22:1–5 The prophet is once more cast in the role of prosecuting attorney, making known to Jerusalem her sins. She is not named at first; rather, she is simply titled “the bloody city.” This title particularly covers one aspect of her sins: those against her fellow man. Bloodshed includes murder but is not limited to that; it can also cover more basic forms of oppression (cf. 7:23; 9:9). It is particularly shocking for Ezekiel to give that title to Jerusalem, because a hundred years earlier Nahum used the same name to describe Nineveh (Nah. 3:1). The other aspect of Jerusalem’s sins, her offenses against God, are summed up as “making idols to defile herself” (Ezek. 22:3). The combination of these two classes of sins is more than sufficient to make imminent her day of judgment. She was supposed to be a “holy city” (Isa. 52:1); instead, she is a source of pollution that must be purged from the land. The prophet focuses particularly on the impact of her judgment on all the nations around her, both near and far. Israel was intended to be the envy of the nations around her, for her glory and honor (Deut. 26:19). Instead Jerusalem’s name is defiled, and she is “full of tumult” (Ezek. 22:5). Her reputation is mud, as we would say, and justifiably so. The widespread knowledge of Jerusalem’s notorious sins means that no one around her will be surprised by her fate when she is destroyed by the Babylonians. “Blood” and “abominations” accurately sum up her record.

22:6–12 The charges are particularly directed at the upper classes of society, beginning with the princes of Israel, which would include Zedekiah. Zedekiah became king after his nephew, Jehoiachin, was deported to Babylon, and he was never entirely accepted as king by many, including Ezekiel (cf. dating formula in 1:2). Bloodshed is central to the condemnation (22:6, 9, 12), while the specific charges are drawn from the so-called holiness code of Leviticus 18–20; 25. Each of these specific indictments finds a reference point somewhere in those chapters.166 Some of the offenses are also covered in the Decalogue (Ex. 20:1–17)—for example, showing contempt for father and mother, profaning the Sabbath, committing murder and adultery. Both social and religious sins are listed: slander, lewdness, and sexual immorality (possibly including incest)167 on the one hand and despising the Lord’s holy things (breaking vows made in the Lord’s name,168 profaning the Sabbaths, and eating at the mountaintop high places) on the other.

Sexual crimes and financial misdeeds are prominent, including bribery and usury (lending money at interest). The latter is a practice historically forbidden in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, since in small communities the practice inevitably led to disastrous outcomes for society. Loans extended at high rates of interest for high-risk endeavors such as farming left the poor struggling constantly to survive. Too often they would lose their few possessions and end up being forced into debt slavery. Generous charitable gifts, wisely administered, were a much better solution than loans for meeting people’s urgent short-term need for financial assistance; the Israelites were encouraged to remember that the people in need were their neighbors and not their customers or, worse, their victims. A similar attitude of distance from one’s neighbors is what permitted the easy flourishing of slander (which involves murdering reputations) as well as the shedding of innocent blood in a community. In contrast, Israel was required to love and care even for the sojourner in her midst (Deut. 10:19)—he was also a neighbor.

While today social and religious sins are seen as entirely different categories of transgression, for ancient people they were simply two aspects of the same fundamental issue: Israel had forgotten the Lord (Ezek. 22:12). This is covenantal language. To remember the Lord is to obey his commands and his statutes, while to forget him is to cast off and reject his oversight. The person who forgets his religious obligations to the Lord will soon forget his social obligations to his neighbor, as the story of Cain and Abel demonstrates (Genesis 4). However, though Israel might have forgotten the Lord, he had certainly not forgotten her.

22:13–16 The Lord warned his people ahead of time what would happen if they ever forgot him: they would swiftly be destroyed (cf. Deut. 8:19). It is therefore no surprise that the following two sections show the Lord’s announcing the impending execution of that threat. Ezekiel 22:13–16 shows the Lord’s scattering his people in judgment, while verses 17–22 show the Lord’s gathering them for judgment. The two opposite images highlight the comprehensiveness of the destruction coming upon Judah and Jerusalem.

