Ezekiel 46

Restoration—Chapters 40-48 years after the conquest of Jerusalem, the destruction of the temple, the desolation of the land, the deportation of its inhabitants, Ezekiel describes in this section the restoration of all that was lost, and gives at the same time, in ch. Ezekiel 47:1-12, a glance into the distant future, in which from the restored Israel salvation for the whole world goes forth in fulfilment of the ancient prediction, “In thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed.” After the introduction (ch. Ezekiel 40:1-4) follows the description of the temple of the future, its enclosing walls and its gates, ch. Ezekiel 40:5-16; the outer court, Ezekiel 40:17-27; the inner, Ezekiel 40:28-47; the proper temple, chEze 40:48-4:4. In ch. Ezekiel 41:5-11, the proportion of the lateral buildings to the temple; in Ezekiel 41:12-14, that of the rear buildings; in Ezekiel 41:15-26, whatever else is to be said of these structures. In ch.

Ezekiel 42:1-14, the offices for the priests. In Ezekiel 42:15-20, after the description of the several parts of the sanctuary, the proportions of the whole. In ch. Ezekiel 43:1-9, the entrance of the Lord into the finished temple. In Ezekiel 43:10-12, why the revelation of the second temple is given. In Ezekiel 43:13-17, the proportions of the altar of burnt-offering; in Ezekiel 43:18-27, its consecration.

In ch. Ezekiel 44 the prophet turns from the temple to the priests of the future, to whom the description of the place leads, which formed the central point of their ministry, the altar of burnt-offering. In ch. Ezekiel 45:1-17, the environs of the temple, the glebe land for the priests, the Levites, and the princes of the future. In ch. Ezekiel 45:18 to Ezekiel 46:15, the sacred seasons and the sacred actions ofthe future.

In ch. Ezekiel 46:16-24, supplements to the foregoing. In ch. Ezekiel 47:1-12, an entirely new subject: the waters of the Dead Sea are made wholesome, and filled with life by the stream from the sanctuary. At the close the prophet returns from the distant to the nearer future. After the temple here follow the land and the city of the future.

The prophet describes, in ch. Ezekiel 47:13-23, the borders of the land; then in ch. Ezekiel 48 the distribution among the several tribes, and how they are grouped around the temple, and the city adjoining it. Thus all that was lost is restored, and a broad foundation for the hopes of the future is given to the people languishing in misery, to the worm Jacob creeping on the ground. This great picture of the future belongs to the end of the literary activity of the prophet. The only prediction of a later date to be found in the collection, that in ch. Ezekiel 29:17 to Ezekiel 30:19, which belongs to the twenty-seventh year of Jehoiachin, while the present belongs to the twenty-fifth, bears no independent character, but is only the resumption of an earlier one at a time when its fulfilment was approaching. It was probably inserted in the collection of prophecies occasioned by the circumstances of those times. Our prophecy simply forms the conclusion of the second consolatory part of ch. Ezekiel 33:21.

But, at the same time, it forms the counterpart to the first great description of the destruction in ch. Ezekiel 1:1 to Ezekiel 7:27, as it is introduced by the majestic vision of the cherubim in ch. Ezekiel 1. The cherubim and the new temple, the introduction and conclusion,—this is what every one thinks of when the name of Ezekiel is mentioned. When our prophecy is usually designated as Ezekiel’s vision of the second temple, there is nothing to find fault with, if it is only understood that the designation refers to its most prominent part. Along with the temple, Ezekiel is concerned in everything else that seemed to be for ever lost in the Chaldean catastrophe. With the exception of the Messianic section in ch. Ezekiel 47:1-12, the fulfilment of all the rest of the prophecy belongs to the times immediately after the return from the Chaldean exile. So must every one of its first hearers and readers have understood it. Jeremiah the prophet, whom Ezekiel follows throughout, with whom the very and with which he begins the collection of his prophecies connects him, had prophesied that the city and temple should be restored seventy years after the date of the Chaldean servitude, falling in the fourth year of Jehoiakim. Of these seventy years, thirty-two had already elapsed at the time when our prophecy was delivered. Ezekiel himself had announced, in ch.

