Religious experience of the prophet Ezekiel

EZEKIEL

In the Wilderness of the People

The prophetic career of Ezekiel began in an environment of exile -- exile from the normal forms of priestly ordination and service, from the rhythms of worship in the Temple, from the larger community of the promised land of Judah. "While I was among the exiles by the Kebar River," his testament begins, "the heavens were opened and I saw a visions of God."

Beyond this, and the fact that he was the married son of a priest, we know almost nothing about him; while "readers might reason that Ezekiel's first divine vision occurred in his thirtieth year," even this is at best a matter of conjuncture for those familiar with that age as the time when Levite priests were ordained to the priesthood under conventional circumstances.

It is likely, however, that Ezekiel was well suited to transform the then-prevailing religious orthodoxy that centered around the Temple in Jerusalem as the place where God affirmed the promise of the Covenant and the people carried out their ritual obligations:

We know Ezekiel was among the intellectual elite of his day. The book of Ezekiel reveals an author of extraordinary acumen, sophistication, and literary gifts. Ezekiel's intellect reveals itself in myriad ways: his mastery of technical vocabularies; his political expertise; his familiarity with Israel's religious traditions; and above all his creative revisions of those traditions to suit the challenges of his times.

Given this background, it is not surprising that Ezekiel seems acutely aware of the religious crisis the Babylonian captivity presented, both for himself personally and for the rest of the exiles collectively. Rather than accuse God of being "powerless, apathetic, or unjust," he looks beyond the exile to a new covenant and "a new and perfectly ordered temple, situated at the center of a land inhabited by the reconstituted twelve tribes of Israel."

Against this erudite backdrop, it is not surprising that the content of Ezekiel's initial vision of the merkaba or divine chariot of fire is profoundly symbolic and even esoteric in nature. Initially, his response to his calling to speak God's words to the "rebellious nation" of the Israelite exiles and to preach without fear is enthusiastic; while the scroll of prophecy is filled with "words of lament and mourning and woe," it "tasted as sweet as honey."

However, rather than immediately set about his work, but instead appears to return -- "overwhelmed" -- to private life.

Ezekiel's passive refusal to immediately deliver God's warning echoes Moses and Jeremiah's more aggressive rejections of their own prophetic callings. However, rather than argue that he is not qualified, Ezekiel simply "sits stunned" until God speaks again to warn him that obedience is not only mandatory but crucial for the prophet and the exile community together:

When I say to a wicked man, "You will surely die," and you do not warn him or speak out to dissuade him from his evil ways in order to save his life, that wicked man will die for his sin, and I will hold you accountable. […] When a righteous man turns from his righteousness and does evil, and I put a stumbling block before him, he will die for his sin. The righteous things he did will not be remembered, and I will hold you accountable for his blood.

Some commentators argue that this stern insistence that the prophet is responsible for the sins of the community is "not reproach, but motivation and encouragement," but this is not entirely convincing in the light of Ezekiel's one-week delay. Was God impatient with the nascent prophet? Dorr simply attributes the entire sequence to "a late editor's somewhat clumsy touch" without commenting on why the two parts of Ezekiel's commission are separated in time or why the second visitation is much more serious in tone than the first.

In any event, the terms of Ezekiel's prophetic career are extraordinarily strict, prompting commentators to call him "an eccentric, even bizarre figure."

Some have argued that he was a paralytic or cataleptic, aphasic, agoraphobic, neurotic, hysteric, mute, or simply suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder following the forced relocation to Babylon.

Whatever the biographical details may be, the scriptural import is clear: God shuts the prophet up in his house and in his own person. Unless he is transmitting the mandate of God, he will be silent and figuratively "bound," cut off from secular interactions with the people and the temptation to actively participate in the political affairs of the exiles: "Divinely imposed silence precludes his arbitrating between Israel and its god, but whenever Yahweh opens his mouth, he must proclaim God's oracles to his fellow captives."

Given the serious consequences of failure, Ezekiel then presumably propagates the content of the rest of the book that bears his name within the exile community.

Within a year, the "elders of the exiles" are gathering at Ezekiel's home, in apparent eagerness to receive "priestly instruction concerning some legal or cultic dispute" -- a crucial field of advice for a people cut off from the Temple apparatus at the heart of their ritual observance -- or, equally plausibly, to seek oracles from the eccentric holy man who otherwise was mute.

