1. in the sixth year. This would be the sixth year of Jehoiachin’s exile (and Ezekiel’s), or 591 B.C.E.

the hand of the Master, the LORD, fell upon me. The usual idiom is “came [or was] upon me.” This more physical formulation is scarcely accidental: as before, Ezekiel is a passive vessel acted upon vigorously, almost violently, by God.

2. a likeness like the look. As in the vision of the celestial chariot, Ezekiel is careful to interpose a whole set of qualifying terms indicating that what he sees in the vision is not the thing itself but a resemblance or analogical image of things familiar to humankind.

like the look of fire. The Septuagint, instead of ʾesh, “fire,” reads ʾish, “a man.”

3. a wind bore me between the earth and the heavens and brought me to Jerusalem. The sense of the prophet as the passive object of divine action continues here. The basis of this whole vision appears to be some sort of hallucinatory experience in which the prophet, who has very recently been lying immobilized for more than a year, senses that he is physically borne off to Jerusalem, if only in a divine vision. As an exiled priest, the Temple there was very much on his mind, and now he envisages, or is made to witness, the pagan abominations practiced in this holy space.

the gate of the inner court. “Court” is implied in an ellipsis in the Hebrew.

the icon of the provoking provocation. The unusual word for “icon,” semel, is an appropriate borrowing from the Cannanite, where it indicates the statue of a god. The prophet refuses to name a particular god but instead uses an elliptical epithet of opprobrium, “the provoking provocation.” The verbal stem from which that designation derives suggests “jealousy,” which makes sense here because God is a “jealous” God, indignant when Israel goes whoring after other deities.

7. there was a hole in the wall. This is the oddest moment in Ezekiel’s vision of the abominations in the Temple. It suggests a kind of prophetic voyeurism. There is a hole through which he might almost peek into the vile pagan rites practiced within the chambers of God’s temple. In order actually to see them, however, he must enlarge the hole and break through the wall.

10. every form of creeping thing and beast, disgusting things, and all the foul things of the house of Israel were incised on the wall. There is an effective segue here from living creatures prohibited as food and regarded with disgust to the “foul things”—which is to say, idols—equally felt to be disgusting by the prophet. It is questionable whether there was a practice of incising the images of pagan gods on the temple walls, but it is a forceful representation of how deeply paganism had penetrated into the most sacred space of the nation.

11. seventy men of the elders of Israel. This assembly of the canonical seventy elders, evidently led by one of the eminent figures of the court aristocracy, amounts to the group’s celebrating a kind of black mass, at least in the eyes of the prophet.

dense cloud. The first of these two nouns, ʿatar, appears only here, but it is probably related to a Syriac word that means “fume.” As elsewhere, when two synonymous nouns are joined in the construct form, the effect is an intensification of their meaning, hence “dense cloud” in this translation. Compare the very similar construction in Exodus 19:9, ʿav-he ʿanan, “the utmost cloud.”

12. Do you see, man, what the elders of the house of Israel are doing in the dark. Although the elders go on to say that the LORD does not see them, they may be hedging their bets or are perhaps fearful that some groups in the community of Judah—certainly prophets such as Jeremiah and Ezekiel—would vehemently object to what they are doing. The fact that they worship strange gods in their private chambers seems to contradict the pagan assembly in the Temple depicted here. Perhaps as a rule they practice their pagan rites in the darkness of their chambers but here have exceptionally joined together to celebrate the cult of strange gods within an inner hall of the Temple, still hidden from the eyes of the general populace but not from the prophet, who has enlarged the hole in the wall so that he can see everything.

14. women were sitting there keening for Tammuz. Tammuz is a deity imported from Babylonia (the Akkadian name is Dumuzi). Like Adonis, he is a vegetation god thought to die and descend into the underworld after the dying of vegetation at the end of the spring. Women in ancient Near Eastern societies were assigned the role of keening for the dead, and so they took over the cultic function of keening for Tammuz.

16. bowing down eastward to the sun. Worship of the sun god and other astral deities, because of Assyrian influences, became widespread in the last two centuries of the First Commonwealth.

17. reaching out the vine branch to My nose. The Masoretic Text says “their nose,” but this is an explicit “scribal correction,” introducing a kind of euphemism in order not to say something offensive relating to God. But the meaning of the expression is elusive. The attempt by some to link zemorah, “vine branch,” with a homonymous root that means “strength” is far-fetched—the clear meaning of the word is “vine branch.” Some have imagined, perhaps fancifully, that it reflects the worship of a phallic deity. But, as Greenberg observes, the prophet at this point has moved on from pagan rituals to a condemnation of moral turpitude—“they . . . fill the land with outrage.” The most reasonable assumption is that the branch extended toward the nose is some sort of insulting gesture.