3. in its midst. This phrase (a single word in the Hebrew) and one variant are constantly repeated in this prophecy, emphasizing the idea that the corruption has penetrated to the very heart of the city.

4. you bring your days close and come to the end of your years. The obvious reference is to the time of judgment; but the preposition rendered as “to” here, ʿad, is unusual, and a number of Hebrew manuscripts show instead ʿet, “the time of.” The phrase “the end” does not appear in the Hebrew but is assumed here to be implied.

7. Father and mother . . . sojourner . . . Orphan and widow. Although the prophet has begun with the sin of idolatry (“foul things”), he now moves on to violations of the familial order and the perpetration of social injustice. From this he will go on (verses 10–11) to acts of sexual indecency, something that appears to have particularly enraged him.

9. Slanderers . . . so as to shed blood. Slander is used as a weapon to condemn the innocent to death or to provoke acts of violence against them, either out of simple hatred or in order to seize the property of those whose blood is shed.

they ate on the mountains. As before, the reference is to a pagan ritual meal.

10. The menstruant’s defilement they took by rape. Sex with a menstruating woman is forbidden even when there is mutual consent. Here the prophet assumes that she would not agree to have sex during her period, so she is taken by force, two taboos thus violated in one fell swoop. The same situation pertains to the rape of the sister in the next verse.

11. his father’s daughter. In a polygamous marriage, she might well be only his half sister, but this is still incest.

18. dross. What follows might possibly be an elaborated allusion to Isaiah 1:22, “your silver has turned to dross.” In any case, it exemplifies Ezekiel’s penchant for adopting quasipoetic strategies in his prose prophecies. The metaphor of silver cheapened by dross is extended through verse 21.

19. Inasmuch as they all have become dross. What follows is an image of measure-for-measure justice: the people have debased their intrinsic value, turned silver into dross; now God will take together all this debased metal and burn it away in a fiery kiln.

20. fan the fire and smelt you. Since one of several synonyms for “anger” that are used here, ḥeimah, “wrath,” is derived from a root that means “heat,” the anger jibes nicely with the metaphor of the burning furnace.

21. you shall be smelted within it. As smelting is a process that burns away impurities, the suggestion is that the base elements of the people will be destroyed but a virtuous core will remain.

25. The plot of her prophets. The general meaning of the noun qesher (literally, “knot”) is “plot” or “conspiracy.” There is not much warrant to render it as “gang,” as does the New Jewish Publication Society. The Septuagint, however, reads ʾasher nesiʾeha, “that her princes,” which is attractive because it eliminates the duplication of “prophets” in verse 28 in this catalogue of miscreants.

they made her widows many. This is the obvious consequence of killing the husbands.

26. They did not distinguish between sacred and profane . . . between clean and unclean. This is the special responsibility of the priests, as Ezekiel, himself a priest, was keenly aware.

28. And her prophets daubed the walls with plaster. This covering up of cracks in the figurative wall of the people is inspired by the elaboration of that image in 13:10ff.

30. a man to mend the fence and stand in the breach. That man would be the authentic prophet, who speaks truth to the people and acts to turn them from their evil ways and thus averts God’s assault on the city through the very breaches that the people have made. Ezekiel, of course, is speaking about Jerusalem while himself prophesying in Babylonia. There is no recognition here of his older contemporary Jeremiah, surely a man who tried to stand in the breach. Ezekiel would have known, or at least heard about, Jeremiah before he himself was exiled in 597 B.C.E.

31. Their way I paid back on their head. The translation follows the contours of the Hebrew idiom (still more literally, “gave on their head”), which implies payback for misdeeds.