3. Man, your belly you shall feed and your innards you shall fill with this scroll. Such specification indicates that the prophet is not merely meant to chew the papyrus scroll but to swallow and digest it. It seems quite likely that Ezekiel believed he had been commanded to perform this difficult symbolic act and in fact carried it out. His report that the taste of the papyrus in his mouth was sweet as honey leads one to infer that he was a person susceptible to aberrant or perhaps abnormal states.

5. a people of an unfathomable language and an obscure tongue. The literal sense is “deep of language and heavy of tongue.” Elsewhere in Prophetic texts, the unintelligibility of the language of the conquerors is part of their fearsome aspect. Here, it becomes part of an a fortiori statement: had the prophet been sent to peoples speaking a barbaric foreign tongue, they would have listened to him; but when he is sent to the Israelites, addressing them in their shared mother tongue, Hebrew, they refuse to listen because of their stubbornness.

but to the house of Israel. The “but” is merely implied in the Hebrew.

8. I have made your face hard against their faces and your brow hard against their brows. Rimon Casher has proposed that the repetition throughout these verses of ḥazak (“hard,” and elsewhere usually “strong”) may be a play on the root of Ezekiel’s name, yeḥezqʾel (“God will make strong”).

9. You shall not fear them . . . for they are a house of rebellion. The causal logic here is that because they are rebels, they are destined to be punished by God, and so there is nothing to fear from them, however they may threaten the prophet.

12. And a wind lifted me. We repeatedly see this prophet as a passive subject of prophecy, being lifted, borne off, stood on his feet, by divine powers.

Blessed be the LORD’s glory from its place. One often proposed emendation reads instead of barukh, “blessed,” berum, “in the rising of,” which yields not a line of dialogue but a narrative report about the divine chariot: “When the LORD’s glory rose up from its place.” This emendation is encouraged by the fact that in paleo-Hebrew script the letters mem and kaf look fairly similar, so a scribe could easily have erred. The emended reading flows more smoothly into the next verse and a half reporting the ascent of the divine chariot, but the Masoretic Text has been retained in this translation because it has become prominently enshrined in the Hebrew liturgy.

14. bitter did I go, with an incensed spirit. The prophet’s disturbed emotional state reflects his troubled sense that the prophetic mission will be very arduous, perhaps impossible.

15. Tel Abib. Though this looks like a Hebrew name, “mound of the sprouting season,” and modern-day Tel Aviv drew the name from here, it is actually Akkadian and means “mound of the flood.”

where they dwelled. This might be a scribal duplication.

17. lookout. The lookout or watchman, as can be inferred from the appearance of the term in narrative contexts, was someone posted on an elevation to look for the approach of hostile forces. Thus, the prophet is appointed to look out for imminent disaster triggered by Israel’s bad behavior and to warn them, as a watchman would.

18. but his blood I will requite of you. This is a much grimmer formulation of the burden of prophecy than that given to other prophets: Ezekiel is obliged to work under an imminent death sentence if he fails to adequately warn the transgressors.

22. the valley. Although some render this as “plain,” the Hebrew term clearly derives from a verbal stem that means “rift” or “split,” and it refers to a valley—in the case of Jordan, the riverbed and the surrounding banks.

23. the LORD’s glory was standing there. Repeatedly in Ezekiel, “the LORD’s glory” (or “majesty”) refers to the divine “chariot” described in chapter 1.

24. And a spirit entered me and stood me on my feet. As before, Ezekiel is a virtual puppet of the divine spirit. This is an idea that will be picked up in Daniel.

shut yourself within your house. Some have seen this as a contradiction of the previous injunction to the prophet to “warn” Israel, compounded by the fact that in the next verse God says He will impose a condition of complete muteness on the prophet. But such oscillations should not surprise us, especially if we assume that all these divine instructions have some relation to the psychology of this particular prophet. In that case, at one moment he feels an absolute imperative to reprove the people, a responsibility he needs to carry out on the pain of death. At another moment, despairing of the very possibility of in any way changing the course of action of these stubborn rebels against God, he shuts himself up in his house and sinks into a condition of total silence.

25. they have put cords on you and bound you with them. Since the prophet has already shut himself up in his house, it is unclear why anyone would feel the necessity to bind him in cords in order to prevent him from going outside. Perhaps this statement should be construed as a metaphor: “they” (the people) have through their actions imposed on the prophet a condition of isolated withdrawal, as though they had bound him with cords.