1. He took me out by the wind of the LORD. Throughout this prophecy, Ezekiel plays on the different senses of ruaḥ, which can mean “spirit,” “wind,” and “breath.” While many translators render the term here as “spirit,” the sense of “wind” fits much better with Ezekiel’s repeated pattern of being borne off physically by a palpable divine force. Compare 11:24, where it is precisely a wind that carries him to the place of revelation.

2. and, look, they were very dry. The remains of these dead are at a very great remove from life: they are not corpses but disarticulated bones and very dry, suggesting that the deaths occurred much earlier. This is an obvious way of amplifying the miraculous restoration to life.

3. Man, can these bones live? This prophecy is probably the most famous one in Ezekiel. Early Jewish and Christian interpreters took it as a prophecy of the resurrection of the dead, but it is quite doubtful that this is what Ezekiel meant. The scattered dry bones of the long dead are a symbolic image of the people of Israel in exile, its national existence violently ended by the conquest and destruction of the kingdom of Judah. The miraculous return to life of the bones figures the restoration of national existence in the homeland.

4. Prophesy to these bones. The startling extremeness of the prophecy of the bones is dramatically evident in the command to the prophet to address, as surely no prophet in the real world ever did, a message to dry bones.

5. breath. Here ruaḥ has to mean “breath,” not “wind” or “spirit.”

7. and the bones came together, one bone to another. This weird self-assembling of the disarticulated bones became the basis for the language of the famous Negro spiritual about this prophecy.

9. From the four winds, come, wind. The initial “winds” here has still another meaning: the four directions, or the four corners of the earth. In Genesis, God blows the breath of life into the inert clay of the first human. Here it is the four winds that perform this act of vivification, giving it a global scope that jibes with the implied idea that the exiles have been scattered to the four corners of the earth.

slain. Now we learn that these dead have met a violent end.

10. legion. The Hebrew ḥayil usually means “military force” (hence the King James Version’s “army”). Here it probably indicates the great number of the revived, but to translate it “multitude,” as some modern versions do, erases the martial connotation, that this vast number of the conquered dead has become a large army. “Legion” in English actually has both meanings.

12. I am about to open your graves. Ezekiel appears to have forgotten that the bones are scattered on the surface of the valley. Now the dead have been buried and will rise from their graves.

16. take you one stick. The Hebrew ʿets means “tree,” “wood,” or “stick.” Some modern interpreters see these as wooden tablets because we know that such tablets were sometimes used to write on. However, the joining together of the two to make one works better for sticks than for tablets, and in Numbers writing is inscribed on staffs, something close to sticks.

Judah . . . Joseph. These indicate the southern and northern kingdoms, sundered after the death of Solomon.

18. Will you not tell us, what are these to you? Unlike the visionary-allegorical prophecy of the dry bones, this is a rather traditional, and didactic, symbolic-prophetic show-and-tell. Its meaning is fairly apparent even before Ezekiel goes on to explain it.

22. I will make them a single nation. This is a utopian prophecy because by Ezekiel’s time there was no real trace of the northern kingdom, destroyed a century and a half earlier by the Assyrians.

on the mountains of Israel. Ezekiel, originating in Jerusalem, repeatedly imagines a mountainous landscape for his homeland, though in fact it extended to valleys and lowlands.

23. in all the places of their habitation. Many manuscripts show instead of the Masoretic moshvoteyhem, “their habitations,” meshuvoteyhem, “their rebelliousness.”

24. And My servant David shall be king over them. The reference is not to some sort of reincarnation of David but to a legitimate heir to the Davidic dynasty who embodies the ideal qualities attributed to him in the Book of Kings.

26. I will set them [as a blessing]. The received text has only “I will set them,” but it looks as if a predicate or adverbial qualifier such as the one supplied in brackets has dropped out of the text.

27. My dwelling place. This is a synonym for “sanctuary” in the preceding verse, and both terms refer to the Temple, which, restored, is to manifest God’s greatness in the world.