Introduction to Ezekiel · ESV Expository

The book of Ezekiel begins and ends with visions of the glory of God. God is the chief actor in the book, and his troubled relationship with his people is the chief topic. In the opening vision the prophet, in exile in Babylon, sees the Lord’s glory enthroned upon a chariot, coming in a storm of judgment against his people (ch. 1). The reason for this coming judgment upon Judah is clearly and persistently laid out in the following chapters. Especially significant is the vision of chapters 8–11, which depicts in a sequence of four increasing scenes of abomination the defilement of the temple in Jerusalem. Because of that defilement, the Lord’s glory vacates the premises, departing eastward to be a short-term sanctuary for the exiles (11:16). God’s departure from his chosen city leaves Jerusalem open to be destroyed by the Babylonians under King Nebuchadnezzar (ch. 9).

The fall of Jerusalem—or, more precisely, the arrival of the news of its fall among the exiles—is a pivotal event in Ezekiel’s book. The oracles of judgment culminate with the announcement that a survivor of the city’s destruction will soon arrive with the news of Jerusalem’s fall (24:26–27). At this point the prophet declares seven oracles of judgment against the surrounding nations for their part in Jerusalem’s destruction (chs. 25–32). This section of oracles against the nations is already a move toward hope for Israel and Judah, as it demonstrates that the negative aspect of the Abrahamic covenant is still in place: those who hurt the Lord’s people will be called to account by him (Gen. 12:1–3).

After the news of Jerusalem’s fall arrives among the exiles (Ezek. 33:21), the prophet’s message changes to one of hope and restoration. His dumbness is removed so that he can speak and intercede on behalf of his people (33:22; cf. 3:26). Every aspect of the exiles’ experience will be transformed as the Lord restores them to their homeland: they will have new leadership (ch. 34) and a new homeland (35:1–36:15), in which they themselves will become a new people, with new hearts to love and obey the Lord (36:16–38). This will be nothing less than new life from the dead (37:1–14), reuniting the people as one under their new king, with the Lord in their midst in a new sanctuary (37:15–28).

Before that new sanctuary is described, the prophet sees a final grand conflict against a global coalition of seven nations (chs. 38–39). This alliance is not coming against Israel for her sins, as occurred so often in the past. This time the nations are being brought against the Lord’s own people so that he can demonstrate his perfect protection for his helpless flock. The nations’ mission must inevitably fail, demonstrating the Lord’s glory once again, as well as the depth of his commitment to his restored people.

The final chapters (chs. 40–48) present a utopian vision of what that restoration of the people to the land will look like. Past sins will no longer be perpetrated, while those who have remained faithful will receive their reward. Once the Lord returns to his people, the entire land will be oriented around God’s presence in his temple, a presence that is now effectively protected from the defilement that earlier drove him away. New regulations govern the prince and the worship to prevent renewal of past sins. Thus the Lord will dwell in the midst of his people—all twelve tribes—forever; as a result, blessing will fill the entire land, flowing out like a river from the temple itself. This utopian vision is intended not as a blueprint for a future nation-state but rather as a critique and encouragement for the original audience (43:10–12) and subsequent readers to repent of their sins and find hope in the Lord.

Title and Author

The book is named for its author, the prophet Ezekiel (1:1–3). Ezekiel is one of the early Judean exiles to Babylon, likely taken along with King Jehoiachin in 597 BC (2 Kings 24:15–16). He is a priest, aged twenty-five when carried off, and his prophetic ministry largely corresponds to the time he would have normally served as a priest in the Jerusalem temple, from age thirty, five years after Jehoiachin’s exile (Ezek. 1:2), until age fifty, twenty-five years after his exile (40:1). Unlike Daniel and his friends, who were brought to Babylon to be retrained for the Babylonian civil service, Ezekiel is exiled to the Nippur region along with a community of other Jews, presumably to boost agricultural production.

Date and Occasion

The northern kingdom of Israel was exiled by the Assyrians in 722 BC as a result of its sin. According to the prevailing Assyrian policy they were scattered among many nations, with others being brought in to take their place. Shortly after that, in 701 BC the Assyrian ruler Sennacherib threatened Jerusalem itself during the reign of Hezekiah, destroying much of Judah, as recorded in reliefs from his Nineveh palace. Only the direct intervention of the angel of the Lord rescued his people, putting to death 185,000 Assyrians overnight (2 Kings 19:35).

