Canter Bridge

It is important to the ethos of the book of Ezekiel that doomed people have been warned.

The logic of divine castigation requires this. Just as the desolation wrought by his overdue judgement will indicate to survivors that YHWH has been about (‘Then you shall know that I am YHWH …’), so it is important that people will have heard the voice of YHWH’s warning prior to the destruction of all that is dear to them.

Chapters 32-33 spell out this dynamic to a degree of detail that rings awkwardly in the mind of the modern reader who already gets the point.

Yet the flailing away at a concept that ancient literature like this allows itself to perform is not boorish behavior. It is rather the signaling of importance in a genre that has more patience for such than ours. The wise reader will recalibrate his tolerances in order to understand what he can.

This chapters before us claim that ‘the Lord does not delight in the death of the wicked’. They represent a kind of theodicy that presents a moral inevitability to the destruction that would fall upon Ezekiel’s Israel. The prophet’s people have not only been heavy of ear and stiff of neck. They have been incorrigible and so their fate has become inevitable. But hardly gleeful.

In the end, the word that comes to YHWH is both tragic and poignant. His community has heard him as an entertainer rather than the spokesman of important things:

To them you are like a singer of love songs, one who has a beautiful voice and plays well on an instrument; they hear what you say, but they will not do it. When this comes—and come it will!—then they shall know that a prophet has been among them.

A prophet’s tracks, seen only in retrospect, are cold comfort when Babylon has been at the gates.