This submersion of Ezekiel the man into Ezekiel the prophet reflects both the specific nature of his calling -- silent except when preaching, divorced from public life -- and, ironically, the nature of his initial refusal. Having neglected to spread the divine message upon first receiving it, his power of speech was taken away except in the exercise of his prophetic function; this situation would continue until the destruction of Jerusalem

seven years later "opens his mouth" and allows him to interact with his fellow exiles in a non-prophetic or purely social context once again.

This withdrawal from public life is also explicitly tied to Ezekiel's initial calling by forcibly separating the prophet from the "rebellious house" that the Babylonian exiles represent. Far from being chastened by their captivity among the Gentiles, the exiles remain headstrong and transgressive, wilfully defying the Law and the proper relationship with God that it entails. In removing Ezekiel from their midst and making him a separate "watchman," God eliminated opportunities for his prophet to slide into idolatry:

Some of the elders of Israel came to me and sat down before me. The word of the Lord came to me: "Son of man, these men have set up idols in their hearts and put wicked stumbling blocks before their faces. Should I let them inquire of me at all?"

Moreover, the contrast between the mute and motionless prophet who speaks and moves at the will of God and the pagan images of the Babylonians -- which do not move, speak, or even hear the prayers of their worshippers -- is both suggestive and instructive. When not moved by God to prophesy, Ezekiel is like a stone idol trapped within himself, but the idols themselves never talk at all.

In this context of the idol as godless body, the connection between the squandering of wealth on the cult of the idols and the misuse of the body in prostitution becomes very complex. Just as the jewels and other adornments of Israel were diverted to dress the "gaudy high places" that represented the holy sites of the Philistine cult, the bodies of the people are worse than worthless when diverted from their proper role as the nation of God.

In fact, the idolatry that ruined the kingdom of Israel and in Ezekiel's time was soon to ruin Judah is the primary focus of much of Ezekiel's preaching. In exile, cut off from the wellspring of Jewish religious life and faced with the looming apparent abrogation of the Covenant, it would be all too easy for the Jews in captivity to adopt Babylonian religious and cultural ways in order to integrate with their new neighbors in the empire:

In the aftermath of Jerusalem's destruction, both Israel's election and the power of its God were thrown open to survivors' questions. How could Yahweh allow the city and its Temple to be destroyed, while age-old enemies survived, gloating over and profiting from Judah's demise? Perhaps God had not permitted the catastrophe at all, but had been defeated by the superior deities of a world-class empire.

As such, the "oracles against foreign nations and rulers" sequence would have been immediately relevant to Ezekiel's immediate audience: By revealing the downfall of all historical empires, God here proclaims the futility of alliances with foreign powers compared to the promise made to the children of Israel.

Instead of assimilating into the Babylonian mainstream, Ezekiel argues, the exiles need to retain their sense of themselves as a separate nation:

During the great days of their nation, the Jews had been a separated people, and this irritated their neighbors. The Jewish claim that Jehovah was the only true and living God meant that the other nations worshipped only dead idols. […] But as the kingdom of Judah drifted from the Lord, the Jewish people adopted the gods and the practices of the Gentiles, and to their neighbors, this looked like pure hypocrisy.

In the context of these visions, any admixture of Jewish identity with foreign ways represented not only just such a hypocritical failure to trust God in all things but, ultimately, a decision to vanish from history. First, Ezekiel reminds his audience, the nations closely related to Israel failed through jealousy, pride, and treason.

Next, he prophesies that the great merchant cities of Phoenicia

are eventually doomed to ruin in the fullness of time -- whereas Israel itself will be regathered into its own land again.

This reminder of the election of Israel must have come as both a bitter challenge to the exiles (who had seen their nation brought low and their connection to it severed) and an argument that, even in such challenging circumstances, fidelity to the Covenant would ultimately reap much greater rewards than any attempt to attach themselves to a foreign civilization.

Significantly, Ezekiel's prophetic vision singles out the fate of Egypt for special attention. Although Egypt had been an undependable neighbor, it is likely that many of the exiles remembered the relatively benign nature of coexistence with the Egyptians as a potential model for coexistence within Babylon or, at best, as an alternative secular power to look to as a potential ally or savior. After all, the history of Israel is filled with encounters with Egypt that begin relatively well (as with Abraham and Joseph) and only decline over time:

Whenever ever a crisis loomed, they were prone to look to Egypt for help. The longer the Jews were away from Egypt, the more they idealized their experiences there and forgot about the slavery and the toil. Of course, King Solomon had married an Egyptian princess and did a considerable amount of business with Egypt, but after he died, those bonds began to unravel.