The tides of war swept through Judah several times in the following century. As the Assyrian power waned, the Babylonians gradually gained ascendancy, capturing the Assyrian capital of Nineveh in 612 BC. Even though the Egyptians sent troops to assist their old enemies the Assyrians, the Assyrian Empire was doomed. After the decisive battle of Carchemish in 605, the Babylonian domination was complete. Judah was caught up in these events when King Josiah attempted to prevent the Egyptian army’s passing through the Jezreel Valley in order to assist the Assyrians. Josiah himself was killed at the Battle of Megiddo in 609, which brought his program of religious reforms to an end. His son Jehoahaz reigned for a mere three months before being replaced by his elder brother Eliakim, whom his Egyptian overlords renamed Jehoiakim (2 Kings 23:34). However, once it was clear that the Babylonians had won, Jehoiakim switched his allegiance to the Babylonians. To ensure his loyalty, hostages from the upper classes were taken to Babylon, including Daniel and his three friends, in 605.

Jehoiakim rebelled against the Babylonians in 598 BC, but his uprising was crushed and he was killed. His son, Jehoiachin, only reigned for a brief period before he was himself carried off into exile in Babylon with another group of prominent people and many of the treasures of the temple. Nebuchadnezzar placed Jehoiachin’s uncle Zedekiah on the throne of Judah, but he too rebelled against Babylon in 589 BC. The result was the total destruction of the land, while the city of Jerusalem was destroyed in 586 BC after a lengthy siege. Zedekiah was forced to watch as his sons were put to death in front of him; he was then blinded and taken off to Babylon with the remainder of the citizens of Judah who had talents or skills that made them useful to the Babylonians (or a potential threat). They remained in Babylon for a generation, until the fortunes of empire changed again and the Medes and the Persians conquered Babylon. Cyrus the Persian issued a decree in 538 BC encouraging exiled people groups to return to their own homes, which enabled the Jews to return to Judah.

Ezekiel’s prophecies are dated from 592 (Ezek. 1:1–2) to 570 BC (29:17). It is likely that the prophet himself (or a scribe acting on his behalf; cf. Jer. 36:4) compiled them into an orderly collection shortly thereafter. Although some critical scholars have sought to divide up sections of the book and allocate them to much later authors, as with the rest of the prophets the scholarly consensus has been open to assigning the vast bulk of the book to an early date, prior to the middle of the sixth century BC. As the Jewish scholar Moshe Greenberg writes, “The persuasion grows on one as piece after piece falls into the established patterns and ideas, that a coherent world of vision is emerging, contemporary with the sixth-century prophet and decisively shaped by him, if not the very words of Ezekiel himself.”1 This is the view adopted in the present commentary.

The occasion for the prophet’s writing is to help his compatriots process the overwhelming event of exile and the destruction of the holy city of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BC. Does Psalm 46 not declare the city inviolable, since the Lord dwells in the midst of her? Does the experience of Sennacherib’s failed assault on Jerusalem not further reinforce this message (cf. 2 Kings 18:13–19:37)? Certainly, many of Ezekiel’s contemporaries believe this to be true, a misconception reinforced by the messages of several false prophets declaring the imminent downfall of Babylon and return of the exiles (cf. Jeremiah 7; 28). In the aftermath of the city’s destruction, what should the exiles believe? Does Jerusalem’s fall prove that the gods of the Babylonians really are more powerful than Israel’s? Should they give up on the Lord and follow Bel and Marduk instead?

The prophet’s message to his contemporaries is that the fall of Jerusalem is due not to any failure on the Lord’s part but rather to his people’s sin. They have so completely defiled Jerusalem that his glory has been forced to depart from it (Ezekiel 10). It is the Lord who has brought the Babylonians to destroy Jerusalem as a just judgment upon his people, in line with the curses attached to the Sinai covenant (ch. 9; cf. Leviticus 26).

Yet those who believe this part of the prophet’s message now face additional theological challenges: Is it just for the Lord to bring judgment on this present generation for all the long history of Judah and Jerusalem’s disobedience (Ezekiel 18)? Is it not unfair for the fathers to sin and for the children to suffer the consequences? And if the judgment is just and fair, is there any hope for the future for this people in exile? They feel spiritually dead, cut off from the living God by his wrath (37:11). Can the Lord who judged them also bind up their wounds and restore them to new life?

