feeling of the later time frowned on the custom, and Ezekiel
treats it as adultery.[1] However, notwithstanding the insistence
on ritual, natural in a priest, his moral standard is high; following
the prescription of Ex. xxii. 21 [20] he regards oppression of
resident aliens (a class that had not then received full civil rights)
as a crime (xxii. 7), and in his new constitution (xlvii. 22, 23)
gives them equal rights with the homeborn. His strongest
denunciation is directed against the religious practices of the
time in Judea—the worship of the Canaanite local deities (the
Baals), the Phoenician Tammuz, and the sun and other Babylonian
and Assyrian gods (vi., viii., xvi., xxiii.); he maintained
vigorously the prophetic struggle for the sole worship of Yahweh.
Probably he believed in the existence of other gods, though he
does not express himself clearly on this point; in any case he
held that the worship of other deities was destructive to Israel.
His conception of Yahweh shows a mingling of the high and the
low. On the one hand, he regards him as supreme in power,
controlling the destinies of Babylonia and Egypt as well as those
of Israel, and as inflexibly just in dealing with ordinary offences
against morality. But he conceives of him, on the other hand,
as limited locally and morally—as having his special abode in.
the Jerusalem temple, or elsewhere in the midst of the Israelite
people, and as dealing with other nations solely in the interests
of Israel. The bitter invectives against Ammon, Moab, Edom,
Philistia, Tyre, Sidon and Egypt, put into Yahweh’s mouth, are
based wholly on the fact that these peoples are regarded as
hostile and hurtful to Israel; Babylonia, though nowise superior
to Egypt morally, is favoured and applauded because it is
believed to be the instrument for securing ultimately the prosperity
of Yahweh’s people. The administration of the affairs of
the world by the God of Israel is represented, in a word, as
determined not by ethical considerations but by personal preferences.
There is no hint in Ezekiel’s writings of the grandiose
conception of Isa. xl.-lv., that Israel’s mission is to give the
knowledge of religious truth to the other nations of the world;
he goes so far as to say that Yahweh’s object in restoring the
fortunes of Israel is to establish his reputation among the nations
as a powerful deity (xxxvi. 20-23, xxxvii. 28, xxxix. 23). The
prophet regards Yahweh’s administrative control as immediate:
he introduces no angels or other subordinate supernatural
agents—the cherubs and the “men” of ix. 2 and xl. 3 are merely
imaginative symbols or representations of divine activity. His
high conception of God’s transcendence, it may be supposed, led
him to ignore intermediary agencies, which are common in the
popular literature, and later, under the influence of this same
conception of transcendence, are freely employed.
The relations between the writings of Ezekiel and those of Jeremiah is not clear. They have so much in common that they must have drawn from the same current bodies of thought, or there must have been borrowing in one direction or the other. In one point, however,—the attitude toward the ritual—the two men differ radically. The finer mind of the nation, represented mainly by the prophets from Amos onward, had denounced unsparingly the superficial non-moral popular cult. The struggle between ethical religion and the current worship became acute toward the end of the 7th century. There were two possible solutions of the difficulty. The ritual books of our Pentateuch were not then in existence, and the sacrificial cult might be treated with contempt as not authoritative. This is the course taken by Jeremiah, who says boldly that God requires only obedience (Jer. vii. 21 ff.). On the other hand the better party among the priests, believing the ritual to be necessary, might undertake to moralize it; of such a movement, begun by Deuteronomy, Ezekiel is the most eminent representative. Priest and prophet, he sought to unify the national religious consciousness by preserving the sacrificial cult, discarding its abuses and vitalizing it ethically. The event showed that he judged the situation rightly—the religious scheme announced by him, though not accepted in all its details, became the dominant policy of the later time, and he has been justly called“the father of Judaism.” He speaks as a legislator, citing no authority; but he formulates, doubtless, the ideas and perhaps the practices of the Jerusalem priesthood. His ritual code (xliii.-xlvi.), which in elaborateness stands midway between that of Deuteronomy and that of the middle books of the Pentateuch (resembling most nearly the code of Lev. xvii.-xxvi.) shows good judgment. Its most noteworthy features are two. Certain priests of idolatrous Judean shrines (distinguished by him as “Levites”) he deprives of priestly functions, degrading them to the rank of temple menials; and he takes from the civil ruler all authority over public religion, permitting him merely to furnish material for sacrifices. He is, however, much more than a ritual reformer. He is the first to express clearly the conception of a sacred nation, isolated by its religion from all others, the guardian of divine law and the abode of divine majesty. This kingdom of God he conceives of as moral: Yahweh is to put his own spirit into the people,[2] creating in them a disposition to obey his commandments, which are moral as well as ritual (xxxvi. 26, 27). The conception of a sacred nation controlled the whole succeeding Jewish development; if it was narrow in its exclusive regard for Israel, its intensity saved the Jewish religion to the world.
