 are the vision: a valley of very dry bones, a noise and a shaking, sinews and flesh and skin, then breath from the four winds. Verse 11 is the explanation: "these bones are the whole house of Israel." Verse 12 is the oracle that tells the exiles what the vision means for them. If any verse in the block can carry several readings at once, this is a good candidate. Christians and Latter-day Saints have read it as a resurrection text, Jews read it in the synagogue at Passover, and Ezekiel's first hearers would have taken it as a promise about getting home.
The method comes from Donald W. Parry, professor of Hebrew Bible at Brigham Young University and a member of the international team that edited the Dead Sea Scrolls (BYU Speeches speaker page). Parry teaches six outlooks, six questions a reader can put to the same passage: what it meant in its own day; what it foretells; whether it is fulfilled more than once; how it applies to us; what it says to me personally; and what it teaches as doctrine. He stresses the last one most. What follows applies his framework. It is not a report of his reading of this verse.
One feature of the text should be noticed first. In the vision itself the bones lie unburied "in the open valley" (37:2), and they are called "these slain" (37:9), so the scene is a battlefield after the fighting. In verse 12 the image changes and the dead are in graves. Ezekiel moves from one picture of death to another, from bodies left out on the ground to bodies sealed inside the earth. Each of the six outlooks has to deal with that change.
Read verse 12 first as an answer to verse 11. The Lord quotes his people: "Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts." This is not Ezekiel's metaphor. It is what the exiles were saying to one another, and the oracle replies to it.
The despair has a recorded cause. Ezekiel had been in Babylonia since the deportation with Jehoiachin (1:2), living among the exiles "by the river of Chebar" at Tel-abib (3:15). In 33:21 a refugee arrives with the news: "The city is smitten." Jerusalem had fallen and the temple was gone. The bones speech is not dated, but it belongs to the oracles that come after that report, and it answers the grief that followed it.
The deportees were not literally dead. Cuneiform tablets from a Babylonian settlement called Al-Yahudu ("Judahtown"), published by Laurie Pearce and Cornelia Wunsch, document the social and economic life of Judean families there in the sixth and fifth centuries BC, many of them with names that include the divine name (Cornell Chronicle report). The exiles were alive and getting on with their lives. The "graves" of verse 12 therefore cannot mean physical burial in the plain sense. 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. "Cut off" in 37:11 is the language Israel used for death and for being removed from the covenant community.
In its near sense, then, the verse promises a national return. God will open Babylonia as if it were a tomb and lead the people "into the land of Israel." The phrase Ezekiel uses for the land, ʼadmat yisraʼel ("the soil of Israel"), is his own, and it keeps the promise tied to actual ground. The verse also says who acts. Every verb belongs to God: "I will open," "cause you to come up," "bring you." The exiles do not raise themselves, and this matches 36:22, where God says he acts "not for your sakes… but for mine holy name's sake."
A near fulfillment followed. Ezra 1:1–3 records the decree of Cyrus allowing the Judeans to go up and rebuild the house of the LORD in Jerusalem. Not everyone went back. The Al-Yahudu tablets show families still living in Babylonia long after Cyrus. So the return happened, but it was partial.
The second outlook reads the verse as prophecy beyond Ezekiel's horizon. The wording supports it: open graves, people coming up out of them, flesh on bone, breath entering a body. Elsewhere the Hebrew Bible states a bodily resurrection directly: "Thy dead men shall live, together with my dead body shall they arise" (Isaiah 26:19), and "many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake" (Daniel 12:2). Readers put Ezekiel 37 beside those texts very early.
The earliest surviving example is among the Dead Sea Scrolls, Parry's own field. A Qumran work now called Pseudo-Ezekiel (4Q385 and related fragments) retells the dry-bones vision but frames it differently. Ezekiel asks how those who have been loyal to God's ways will be rewarded, and the bones prophecy is the answer. Albert Hogeterp argues that this turns Ezekiel's metaphor of national revival into an expectation of eschatological resurrection for the righteous (Hogeterp, "Resurrection and Biblical Tradition: Pseudo-Ezekiel Reconsidered," Biblica 89 (2008)). 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.
The New Testament describes an event in the same terms. At the death of Jesus, "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 "graves were opened" and "came out of the graves" are close to the wording of Ezekiel 37:12–13.
Latter-day Saint scripture makes the distant reading explicit. In Joseph F. Smith's 1918 vision of the spirit world, Ezekiel is among the prophets waiting for redemption, described as the one "who was 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, living souls" (D&C 138:43). The modern chapter heading in the Church's Bible 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.
The third outlook asks whether the first two readings compete or whether both can be right. Jewish tradition debated the question openly, and the Talmud preserves the argument.