Ezekiel answers all these questions, revealing the faithfulness of Israel’s God: he is faithful not only to judge covenant breakers but also to restore the repentant and purify them from their sins. This God has so attached his glory to his relationship with his people that he cannot ultimately abandon them, in spite of their sin, but must ultimately restore them to himself in a new covenant relationship—a covenant whose outcome will be peace, not destruction (cf. 36:22–38).

Genre and Literary Features

As a prophet, Ezekiel uses a wide variety of literary genres. He speaks straightforward oracles of judgment and hope (Ezekiel 7; 36) while also adopting various kinds of metaphorical speech (e.g., “riddles”; 17:2). Some of these metaphors would have been as shocking to the ancient audience as they are to contemporary ones, though perhaps for different reasons (chs. 16; 23). Ezekiel performs a variety of prophetic sign-acts that range from simple, ordinary actions such as holding two staffs in his hand (37:16–17) to bizarre behaviors that have made people question his sanity, such as lying on one side for more than a year, making threatening gestures toward a map of Jerusalem (4:4–13). These sign-acts are a potent way of conveying an undesirable message to a resistant audience by piquing its interest and raising questions in its mind about what might be the significance of these actions.

Perhaps Ezekiel’s primary mode of revelation is the prophetic vision. Four times, at key moments in his prophecy, he is caught up by the Spirit and sees things invisible to the ordinary human perception (chs. 1–3; 8–11; 37; 40–48). He sees the glory of God coming in judgment against his own people and hears a call to proclaim that message to his hardhearted contemporaries (chs. 1–3). He sees the defilement and destruction of Jerusalem in visionary form, accompanied by the temple’s abandonment by the Lord (chs. 8–11). He sees the Lord’s raising a mighty horde of dry bones by his Spirit and reconstituting them into a vital and obedient army through the prophetic word (37:1–11). And he sees a utopian vision of a restored people’s dwelling at peace around the temple in a restored land, purified from all their past sins and renewed in their relationship to the Lord, who once more dwells in their midst (chs. 40–48).

Theology of Ezekiel and Its Relationship to the Rest of the Bible and to Christ

As said earlier, Ezekiel is called to prophesy to the exiles of Judah, who have been carried away into captivity in Babylonia, far away from their temple and their God. Ezekiel 37:11 provides a window into the despair they feel there: “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are indeed cut off.” What future is there in a relationship with a God unable or unwilling to protect his own land? What use is a God who allows his own temple in Jerusalem to be defiled? What value are the promises to the patriarchs of a people and a land when that people has been decimated and those who remain are carried far away from that land? The people also feel angry and unfairly treated by God, saying, “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” (18:2). Why are they suffering for their parents’ sins? Much of the book is a response to those two attitudes.

First, the prophet stresses the Lord’s divine sovereignty and glory. The defeat of Judah and the destruction of Jerusalem are not due to any weakness and failure on the Lord’s part; he is a majestic and glorious God, as the vision in chapter 1 makes abundantly clear. He does whatever he pleases, in pursuit of his own glory. He is more than able to save and restore his people; indeed, ultimately it is his purpose to do so, not for their sake but for the glory of his own name (39:21–29).

Yet this does not mean that the Lord has a blind attachment to Israel and Judah. He can come in judgment upon Israel and Judah as easily as he can come to their defense as their rock and refuge. The Sinai covenant spelled out consequences for obedience and disobedience, and under that covenant Israel, Judah, and Jerusalem’s long history of disobedience could ultimately only have one outcome (cf. Lev. 26:14–39). As God foretold to Moses, his people would be exiled (Deut. 30:1). This is by no means unfair to the present generation, for their sins are equal to those of previous generations: their problem is not that the Lord is unjust but that they are unjust (Ezek. 18:29). As a result, the second principal theme that the prophet hammers home is the inescapability of judgment for sinners. Judgment may be delayed and deferred out of the Lord’s mercy, but there comes a time when even God’s compassion runs out and the axe of his judgment falls decisively and deservedly (5:11; 7:4; 8:18).

If God’s judgment against sin reaches even to his own people when they rebel—even to destroying his own house in Jerusalem, where he had set his name—how will sinners escape total obliteration? The despair of the exiles seems well-founded, while the confidence of the godless in our own day, believing they can say and do whatever they please without consequence, is demonstrated to be naïve in the extreme. But, paradoxically, if it is the Lord who destroys and tears down, bringing enemies against Jerusalem to destroy it, then that same God can by his power also build up and restore, renewing people, land, and temple to his favor (cf. Jer. 1:10). Such restoration cannot be presumed upon; it will not be easily accomplished. Atonement must be made to purify the people and to cleanse the land and the temple—prominent themes in Ezekiel 40–48—but the God who is committed to the glory of his own name will clearly do whatever is necessary in that regard to accomplish his plans and fulfill his promises.