Ezekiel 29:13, that forty years after the desolation of Egypt, the nations visited by the Chaldeans would return to their former state. And what is more obvious, according to Ezekiel 11:16, the restoration is to follow in a brief space after the destruction of the temple. Accordingly the first hearers and readers could not but expect that, with respect to the restoration of the temple and city, the word holds good which Habakkuk once uttered (ch. Ezekiel 1:5) with regard to the destruction, “I do a deed in your days;” and we enter upon the interpretation with the presupposition that here also the word of the Lord applies, “Verily I say unto you, This generation shall not pass till all these things be fulfilled.” What can be maintained against this assumption rests on mere appearance. We have before us not a foreboding, which represents the future in its accidental and indifferent circumstances, but a prophecy, for which it is essential to give truth and poetry, which contains a kernel of real thoughts, but does not present them naked—how would the holy Scripture shrivel up if we should reduce it to its matter of thought!—but clothed with flesh and blood, that they may be a counterpoise to the sad reality, because they fill the fancy, that fruitful workshop of despair, with bright images, and thus by the word alleviate life at a time when all that is visible cries aloud, Where is now thy God? If we mistake this characteristic of the prophecy, that comes out more strikingly in Ezekiel than in any other prophet; if we ascribe a real import to everything without discrimination, an incongruity will certainly appear between the prophecy and the state of things after the exile. But it vanishes at once, if we can distinguish between the thought and its clothing; and this distinction will be easy, if we place before our eyes the first hearers and readers of Ezekiel, figure to ourselves the wounds for which the remedy is here proposed, and at the same time the mental world of Ezekiel the priest, the circumstances in which he grew up, and the materials within him for clothing the divine verities which he had to announce to the people of God. But we must regard this distinction as the chief problem of the expositor in the present section. Exactly in proportion to the fitness of the solution will be the value of the exegetical result. A double danger here lies before us,—to ascribe to forms what belongs to thought, and to thought that which belongs to mere form. Let us take a glance at the views deviating from that now given. According to some, we have here “a model, according to which, on the return of the people, the temple should have been rebuilt,”—a building specification by divine authority. But this opinion forgets that we have here to do not with an architect, but with a prophet—with one whose department is not the hands, but the hearts, which he has to awaken to faith and hope, and walking in the ways of God. It cannot produce a single analogy from the prophetic region: nowhere have the prophets intruded into the department of legislation, for which under the old covenant other organs were provided. Especially all the other prophecies of Ezekiel of the time after the destruction bear not a legislative, but a hortatory character. In particular, the adjoining prophecy concerning Gog and Magog leads us to expect that here also much will belong to mere pictorial description, which is excluded if we ascribe a legislative import to the section.

To this is added the obvious impossibility of erecting a building according to the specifications given. These suffice only to give play to the imagination. For a practical end, the most necessary things are wanting. We have in particular almost nothing of materials, to which so much space is devoted in the description of Solomon’s temple. As a rule, the specifications are confined to the mere measures and distances; whence those who, like Villalpandus, have undertaken to give literal plans of Ezekiel’s temple, have been obliged to draw much from their own fancy. Lastly, in the building of the second temple, it is manifest that no reference is made to Ezekiel’s temple.

As the reason of this cannot be sought in any doubt of the divine mission of Ezekiel, whose prophecies were admitted into the canon, it can only be found in this, that men saw in this prophecy something else than a building specification. In the older theology, it was customary to regard not merely ch. Ezekiel 47:1-12, but the whole section (ch. Ezekiel 40:1 to Ezekiel 48:35), as a prophecy of the Christian church.[245] There is truth at the foundation of this view. Although the restoration of the city and the temple is first predicted, as it took place on the return from the Chaldean exile, yet this special announcement rests on the general ground of the firm conviction of the living power and indestructibility of the kingdom of God, the symbol of which was the temple, according to a view pervading the whole of the Old and New Testament. And as the prophecy reaches beyond its first fulfilment, it guarantees that within the kingdom of God life shall arise out of every death,—that the old covenant cannot go down without rising again gloriously in the new. But the fault in the older exposition, as it has been lately revived by Dr.

Kliefoth, with the addition that the prophecy here describes not merely the development and operation of the Christian church in this world, but its consummation in the next, was this, that it referred the prophecy directly and exclusively to the Christian church, and excluded the fulfilment in the time of Zerubbabel. It is against this opinion so stated, that it is unnatural to suppose that the prophet has left out all consideration of the nearer deliverance; that, with the exception of ch.