Text and Authorship.—The Hebrew text of the book of Ezekiel is not in good condition—it is full of scribal inaccuracies and additions. Many of the errors may be corrected with the aid of the Septuagint (e.g. the 430—390 + 40—of iv. 5, 6 is to be changed to 190), and none of them affect the general thought. The substantial genuineness of the discourses is now accepted by the great body of critics. The Talmudic tradition (Baba Bathra 14b) that the men of the Great Synagogue “wrote” Ezekiel, may refer to editorial work by later scholars.[3] There is no validity in the objections of Zunz (Gottesdienstl. Vortr.) that the specific prediction concerning Zedekiah (xii. 12 f.) is non-Prophetic, and that the drawing-up of a new constitution soon after the destruction of the city and the mention of Noah, Daniel, Job and Persia are improbable. The prediction in question was doubtless added by Ezekiel after the event; the code belongs precisely in his time, and the constitution was natural for a priest; Noah, Daniel and Job are old legendary Hebrew figures; and it is not probable that the prophet’s “Paras” is our “Persia.” Havet’s contention (in La Modernité des prophètes) that Gog represents the Parthians (40 B.C.) has little or nothing in its support. There are additions made post eventum, as in the case mentioned above and in xxix. 17-20, and the description of the commerce of Tyre (xxvii. 9b-25a), which interrupts the comparison of the city to a ship, looks like an insertion whether by the prophet or by some other; but there is no good reason to doubt that the book is substantially the work of Ezekiel. Ezekiel’s style is generally impetuous and vigorous, somewhat smoother in the consolatory discourses (xxxiv., xxxvi., xxxvii.); he produces a great effect by the cumulation of details, and is a master of invective; he is fond of symbolic pictures, proverbs and allegories; his “visions” are elaborate literary productions, his prophecies show less spontaneity than those of any preceding prophet (he receives his revelations in the form of a book, ii. 9), and in their present shape were hardly pronounced in public—a fact that seems to be hinted at in the statement that he was “dumb” till the fall of Jerusalem (iii. 26, xxxiii. 22); in private interviews the people did not take him seriously (xxxiii. 30-33). His book was accepted early as part of the sacred literature: Ben-Sira (c. 180 B.C.) mentions him along with Isaiah and Jeremiah (Ecclus. xlix. 8); he is not quoted directly in the New Testament, but his imagery is employed largely in the Apocalypse and elsewhere. His divergencies from the Pentateuchal code gave rise to serious doubts, but, after prolonged study, the discrepancies were explained, and the book was finally canonized (Shab. 13b). According to
- ↑ The stricter marriage law is formulated in Lev. xviii. 8-15, xx. 11 ff.
- ↑ Yahweh’s spirit, thought of as Yahweh’s vital principle, as man’s spirit is man’s vital principle, is to be breathed into them, as, in Gen. ii. 7, Yahweh breathes his own breath into the lifeless body. The spirit in the Old Testament is a refined material thing that may come or be poured out on men.
- ↑ The “Great Synagogue” is semi-mythical.