These are the themes we find in Ezekiel: God’s glory and sovereignty, man’s sinfulness, the certainty of judgment, the promise of mercy and hope for the future. From an NT perspective Ezekiel’s depiction of the future blessing is still partial and incomplete. In his vision there is no general access for the people to the God who dwells in their midst, and atoning sacrifices are still needed on a regular basis to purify the land from sin. The river that flows from the temple brings life to the land (ch. 47), yet there is no mention yet of a blessing for all nations. There is still room for a greater revelation of hope.

That greater revelation of hope is revealed fully in Jesus Christ, toward whom Ezekiel directs our eyes (1 Pet. 1:10–11). The glory of God, which Ezekiel anticipates as returning to the temple, does not immediately appear when the temple in Jerusalem is rebuilt in the days of Haggai and Zechariah. It arrives finally in veiled form in the person of Jesus, of whom John testifies: “We have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father” (John 1:14). When Jesus is brought to the temple as a tiny baby, aged Simeon takes him in his arms and declares that glory is returning to its true home in the midst of Israel (Luke 2:32). Just as the glory departs Jerusalem in Ezekiel’s day and goes to be with his people in exile, so Jesus leaves heaven to dwell with sinful men and women, experiencing our pains and sicknesses alongside us as the faithful servant of the Lord (Isa. 53:3). He comes to Jerusalem and in the greatest abomination of all is rejected, with the inhabitants of the city crying out “Crucify!” (Mark 15:13). The glory of Israel is taken out to the place of the skull, Golgotha, so that he might suffer “outside the camp” on behalf of his people (Heb. 13:12, 13).

Through Jesus’ suffering, death, and resurrection the promised future has now become a reality. The mediator who could not be found in Ezekiel’s day to stand in the gap and turn aside judgment (Ezek. 22:30) is now found in Jesus. He is the mediator of the new covenant who offers his own blood for the sins of his people (Heb. 9:11–15). Jesus is the Good Shepherd, promised by Ezekiel, who will restore justice for his sheep (John 10:11). All those who are in Christ are new creatures, raised from spiritual deadness to new life and filled with the Spirit of God (2 Cor. 5:17; Eph. 5:18). From each of them, as temples of the Holy Spirit, will flow rivers of living water, bringing life and hope to a despairing world (John 7:37–39).

The salvation revealed in Jesus is even greater than that which was revealed to Ezekiel, as the Son is greater than the long line of prophets who preceded him (Heb. 1:1–4). Even Ezekiel’s wildest visions—and some of them are pretty wild—are simply not wild enough to encompass the forgiveness and freedom that is ours in Christ! In Jesus we now have boldness to approach the throne of grace (Heb. 4:16), which was decisively off-limits in Ezekiel’s temple. The city toward which we press as Christians—the Jerusalem that is above (Heb. 12:22)—needs no closed gates, restricting access to it. Indeed, it needs no temple (Rev. 21:22), for the final sacrifice has now been offered once and for all by Christ (Heb. 10:10). No more sacrifices can or will be offered in the future. And this new Jerusalem will be filled not only by the full number of the tribes of Israel but by a great multitude of all nations, tribes, peoples, and tongues who have come together in the church through faith in Christ (Rev. 7:5–9). Ezekiel would have longed to have fuller understanding of this grace, a mystery that is now in these last days laid open for the simplest Christian to understand (Eph. 1:3–12; 1 Pet. 1:10–11). But we can join Ezekiel in being lost in wonder, adoration, and praise for the mighty God, who is thus able to glorify himself in the salvation of lost sinners, to the praise of his name.

Preaching from Ezekiel

It is challenging to undertake a sermon series on the book of Ezekiel, not least because of the vast scope of the book itself. Even preaching one sermon on each literary unit (mostly around a chapter in length, as delineated in this commentary) would take a full year and require covering almost seventy verses in some sermons. That would test the patience of most congregations, especially if there is only one sermon per Sunday. In addition, the first half of the book is relentlessly oriented toward judgment, only to be followed by seven chapters of oracles against foreign nations; it would not be easy to preach those passages in a way that keeps our eyes fixed on Christ and the gospel. It would be possible, as the Response sections indicate, but it would take some skill and thought.

