2. a lookout. The same metaphor for the role of the prophet is used in 3:17. Although this term could also be rendered as “watchman,” the connotation is clearly military: he is the person posted in a tower or on a height to look out for and warn the people of approaching armies, as the prophet sees and warns of impending disaster.

3. when he sees the sword coming against the land. This passage makes effective use of synecdoche: “the sword” clearly refers to the military force wielding swords, but the concrete image of a destructive sword descending upon the city is palpable.

the ram’s horn. The ram’s horn, with its sharp, penetrating sound, was used both to muster troops and to warn of an attack.

6. the person is taken in his crime, but his blood will I demand of the lookout. The offending person (the Hebrew says merely “he”), not having been warned by the prophet, will be punished by death, but the prophet, because he has failed to fulfill his calling, will bear responsibility for that death, and retribution will be exacted from him. Verse 8 essentially repeats this idea in slightly different language, Ezekiel’s penchant for repetition again in view.

11. I do not desire the death of the wicked. More than any other prophet, Ezekiel is repeatedly concerned with questions of divine justice and penitence. This sentence, for understandable reasons, was later incorporated in the liturgy for the Day of Atonement.

12. And the righteous cannot live by virtue of it. The “it,” though a little distant from its antecedent, refers to “the righteousness of the righteous.”

16. All his offenses that he committed shall not be recalled for him. In Ezekiel’s vision of divine justice, a person lives in a condition of constant existential choice: the wicked man can reverse the dire consequences of all his previous trespasses by deciding to do what is right, and the righteous man can cancel all the good effects of his acts of justice by sliding into acts of wickedness. The next four verses, hewing to Ezekiel’s characteristic style, go on to repeat this idea.

21. a fugitive came to me from Jerusalem. Since the notation of date at the beginning of the verse places this prophecy in 585 B.C.E., this would be a year after the destruction of Jerusalem.

22. And the hand of the LORD was upon me . . . and He opened my mouth. As elsewhere, Ezekiel represents his prophetic experience as a kind of bodily seizure by God in which he is virtually a passive instrument. One suspects that, more than the other prophets, he underwent extreme ecstatic states. He seems to imply here that prior to the night before the arrival of the fugitive, he had been plunged in a condition of muteness. By his own account, he had certainly prophesied several times in the period before and after the final conquest of the kingdom of Judah. It may be the case that he alternated between times of ecstatic prophecy and times of total silence.

24. these dwellers among the ruins. This phrase suggests that Ezekiel had already heard of the destruction of Jerusalem.

25. Over blood you eat. Consuming blood, or eating “over” blood, is explicitly prohibited (see Leviticus 19:26). There could also be a reference here to some sort of magical rite, as the invocation of idolatry in the next phrase might suggest. But then the end of the verse mentions shedding blood, so the blood forbidden to be eaten perhaps puns on the idea of murder—you eat as you are immersed in bloodshed.

27. among the ruins . . . on the surface of the field . . . in the fortresses and in the caves. This constitutes a panorama of where the survivors of the destruction of Jerusalem are to be found: some remain among the ruins of the city; some have fled to the open field; some have taken refuge outside the city in fortresses (whether actual fortresses or simply mountain crags) and caves.

28. a desolation and a devastation. The wordplay in the Hebrew is shemamah umeshamah.

30. by the walls and at the entrances of the houses. This is a realistic picture of people congregating on the streets outside their homes to speak to one another.

one speaks to another, a man to his kinsman. Since both phrases mean the same thing, this is probably one of those instances in which scribal tradition has incorporated in the text two alternate versions of the same phrase.

Come, pray, and hear what is the word coming forth from the LORD. As elsewhere, the people, despite the tension between them and the prophet, are anxious to hear from him what God’s word is, especially at this grim moment when they know that their homeland has been destroyed.

31. as the people are wont to come. Literally, “as the coming of the people.”

the lust in their mouths. While the expression sounds a bit strange (the Septuagint has instead “the lies of their mouth”), it is probably authentic, leading to the reference to “a song of lust” in the next verse. The people are scarcely ready to take in the word of the LORD spoken by the prophet, immersed as they are in concupiscence and greed (“after their gain their heart goes”).

32. you are for them a song of lust, lovely in sound and deftly played. The prophet speaks God’s imperative words, but all his listeners are capable of hearing is the sort of lewd song accompanying their own profligacy to which they are habituated.

33. And when it comes—look, it comes. The meaning “it” invoked is the disaster of which Ezekiel has prophesied—at this dark moment, a disaster compounding the catastrophe of material defeat.