1. twenty-five men. These are evidently the same twenty-five mentioned in 8:16 who were worshipping the sun.

3. Soon is not the time to build houses. The plotters belong to the party resisting Babylonia, and so they think that all efforts should be channeled into constructing fortifications, not building houses.

It is the pot and we are the meat. The sense of this rather odd metaphor is: it (the city) is the pot that contains us, and we are the good meat within the pot. But the metaphor undermines its own arrogant assertion because meat in a pot over a fire is destined to be cooked and consumed.

6. You have left many slain in this city. The preceding account of the turpitude of these Jerusalemites concentrated on their attachment to idolatry. Now, however, they are castigated as murderers.

7. Your slain . . . they are the meat and it is the pot, and you will I bring out from within it. God now reverses the self-congratulatory metaphor of the perpetrators of crime. Their victims are the true elite (“the meat”), and the victimizers will be cast out of the pot (that is, the city) as matter unfit for consumption.

10. By the sword you shall fall, at the border of Israel. The miscreants will be cast very far from the city in which they thought they might find safety. What the prophet may have in mind concretely is that they will flee Jerusalem in the face of the Babylonian invaders, only to be caught and killed at the border.

12. like the laws of the nations that were all round you did you do. Here the reference appears to be to idolatry. One should keep in mind that the Hebrew mishpatim means both “laws” and “practices” or “behavior.”

13. Woe, O Master, the LORD, You are making an utter end of the remnant of Israel. This sentence could also be construed as a tormented question (Are you making . . .?). It may seem puzzling that Ezekiel should be distressed over the death of Pelatiah, who is after all one of the ringleaders of the men “devising evil counsel.” All we know about Pelatiah is that he was some sort of high-ranking official, but this may have been enough to make his sudden death a cause of distress for the prophet. That is, if the leaders of the people suddenly begin to drop off in this fashion, is God about to wipe out the whole people?

15. your brothers, your next of kin. The designation “next of kin” is adopted from Greenberg. The literal sense is “your redemption people,” that is, the people who because of their kinship are legally obliged to redeem property that has been somehow alienated from a person. (Compare the “redeeming kin” in the Book of Ruth.) The mention in the next verse of God’s having “taken them far away among the nations” indicates that these are the exiles. The self-satisfied residents of Jerusalem want to dissociate themselves from their exiled brothers, claiming exclusive rights to the land: “Go away from the land. To us the land has been given as an inheritance.”

16. but a bare sanctuary. The Hebrew expression miqdash meʿat was taken by later tradition as a reference to the synagogue, but this text well antedates the institution of the synagogue. The idea seems to be that in the exile, in the absence of a temple, God provides only minimal indications—perhaps through prophecy?—of His continuing closeness to Israel.

17. Israel’s soil. Here, and in the next chapter, the reference seems to be to the land, but the suggestion of soil to be tilled in the Hebrew term is worth retaining.

19. give them . . . put in your midst. As elsewhere, the switching back and forth between third person and second person reflects ancient Hebrew usage.

21. But those whose heart goes after their disgusting things. The beginning of this clause in the Masoretic Text reads, incomprehensibly, “But to the heart [weʾel lev] of their disgusting things.” The translation reflects a widely accepted emendation grounded in the Targum Yonatan, weʾeleh ʾaḥarey.

24. in the vision, in the divine spirit. By stipulating these phrases, Ezekiel again emphasizes that all the sights he has been vouchsafed to see in Jerusalem were a visionary experience, not a bodily one. Since the same noun, marʾeh (literally, “what is seen”), is then used for the celestial chariot that rises into the sky above the prophet, the implication is that it, too, is not a literal, physical entity, but a visionary reality that reveals something about the nature of the deity.