An Exile Speaks to a Doomed City
To read Ezekiel 22 responsibly, we must remember where Ezekiel was when he spoke these words. In 597 BCE, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon captured Jerusalem and deported King Jehoiachin to Babylon, along with the royal family, officials, warriors, and skilled workers of Judah (2 Kgs. 24:10–17). Ezekiel, a priest, was among those deported. In the fifth year of that exile, while he lived among the exiles by the river Chebar, he received his call to be a prophet (Ezek 1:1–3). As Sampson Ndoga notes, Ezekiel’s oracles were pronounced between July 593 BCE (Ezek 1:1–2) and April 571 BCE (Ezek 29:17).[18]
Meanwhile, Babylon had placed Zedekiah on the throne of Judah. When Zedekiah rebelled, the Babylonian army returned and besieged Jerusalem in 588 BCE (2 Kgs. 25:1; Ezek. 24:1–2). In 587/586 BCE, the city fell. The temple was burned, the walls were torn down, and more of the population was taken into exile (2 Kgs. 25:8–11). Months later, a fugitive who had escaped from Jerusalem came to Ezekiel in Babylon with the report: “The city has fallen” (Ezek. 33:21).
Ezekiel 22 belongs to the tense years before that final catastrophe. The oracle is not dated, but it stands between an oracle dated in the seventh year of the exile, about 591 BCE (Ezek. 20:1), and the announcement of the siege in 588 BCE (Ezek. 24:1–2). P. J. Harland concludes that the first oracle of the chapter “seems to look back to the disaster of 597 and forward to 587.” He adds, “The place of composition is probably Babylon; there is no need to presuppose that Ezekiel had to be in Jerusalem in order to deliver judgment on the city.”[19] Cooke believed that the first two oracles of the chapter “may well belong to the same date as ch. 21, the eve of the final catastrophe.”[20] Zimmerli, though cautious, agrees that “we can certainly not exclude that 22:1-16 also is concerned with a reckoning with the sins of Jerusalem before the ultimate fall of the city.”[21] Scholars date the third oracle of the chapter (Ezek. 22:23–31) differently, and I will discuss that question in Part Two.
This setting explains the purpose of the oracle. Although Ezekiel addresses Jerusalem, his actual audience was the community of exiles in Babylon. Craigie writes: “But though the words are formally addressed to Jerusalem, in reality they are declared in the hearing of the Hebrews in exile. And as Ezekiel’s companions heard the words of this prophecy, their few remaining hopes of rescue coming from Jerusalem would have been shattered.”[22] Many of the exiles expected a quick return home. Prophets such as Hananiah promised that the exiles would return within two years (Jer. 28:1–4), and Jeremiah warned them not to listen to prophets who were deceiving them (Jer. 29:8–9). Ronald Clements writes that Ezekiel presents his catalog of crimes “in order to convince those who find such an accusation too unwelcome and unbelievable.”[23]
Ezekiel was not alone in his verdict. In Jerusalem, Jeremiah was delivering the same message to the king and the people (Jer. 7:1–15; 22:13–17). Cooke wrote that “the general truth of Ezekiel’s verdict on Jerusalem in its last days is fully borne out by Jeremiah, who is every whit as stern.”[24]
Ezekiel, then, was not offering a detached moral lecture. He was interpreting a national catastrophe through the lens of the covenant. Harland writes that “Ezekiel is trying to help the people make sense of the exile,” and he describes the book as an “elaborate theodicy.”[25] Bruce Vawter and Leslie Hoppe state the point sharply: “The LORD’S sentence of exile, therefore, was but the ratification of a decision made by a people that had refused to honor its own heritage.”[26]
Where Application Must Begin
This historical setting has an important consequence for the way we apply the chapter. Ezekiel 22 is not a generic oracle against any society we happen to dislike. It is a word of judgment addressed to Jerusalem, the city that bore God’s name, the home of the temple, and the capital of the people who had received the covenant at Sinai. Clements notes that one of the key features of the oracle is “that it is a city—Jerusalem, Israel’s best known and most celebrated city—that stands condemned.”[27] The oracle begins with God’s own people, their city, their worship, and their leaders.
In my 1986 lesson, I wrote, “We cannot compare our society in the year 1986 with Jerusalem in the year 587 B.C.” I still believe that sentence is correct, and today I would state it more strongly. Ezekiel spoke as a prophet who had received the word of the LORD. He could say, “Thus says the Lord GOD,” and interpret the coming destruction of Jerusalem as the judgment of God. We do not possess that kind of prophetic authority. We can recognize that Ezekiel explained Jerusalem’s fall as God’s judgment on covenant unfaithfulness. We cannot conclude from his words that every earthquake, epidemic, economic crisis, or military defeat in our time is God’s punishment on a particular nation for a particular sin.
