1. Man. The Hebrew ben-ʾadam, “human being,” is the characteristic form through which God repeatedly addresses Ezekiel. As several commentators have noted, it places the prophet in an antithetical relation to the “creatures” of the divine chariot, who are not mortal humans. The translation avoids rendering the term as “son of man” because, after the Gospels, that designation took on Christological connotations.

2. And a spirit entered me as He spoke to me and stood me on my feet. Ezekiel is thus like the wheels in the divine vision, which are inhabited by a spirit that directs them. Ezekiel appears to exert less human agency than the other prophets, and that could well be a manifestation of his distinctive psychology as prophet.

and I heard what was spoken to me. Some understand this as “one speaking to me.” The Hebrew shows a reflexive form of the verb “to speak,” with no visible subject, perhaps reflecting reticence about saying “God.”

3. the rebellious nations. The designation of the Israelites as “nations” in the plural is peculiar. Some think it refers to the tribes, but they are not elsewhere called “nations.” Perhaps the plural is meant to encompass both the northern kingdom of Israel and the southern kingdom of Judah. While the northern kingdom had long been destroyed, the verbal phrase “have rebelled against Me” invokes past actions, and Ezekiel may also be imagining a virtual presence of the vanished kingdom, as Jeremiah sometimes does.

4. Thus said the Master, the LORD. This is the so-called messenger-formula with which many prophecies begin. No words of prophecy follow, though the last words of this chapter indicate the content of the prophecy.

5. but they shall know that a prophet has been in their midst. The anticipation, shared by Isaiah and Jeremiah, that the people may not heed the prophet, is parsed in a different way here: perhaps the people will choose to ignore the prophet’s admonitions, but they will not escape a strong and troubling sense of the urgent authenticity of his message.

6. thorns and thistles. Many translations render the first term as “nettles” (only an approximate meaning is known), but the Hebrew shows a forceful alliteration—saravim, salonim—that deserves to be emulated in the English.

8. Open your mouth and eat what I give you. Other prophets are bid to perform symbolic acts, but this one is extreme, and characteristic of Ezekiel. He has just been told not to be rebellious like his countrymen; now he is asked to show his total submission by ingesting a scroll. Again, this appears to reflect Ezekiel’s aberrant psychology. God does not inform him what he is to eat until the mysterious hand appears with the scroll.

10. it was written on both sides. As Menachem Haran has noted, this means the scroll was papyrus, not parchment, because the way animal skins were prepared for scrolls in this period precluded writing on both sides. It would, of course, be considerably easier to ingest papyrus than parchment.