1. came to me and sat down before me. The only reason they would come to the prophet would be to hear an oracle from him. This very expectation enrages Ezekiel because he is aware that while seeking instructions about the intentions of YHWH—hedging their bets, one might say—their thoughts are taken up with other gods.

3. their foul things, and the stumbling block of their crime. It is characteristic of Ezekiel’s polemic style that he often will not bring himself to refer to false gods as “gods” or “idols” but instead substitutes pejorative epithets—gilulim, “foul things,” a word that recalls the Hebrew term for “turds,” and “stumbling block of their crime.” (For this reason, translations that render gilulim as “idols” or “fetishes” dilute the force of the original.)

Shall I respond in an oracle to them? The verb darash is the technical term for inquiry of an oracle, which is precisely what the elders have come to do.

7. I the LORD will answer him Myself. The “answer” that God says He will deliver is not the communication of an oracle but withering punishment.

9. And the prophet who will be enticed and will speak a word, it is I the LORD Who enticed that prophet. The theology behind this statement is somewhat convoluted. The evident idea is that these false prophets have habitually been speaking “out of their own heart,” which surely suggests human initiative. Given that behavior, God will now proceed to “entice” (or “seduce”) such a prophet to continue pronouncing false prophecies so that he will be ripe for punishment.

11. they shall be My people, and as for Me, I will be their God. This recurring statement expresses Ezekiel’s expectation that after the national cleansing of terrible retribution, Israel’s wholeness will be restored.

14. Noah, Daniel, and Job. It is now clear to all scholars that here Daniel does not refer to the protagonist of the Book of Daniel. One should note that the consonantal text allows us to pronounce this name as Danʾel. In the Ugaritic Epic of Aqhat, there is a righteous judge named Danʾel. These three figures, then, are three legendary righteous men, none belonging to the people of Israel. Job’s presence among the three reflects the fact that a story about a righteous man named Job was current in the region well before the composition of the Book of Job. The non-Israelite identity of the three is in keeping with the generalizing force of the declaration, “when a land offends against Me,” which is to say, any land.

16. these three . . . shall surely save neither sons nor daughters. In Ezekiel’s implacable moral vision, God follows a more stringent standard of justice than he does in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. There, he agreed to save the cities of the plain if there were ten righteous men within them, and in the implemented destruction, Lot was able to save his two daughters. Here, only the three righteous men will survive, and their own children will perish.

21. How much more so. This formula for an a fortiori condition, ʾaf ki, is applied here because if any offending land is subject to the unremitting scourge of divine punishment, an offending Jerusalem, which was God’s chosen city, will all the more be punished.

22. there shall be left in her a remnant that is brought out, sons and daughters. This is the surprise turn of God’s compassion for Israel. By all rights, since the sons and daughters of all other lands would not be spared, we might expect that Jerusalem’s sons and daughters would perish. God, however, will not allow the covenanted people to be utterly destroyed, and so, after the terrible devastation, the sons and daughters survive to go out of the city and join the earlier exiles in Babylonia as the nucleus of national regeneration.

23. And they shall console you when you see their way and their deeds. Although many claim that ʿalilot, “deeds,” has a negative sense in Ezekiel, the present context invites the opposite inference: the exiles will be consoled when they see these sons and daughters behaving as Israelites should and thus bringing hope for the future. There may even be an intended contrast between the paganizing elders of the previous prophecy and the young exiles here.