In Sanhedrin 92b, Rabbi Eliezer holds that the dead Ezekiel revived stood up, sang, and died. Rabbi Eliezer son of Rabbi Yosei HaGelili goes further: they went up to the land of Israel, married, and had children. Rabbi Yehuda ben Beteira then stands up and says he is descended from them and owns phylacteries his grandfather inherited from them. Against this literal reading stands the view that the vision was a parable. Rabbi Yehuda's position is the most useful for this outlook: in the Davidson translation on Sefaria, he says the vision "was truth and it was a parable." Rabbi Nehemya objects that it cannot be both and offers his own reading of the phrase: "In truth, it was a parable" (Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 92b, Sefaria). The rabbis did not resolve the dispute, and the Talmud kept both sides.
The liturgy suggests that both readings stay in use. Ezekiel 37:1–14 is the haftarah for the Sabbath during Passover week (Jewish Theological Seminary, "Shabbat Hol Hamoed Pesah"; some communities begin at 36:37). 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. The wall paintings of the third-century synagogue at Dura-Europos in Syria include Ezekiel's visions, among them a sequence on the valley of dry bones ("Dura-Europos synagogue," Wikipedia). A congregation living in diaspora chose to paint dead bodies coming back to life.
A modern instance exists as well. Naftali Herz Imber's poem "Tikvatenu," which became Hatikvah, the Israeli national anthem, answers the exiles' complaint in 37:11, ʼavdah tikvatenu, "our hope is lost," with ʻod lo ʼavdah tikvatenu, "our hope is not yet lost." Dalia Marx describes Imber as turning Ezekiel's words "on their head" (Dalia Marx, "Tikvatenu: The Poem that Inspired Israel's National Anthem," TheTorah.com). The verse now has at least three readings people have treated as fulfillments: Cyrus's return, an expected resurrection, and a twentieth-century national return. The dual-fulfillment outlook does not require choosing one. It asks the reader to say which kind of fulfillment each one is.
The fourth outlook applies the text to the reader's own community and time. 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 had a technical name for a stricter version of it. A pesher (interpretation) quotes a prophetic text line by line and then says "its interpretation concerns" the sect, its Teacher of Righteousness, and its enemies. The Habakkuk Pesher (1QpHab) is the best-known example. Pseudo-Ezekiel is not formally a pesher, but it does something similar: it takes a prophecy to exiled Israel and applies it to the righteous of the writers' own day.
The Come, Follow Me lesson does the Latter-day Saint version of this. It asks readers to consider what the dry bones suggest "about gathering Israel on both sides of the veil." That phrasing comes from President Russell M. Nelson's June 2018 "Hope of Israel" devotional. There he called the gathering "the greatest challenge, the greatest cause, and the greatest work on earth" and said it applies to people "on either side of the veil" (Russell M. Nelson, "Hope of Israel," worldwide youth devotional, June 3, 2018). Nelson's devotional does not cite Ezekiel. The lesson connects the two. Read this way, verse 12 covers both groups. Missionary work brings the living to "the land," meaning 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.
Parry's fifth outlook is the hardest to describe because it depends on the reader. A verse may bring instruction, guidance, or revelation to a particular person that has little to do with its context. The framework allows for this and asks only that the reader recognize it as a personal reading.
Some features of this verse lend themselves to 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 relapsing into an addiction may recognize the sentence "our hope is lost" as their own before recognizing anything about Babylonia. The verse does not argue with the despair. It does not tell the exiles that their bones are not dry. It accepts their description, graves included, and then says "I will open." The only thing Ezekiel says in the whole scene is "O Lord GOD, thou knowest" (37:3). For a personal reading, that answer 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.
Parry stresses this outlook most, and it is the one that can carry over between readers. The question is what the verse, read carefully and with the passage around it, teaches as true about God and humankind. At least four things.
Resurrection is bodily and restorative. The vision does not describe spirits drifting up out of a valley. It describes "bone to his bone," sinews, flesh, and skin (37:6–8), the same body put back together. That is the doctrine Alma states: "every limb and joint shall be restored to its body" (Alma 40:23). Verse 12 adds a direction of movement. The dead "come up," out of the ground and into a place.
A body without breath is not yet alive. Verse 8 marks a stage that is easy to skip: the bodies are complete, "but there was no breath in them." Life comes only when the ruach, which means breath, wind, and spirit, enters (37:9–10, 14: "And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live"). Restoration scripture says the same thing as a definition: "the spirit and the body are the soul of man" (D&C 88:15). Ezekiel shows the two parts arriving separately. The body is rebuilt first and is inert until the breath comes.
God does the raising. Every verb in 37:12–14 has God as its subject. The bones do not climb out of the graves. They are brought up. This fits the theology of the whole block. The new heart in 36:26 is given, and the stony heart is taken away. The cleansing in 36:25 is something God sprinkles on them. Ezekiel's account of grace starts with God acting.
The purpose is knowing God. Verse 13 states the goal: "And ye shall know that I am the LORD, when I have opened your graves." The recognition formula "ye shall know that I am the LORD" runs throughout Ezekiel. Here the event that brings about that knowledge is the reversal of death. The verse ends with the people restored to covenant belonging, "O my people," and with God known by them.
These doctrines hold whichever fulfillment a reader prefers. 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. That is probably why Parry gives doctrine the most weight. The other five outlooks can disagree with each other, and the doctrine stays the same under all of them.