Verse 13 begins with the Lord’s striking (or clapping) his hands in a threatening gesture because of his peoples’ sins (cf. 21:14). These sins are summarized as “dishonest gain” and bloodshed, linking together the first and the last of the crimes listed in 22:6–12 in reverse order to form a chiasm. Israel will be scattered among the nations, as threatened in Deuteronomy 28:64. The nation will not be purified by this scattering, but it will at least have the effect of purifying the land the Lord promised to give the people’s fathers by bringing their uncleanness to an end. Once scattered in exile, the nation of Israel can defile itself to its hearts content (again as anticipated by Deut. 28:64, which speaks of the people’s “serving gods of wood and stone”; cf. Ezek. 20:32), but the Lord’s justice and holiness will be made visible to all through their expulsion from the land.

22:17–22 These verses express the same thought via a different metaphor. Instead of being scattered, Israel will be gathered together into Jerusalem (v. 19). The purpose of this gathering is not blessing or the Lord’s safekeeping, but so that the people can experience the blast furnace of God’s wrath against their sin, melting them as silver is melted (v. 22). The image of the Lord’s refining his people through trials is common in Scripture (Isa. 48:10; Dan. 11:35; Mal. 3:2–3; Rev. 1:15). Unfortunately, since in this case the whole people are dross, the result of the refining process will be not a residue of pure metal but simply a heap of burned dross, suitable only to be discarded on the slag heap.

22:23–31 The final oracle of the chapter describes Jerusalem as a “land that is not cleansed or rained upon in the day of indignation.” She has already suffered “showers” of judgment in the Babylonian invasions of 605 and 597 BC—smaller acts of the Lord’s judgment on his people—but these have not had a cleansing effect. The people have remained unchanged, and the land is still filled with oppression and injustice, necessitating a future flood of God’s judgment upon them (Ezek. 22:31; cf. 13:11; 38:22).

Whereas verses 6–12 indicted Jerusalem from God’s law (Leviticus 18–20; 25), this second blast of condemnation quotes a charge made by one of the prophets (Zeph. 3:3–4). Zephaniah prophesied a generation earlier than Ezekiel, during the reign of Josiah (Zeph. 1:1). Nothing has changed in Judah in the meantime. Zephaniah’s four categories of offenders (officials, judges, prophets, and priests) are slightly different than Ezekiel’s (princes,169 priests, officials, and “people of the land”170), but the offenses are largely the same. Judah’s princes (Ezek. 22:25) and officials (v. 27)171 are compared with ravenous animals—lions and wolves—who devour people and steal their possessions. They used their positions of power to enrich themselves at whatever cost to those under their rule. The priests too have abused their position by having “done violence to my law and profaned my holy things” (v. 26). They did so by failing in both their teaching and their judicial tasks. It was the priests’ responsibility to guide the people in distinguishing between clean and unclean, a central aspect of maintaining Israel’s distinctive holiness. Instead they failed to teach the proper distinctions, notably in treating the Sabbaths as ordinary days rather than as days holy to the Lord. As a result the Lord himself was profaned in their midst by the general disregard of his laws that they promoted.

The prophets are condemned in terminology borrowed from chapter 13, depicting them as happily smearing whitewash on the tottering wall of the society around them, inventing false oracles and visions that declare everything is fine when the Lord has given them no such message (22:28). Finally, the people of the land, the leading members of the community, have joined the princes and officials in robbing and oppressing the powerless and the needy, both the indigenous poor and sojourners who have come from elsewhere, with no family resources or connections to protect them against institutionalized injustice.

The Lord sums up this as a situation in which the walls of society have been broken down, as if by an invader. Ironically, the leaders in the Judean community have already created the same kind of havoc in their society that the Babylonians will wreak on their city (v. 30). In such a situation the Lord looks for someone to stand in the breach and rebuild the fallen down walls—for a true prophet (cf. 13:5) who will take on the difficult and dangerous task of interceding for the people, as Moses did when the people had sinned with the golden calf (cf. Ps. 106:23). But no such prophet is to be found,172 for the prophets are all too busy telling the people what they want to hear. As a result, there is no remedy but for the Lord to pour out the fire of his wrath upon the people, returning their actions on their own heads (Ezek. 22:31; cf. 11:21).