Some interpreters move too quickly from Ezekiel’s Jerusalem to the modern world. Block, for example, writes, “The opening line of this oracle could be written over many of the cities of our nation and of the world: ‘Woe to the bloody city!’”[28] Block is right that God cares deeply about violence. As he says in the same place, God “will not stand idly by forever while men and women created as his images are abused and exploited and slaughtered.” But Ezekiel did not write his oracle over the cities of the nations. He wrote it over the city of God. When Christians use this text to condemn other nations or other cities while ignoring the violence and injustice in their own churches and communities, they reverse the direction of Ezekiel’s message.
Jesus warned against this kind of reasoning. When some people told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices, and when he spoke of the eighteen people killed when the tower of Siloam fell, he refused to treat their deaths as proof of special guilt. Instead, he turned the question back on his hearers: “No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did” (Luke 13:1–5). The New Testament also reminds us that “the time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God” (1 Pet. 4:17).
The proper use of Ezekiel 22, therefore, is self-examination rather than accusation. The question the text puts to us is not, “Which nation deserves God’s wrath?” The question is, “What kind of community have we become?” Has violence, or indifference to violence, become part of our public identity? Do our institutions protect the vulnerable, or do they exploit them? Have those who claim to worship the holy God allowed their common life to be shaped by the abuse of power and by contempt for those who have the least power?
Conclusion
Ezekiel’s first words in chapter 22 set the tone for everything that follows. The city that should have been known as the city of God and the faithful city had become known as “the bloody city.” The name was borrowed from Nahum’s oracle against Nineveh, and its meaning was unmistakable: Jerusalem now treated its own people the way Assyria had treated its enemies. The prophet who spoke these words was an exile in Babylon, explaining to his fellow exiles why the city they loved was about to fall.
In the next post, I will examine the list of crimes in Ezekiel 22:3–12. There we will see that Ezekiel does not separate religious sins from social sins. Idolatry, bloodshed, contempt for parents, the mistreatment of the alien, the orphan, and the widow, the profaning of the Sabbath, sexual violence, bribery, and extortion are woven together into one indictment. That indictment ends with the most serious charge of all: “and you have forgotten me, says the Lord GOD” (Ezek. 22:12).
Read the Whole Series: Ezekiel 22 and the Anatomy of a Corrupted Society
Claude Mariottini
Emeritus Professor of Old Testament
Northern Baptist Seminary
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NOTES
[1] Daniel I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel: Chapters 1–24, New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 702 n. 16.
[2] Peter C. Craigie, Ezekiel, Daily Study Bible (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1983), 165.
[3] Block, Ezekiel: Chapters 1–24, 705.
[4] Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 21–37: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Anchor Bible 22A (New York: Doubleday, 1997), 453.
[5] Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel 1: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel, Chapters 1–24, trans. Ronald E. Clements, Hermeneia (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), 456.
[6] Block, Ezekiel: Chapters 1–24, 703–4.
[7] Margaret S. Odell, Ezekiel, Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2005), 282.
[8] G. A. Cooke, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Ezekiel, International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936), 240.
[9] Greenberg, Ezekiel 21–37, 452.
[10] Zimmerli, Ezekiel 1, 456.
[11] Block, Ezekiel: Chapters 1–24, 701.
[12] Greenberg, Ezekiel 21–37, 452.
[13] Craigie, Ezekiel, 165.
[14] Zimmerli, Ezekiel 1, 456.
[15] Paul M. Joyce, Ezekiel: A Commentary, Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 482 (New York: T&T Clark, 2007), 159.
[16] Patrick Fairbairn, Ezekiel and the Book of His Prophecy: An Exposition, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1855), 249.
[17] Greenberg, Ezekiel 21–37, 452.
[18] Sampson S. Ndoga, “Contemporary Reflections on Ezekiel 22:23–31 as a Depiction of Collective Responsibility of Leaders for National Demise,” Old Testament Essays 27, no. 1 (2014): 248.
[19] P. J. Harland, “What Kind of ‘Violence’ in Ezekiel 22?” Expository Times 108 (1997): 111.
[20] Cooke, Ezekiel, 240.
[21] Zimmerli, Ezekiel 1, 456.
[22] Craigie, Ezekiel, 165.
[23] Ronald E. Clements, Ezekiel, Westminster Bible Companion (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996), 100.
[24] Cooke, Ezekiel, 240.
[25] Harland, “What Kind of ‘Violence’ in Ezekiel 22?” 114.
[26] Bruce Vawter and Leslie J. Hoppe, A New Heart: A Commentary on the Book of Ezekiel (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 111.
[27] Clements, Ezekiel, 101.
[28] Block, Ezekiel: Chapters 1–24, 713.