Ezekiel 47, there is not the slightest reference to the peculiarities of the church of the New Testament, and all that is advanced as such is only imported; that the statement, “The new theocracy which he depicts is more intellectual and spiritual than the old,” is nowhere verified; and that in this way we lose the whole substance of the prophecy, and are compelled to fill up the vacuum thus occasioned with our own thoughts. It is, for ex., obviously to import and not to expound, if we are to find in the close of the prophecy, from, Ezekiel 47:13 onwards, “the introduction of the people of God, gathered by Christ from Jew and Gentile, as a new manhood, into the perpetual Canaan of the new earth at the consummation.” None of the first readers of Ezekiel could find this in it. They must have understood by the Jordan simply the Jordan, by the sea the Mediterranean, by the tribes themselves those who still bore the yoke of banishment. The return of the people to the old home, the restoration of the temple, of the priestly service to be performed by the sons of Zadok, of the sacrifices in the Old Testament form,—these are obvious realities; and nothing leads us to suppose that they are to be regarded as figures belonging to the action of the prophetic scene of the future. If so interpreted, the prophecy would be altogether vain. The people might then reject the former threatenings of the prophet also, because they referred them to a people of the future, and explained all that cried aloud, “Thou art the man,” as mere figures.

Had the prophet wished all these things to be regarded as mere figures, he must have explained this in the clearest manner. The apagogical argument for this view, drawn from the fact that there is much that is not found in the times soon after the exile, so that we must be perplexed about the divine mission of the prophet if we cling to these times, loses its force as soon as it is admitted that a distinction must be made between the thought and its clothing.

But we do not see how this argument can be maintained by those who themselves extend the domain of form much further, and in fact draw upon themselves the charge of arbitrary spiritualizing unjustly brought against others. [245] But the older theologians were not without a sense of the difficulties which pressed upon the view, and awaited fuller light in the future. Starck, for ex., says, Precor Deum, ut aliis Ezechielis revelationem meditantibus majorem affandat lucem, majora dicendi et nodos solvendi. Finally, most unfortunate is the interpretation, according to which that “national order” is here described, “in which at the end of the times converted Israel, with the church engrafted into it from the heathen, shall live in the millennial kingdom.” There is not the least ground to refer to the last time a prophecy which, rightly understood, has found its fulfilment a few decenniums after it was delivered. It is manifest on the clearest grounds, that the delineations of the prophet have something intentionally Utopian, and much belongs only to the pictorial. If we neglect this, and are led by a literal interpretation to overstep the bounds of the Old Testament, we arrive at very doubtful dogmatic results. The restoration of the temple, the Old Testament festivals, the bloody sacrifices, the priesthood of the sons of Zadok, can only be expected within the bounds of the New Testament by a misunderstanding of the nature of Christ and His church. But if we shrink from these consequences, if at this point we distinguish between the thought and its form, if we cease to cling to the literal interpretation, we do not see why the fulfilment is to be sought in so cloudy a distance. Dr. v.

Hofmann says justly in the Scriptural Proof: “In the face of the fall of the Israelitish community, the desolation of the holy land, the destruction of God’s house, the people needed a promise which assured them of the restoration of all that seemed lost.” All this is actually bestowed again upon the people through God’s grace under Zerubbabel and Joshua, Ezra and Nehemiah; and with what gratitude this grace is acknowledged, Psalms 107 for ex., shows. It would be unreasonable to ignore this restoration, rather than be led by so manifest a fulfilment of the promise contradicting all natural reason, to the hope of the deliverance of the church from all the troubles and sorrows which it now suffers.

Ezekiel 46:16-24

Chapter 46:16-24 Before passing to an entirely new subject, the prophet gives some additions to the foregoing. The first of these additions is connected with ch. Ezekiel 45:7-9, where the prophet had presented to view the separation of an estate for the prince. The second, in Ezekiel 46:19-20, gives, in continuation of the description of the chambers of the priests in ch. Ezekiel 42:1 f., an account of the sacrificial kitchens for the priests, forming the termination of them toward the west. To this is then annexed, in Ezekiel 46:21-24, an account of the sacrificial kitchens for the people.

The practical point in the first of these additions is to warn against the recurrence of the former despotic spirit in the government. The second and third additions are intended to teach the people to rise from the visible to their God, who is so plenteous in redemption. The energy of the prophet’s faith is shown in this, that he enters into the minutest architectural details of the temple of the future. As, moreover. the section concerning the princes takes its rise from the relations of the past, so the sacrificial kitchens of the future are doubtless portrayed with reference to that which the prophet had seen with the bodily eye in the past. Such apartments could not be wanting in the temple of Solomon. Where it belongs properly to the priestly calling to eat parts of the sacrifices, where the piety of laymen is to employ itself in the preparation of sacrificial feasts “before the Lord,” there must have been cooking-places within the bounds of the sanctuary. Ezekiel 46:16. Thus saith the Lord Jehovah, When the prince gives a gift to any of his sons, this shall be his inheritance to his sons: it shall be their possession by inheritance. 17. And if he give a gift of his inheritance to one of his servants, then it shall be his to the year of freedom, and it shall return to the prince; only his inheritance to his sons shall belong to them. 18. And the prince shall not take of the people’s inheritance, to force them out of their possession: out of his own possession he shall endow his sons, that my people be not scattered every man from his possession. 19. And he brought me through the entry, which was at the side of the gate, to the holy chambers to the priests, that look toward the north: and, behold, there a place on their side westward. 20. And he said unto me.