For that reason in most settings it would be better to preach a shorter series that traces various main themes and highlights through the book, orienting the congregation to the message of the book as a whole so that the people may be able to understand better the whole of it when they read it on their own. Daniel Block offers a proposal for preaching Ezekiel in a fifteen-week thematic series, arranging the oracles according to various different tasks and roles the prophet fulfills.2 Of course, the danger of such a series is of cherry-picking passages in a way that avoids the challenging passages that people most need our help in understanding. Such an approach may easily end up misrepresenting the shape of the whole book by tilting our selections toward salvation rather than judgment. Great care should therefore be taken to preach on a representative sampling of the whole book—the harder passages as well as the more encouraging ones—in a way that enables people to grasp Ezekiel’s contribution to the whole of biblical theology. That is a task with which this commentary is designed to help.

Interpretive Challenges

Ezekiel is certainly a challenging book to understand. It always has been. The church father Jerome commented,

As for Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel, who can fully understand them or adequately explain them? . . . The beginning and ending of Ezekiel, the third of the four, are involved in so great obscurity that like the commencement of Genesis they are not studied by the Hebrews until they are thirty years old.3

Jewish difficulties in interpreting Ezekiel lay largely in the beginning and the ending of the book. The opening chariot vision, with its unusually detailed description of God, was thought to be not only difficult to understand but even potentially dangerous. The rabbis recorded the cautionary tale of a young man who picked up a scroll of Ezekiel while visiting his teacher’s home and apprehended the true meaning of the obscure Hebrew word khashmal, the material of which the divine figure is composed (1:27). Instantly, fire came out from the khashmal and incinerated him.4 Meanwhile, at the end of the book it seemed impossible to harmonize the regulations that Ezekiel outlines for the sacrifices and religious calendar of the new order with those prescribed by Moses in the Pentateuch. The book itself might have been excluded from the canon but for the work of Hananiah ben Hezekiah, who squirreled himself away in his attic and burned three hundred barrels of oil in his lamp until he reconciled the different laws.5 Unfortunately, however, the fruits of his work have not been preserved for us, which is a pity since it would be fascinating to know how he proposed to harmonize them.

Modern readers are unlikely to share these rabbinic concerns but will encounter different concerns of their own as they read the book. In particular, the metaphorical description of Jerusalem, Israel, and Judah in chapters 16; 23 as extremely promiscuous women who face severe punishment for their sins have triggered cries of outrage among modern readers.6 Modern interpreters are often (rightly) very alert to the danger women in our world face of physical abuse, though in many cases they fail to see what the fuss is about sexual immorality, even on the grandest scale. Often lost from view is the fact that these chapters are both extended metaphors; they are not describing directly the actions of literal people and their consequences but using pictorial language to convey a message of judgment intended to shock and outrage its hearers, ancient and modern.7

Equally challenging for most modern readers is the vision of the renewed temple and land in Ezekiel 40–48. Many evangelical readers will see these chapters as portraying some future literal arrangement of Israel’s people and land, usually relegated to a future millennial state. We may appreciate the desire to see prophecy fulfilled literally, but not all prophecy is intended to be fulfilled in that way. Numbers 12:6–8 reminds us that prophets often speak in dreams, visions, and riddles—nonliteral forms of communication. Certainly, the vision was intended to have an immediate relevance for the prophet’s original hearers (Ezek. 43:10–11), not merely the distant future. Ironically, in relegating this vision’s fulfillment to a distant millennial kingdom these interpreters find themselves alongside Ezekiel’s own contemporary critics, who declared, “The vision that he sees is for many days from now, and he prophesies of times far off” (12:27).

In reality, the vision had immediate import (12:28), accomplished in its role as a utopian depiction of the land of Israel, restored in a way that preserves the best of the past while eliminating the abuses that had repeatedly marred its former existence. The vision is theology expressed in the form of architecture, legislation, and geography, not a blueprint for a future earthly temple and nation-state.8 Indeed, in Revelation John takes the same kind of imagery and refracts it through the lens of fulfillment in Christ, showing us a new Jerusalem that is both similar to and different from Ezekiel’s vision. This commentary follows the same interpretive strategy, looking to see how the ancient words of the OT prophet point forward to the sufferings of Christ and the glories that will follow (Luke 24:45–47)—a strategy that enables contemporary readers to see how the gospel shines forth from every page of Ezekiel’s book.