This is the place where the priests shall boil the guilt-offering and the sin-offering, where they shall bake the meat-offering, so as not to bring it forth to the outer court to sanctify the people. 21. And he brought me forth to the outer court, and led me to the four corners of the court; and, behold, a court in the corner of the court, and a court in the corner of the court. 22. In the four corners of the court were smoking courts forty long and thirty broad; one measure was to the four corner rooms. 23. And there was a range around in them around the four, and cooking-places were made under the ranges around. 24. And he said to me. These are the house of the cooks, where the ministers of the house boil the sacrifice of the people. That we have in Ezekiel 46:16-18 not an attempt of the prophet to set up for a lawgiver, but a clear representation of the thought that the princes of the future are to be no despots, are to beware of the unjust absolutism of those of the past, is manifest from that which we have already remarked concerning the purely ideal character of the partition of the land. The prince here cannot be Christ. He is one who may have several sons of his own body, who disposes of his property in the prospect of his death, who stands not beyond the region of sin, else he should not need to be warned against it. We have here, in fact, not two commands, but one concession,—namely, that the prince may bequeath of his own proper and hereditary lands to his later born sons; and one command,—namely, that he may not give away thereof to his servants, because he who gives much is forced to take from others their own. The danger against which the prophet here provides, Samuel has pointed out in 1 Samuel 8:14. The regulation that the gifts of land to the prince’s servants shall revert to him in the jubilee, points to Leviticus 25:10, Leviticus 25:13, where the jubilee is also called the year of freedom. The “holy chambers” mentioned in Ezekiel 46:19 are the chambers of the priests described in ch. Ezekiel 42:1 f. “To the priests:” this is added, because the chambers are regarded as a perquisite of the priests,—a usage for which many analogies are to be found in Catholic countries—“to the Carmelites,” etc. The entry is that mentioned in ch. Ezekiel 42:9. It leads to the inner court gate west of the eastern gate of the fence-wall of the priestly cells. There: thus the kitchens are in the cell-building, not by or outside it. It formed, as we have already shown, the western part of it.[310] The priests must have their separate kitchens, lest, if they carry the food through the throng of the court, the people be sanctified: this is explained by the remarks on ch. Ezekiel 44:19. [310] The singular ιַ ?ψְ ?λְ ?ϊָ ?ν is to be read as in Genesis 49:13. The suff. refers, in fact, to the chambers, formally to the priests, including the chambers under them. The repetition of the words, “a court in the corner of the court,” in Ezekiel 46:21, points out that the same observation is repeated several times. Ezekiel 46:22 then says more definitely, that in each of the four corners of the court was such a kitchen for the people, which we must regard as an offshoot of the chambers of the people in the sides of the court. “Smoking courts” (Ezekiel 46:22): the rising smoke is the characteristic mark of these buildings.[311] Not without reason are the slain-offerings only mentioned in Ezekiel 46:24, as distinguished from the sin and guilt offerings to be prepared in the kitchens of the priests. Only with the slain-offerings, such as are akin to common slaughtering, was a communion connected. The greatest part fell to the offerers, and was consumed in the sacrificial meals. But the sacrifice of the people might not be prepared by the people, but only by the Levites, who were designated in ch. Ezekiel 44:1 the ministers of the people. [311] The verb χθψ, with all its derivatives, has in Hebrew only the meaning, to exhale, steam, smoke; and to abandon this in favour of another far-fetched meaning there is the less occasion, where kitchens are in question. That the proper name Keturah, written as our word, means the fragrant, is admitted. The Talmud (Middoth ii. § 8) has rendered ξδχφςεϊ here atria fumum exhalantia, with which the Masoretes were perplexed, as the points over it show; and which is probably a kind of priestly proper name for those rooms, which Ezekiel here brings forward as a fond reminiscence. It is properly the part. Hoph., and signifies not, as ξχφες, corner, but cornered, a corner room.