Outline

I. Ezekiel’s Call and Commissioning (1:1–3:27)

A. Ezekiel’s Vision of God’s Glory (1:1–28)

1. Introduction (1:1–3)

2. The Vision of the Divine Throne-Chariot (1:4–28)

B. The Prophet’s Challenging Charge (2:1–3:15)

C. The Prophet’s Commission as a Watchman (3:16–27)

II. Oracles of Doom (4:1–24:27)

A. Prophecies against Jerusalem and Judah (4:1–7:27)

1. Sign-Act 1: The Besieged Brick (4:1–3)

2. Sign-Act 2: The Prone Prophet (4:4–8)

3. Sign-Act 3: The Defiled Diet (4:9–17)

4. Sign-Act 4: A Shaved Prophet and His Hair (5:1–4)

5. The Sign-Acts Interpreted (5:5–17)

6. Judgment on Israel’s Mountains (6:1–14)

7. The End Has Arrived (7:1–27)

B. The Vision of the Defiled Jerusalem Temple (8:1–11:25)

1. Four Scenes of Abomination (8:1–18)

2. Comprehensive Judgment on Jerusalem (9:1–11)

3. The Lord’s Glory Departs (10:1–22)

4. Judgment upon Israel’s Leaders (11:1–15)

5. Hope for the Exiles (11:16–25)

C. Further Oracles of Judgment (12:1–24:27)

1. Sign-Acts Preparing for Exile (12:1–20)

2. Fulfillment Is Near (12:21–28)

3. False Prophets Will Be Judged (13:1–23)

4. Divided Hearts Rejected (14:1–11)

5. Divine Judgment Determined (14:12–23)

6. The Parable of the Worthless Wood (15:1–8)

7. The Parable of the Unfaithful Wife (16:1–63)

8. The Parable of the Vine and the Two Eagles (17:1–24)

9. The Proverb about Sour Grapes (18:1–32)

10. A Lament for Two Lions and a Vine (19:1–14)

11. A History of Israel’s Rebellion (20:1–44)

12. The Song of the Sword (20:45–21:32)

13. The Indictment of Jerusalem (22:1–31)

14. The Two Sisters (23:1–49)

15. The Cooking Pot (24:1–14)

16. The Prophet’s Wife Dies (24:15–27)

III. Seven Oracles against the Nations (25:1–32:32)

A. An Oracle against Ammon (25:1–7)

B. An Oracle against Moab (25:8–11)

C. An Oracle against Edom (25:12–14)

D. An Oracle against Philistia (25:15–17)

E. An Oracle against Tyre and Her Ruler (26:1–28:19)

1. A Prophecy against Tyre (26:1–21)

2. A Lament for the Ship, Tyre (27:1–36)

3. The Pride of the Prince of Tyre (28:1–19)

F. An Oracle against Sidon (28:20–23)

G. An Oracle of Salvation for Israel (28:24–26)

H. An Oracle against Egypt and Her Ruler (29:1–32:32)

1. Slaying the Egyptian Dragon (29:1–16)

2. Babylon’s Reward (29:17–21)

3. A Lament for Egypt (30:1–19)

4. Egypt’s Broken Arms (30:20–26)

5. The Fallen Tree (31:1–18)

6. The Hunted Beast (32:1–16)

7. Egypt’s Home among the Dead (32:17–32)

IV. Oracles of Good News (33:1–48:35)

A. The Turning Point (33:1–33)

B. Oracles of Restoration (34:1–37:28)

1. A New Shepherd (34:1–31)

2. A Renewed Land (35:1–36:15)

3. A Renewed Covenant (36:16–38)

4. A Renewed People (37:1–14)

5. A Renewed Unity (37:15–28)

C. The Final Battle (38:1–39:29)

1. The Raising Up and Defeat of Gog (38:1–23)

2. The Final Disposal of Gog (39:1–29)

D. The Renewed Temple (40:1–48:35)

1. The Formation of the Sacred Space (40:1–42:20)

a. Walls and Gates (40:1–47)

b. The Inner Sanctuary (40:48–41:26)

c. The Temple’s Chambers (42:1–20)

2. The Filling of the Sacred Space (43:1–46:24)

a. The Glory Returns to the Temple (43:1–12)

b. The Altar of Burnt Offering (43:13–27)

c. Rules for Access to the Temple (44:1–31)

d. Rules for the Prince (45:1–46:24)

3. The Life-Giving River (47:1–12)

4. Defining and Distributing the Land (47:13–48:35)

a. Defining the Borders (47:13–23)

b. Allocating the Land (48:1–35)

Ezekiel 1