1And He said to me, “Man, what you find, eat. Eat this scroll and go speak to the house of Israel.” 2And I opened my mouth and He fed me this scroll. 3And He said to me, “Man, your belly you shall feed and your innards you shall fill with this scroll that I give you.” And I ate, and it became sweet as honey in my mouth. 4And He said to me, “Man, come! Go to the house of Israel and speak to them My words. 5For not to a people of an unfathomable language and an obscure tongue do I send you—but to the house of Israel. 6Not to many peoples of impenetrable language and obscure tongue whose words you would not understand. Surely had I sent you to them, they would have listened to you. 7But the house of Israel does not want to listen to you, for they do not want to listen to Me, for all the house of Israel are hard-browed and hard-hearted. 8Look, I have made your face hard against their faces and your brow hard against their brows. 9Like diamond harder than flint I have made your brow. You shall not fear them and shall not be terrified by them, for they are a house of rebellion.” 10And He said to me, “Man, all My words that I shall speak to you—take into your heart and with your ears listen, 11and come! go to the exiles, to the sons of your people, and speak to them and say to them: Thus said the Master, the LORD, whether they listen or not.” 12And a wind lifted me, and I heard behind me the sound of a great roar: “Blessed be the LORD’s glory from its place,” 13and the sound of the creatures’ wings touching each other and the sound of the wheels over against them and the sound of a great roar. 14And a wind lifted me and took me, and bitter did I go, with an incensed spirit, and the hand of the LORD was strong upon me. 15And I came to the exiles at Tel Abib who dwelled by the Kebar Canal, where they dwelled, and I sat there seven days, desolate in their midst. 16And it happened at the end of seven days that the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 17“Man, I have made you a lookout for the house of Israel. When you hear a word from My mouth, you shall warn them from Me. 18When I say to a wicked man, ‘You are doomed to die,’ and you have not warned him and have not spoken to warn the wicked man against his wicked ways to keep him alive, that wicked man shall die for his crime but his blood I will requite of you. 19As for you, when you warn the wicked man and he does not turn back from his wickedness and from his wicked way, it is he who shall die for his crime and you, you shall have saved your own life. 20And when the righteous man turns back from his righteousness and does wrong, and I put a stumbling block before him, he shall die, for you did not warn him. For his offense he shall die, and his righteousness shall not be recalled, but his blood I will requite of you. 21And you, when you have warned the righteous man not to offend and he has not offended, he shall surely live, for he has taken warning, and you, you shall have saved your own life.”
22And the hand of the LORD was upon me there, and He said to me, “Arise, go out to the valley, and there will I speak to you.” 23And I arose and went out to the valley, and, look, the LORD’s glory was standing there, like the glory I had seen by the Kebar Canal, and I fell on my face. 24And a spirit entered me and stood me on my feet and spoke to me and said to me, “Come, shut yourself within your house. 25And now, man, they have put cords on you and bound you with them, that you not go out in their midst. 26And your tongue I will make cleave to your palate that you be mute, and you shall not be a reprover to them, for they are a house of rebellion. 27But when I speak to you I will open your mouth, and you shall say to them: ‘Thus said the Master, the LORD: Who listens shall listen, and who does not shall not, for they are a house of rebellion.’”
CHAPTER 3 NOTES
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3. Man, your belly you shall feed and your innards you shall fill with this scroll. Such specification indicates that the prophet is not merely meant to chew the papyrus scroll but to swallow and digest it. It seems quite likely that Ezekiel believed he had been commanded to perform this difficult symbolic act and in fact carried it out. His report that the taste of the papyrus in his mouth was sweet as honey leads one to infer that he was a person susceptible to aberrant or perhaps abnormal states.
5. a people of an unfathomable language and an obscure tongue. The literal sense is “deep of language and heavy of tongue.” Elsewhere in Prophetic texts, the unintelligibility of the language of the conquerors is part of their fearsome aspect. Here, it becomes part of an a fortiori statement: had the prophet been sent to peoples speaking a barbaric foreign tongue, they would have listened to him; but when he is sent to the Israelites, addressing them in their shared mother tongue, Hebrew, they refuse to listen because of their stubbornness.
but to the house of Israel. The “but” is merely implied in the Hebrew.
8. I have made your face hard against their faces and your brow hard against their brows. Rimon Casher has proposed that the repetition throughout these verses of ḥazak (“hard,” and elsewhere usually “strong”) may be a play on the root of Ezekiel’s name, yeḥezqʾel (“God will make strong”).
9. You shall not fear them . . . for they are a house of rebellion. The causal logic here is that because they are rebels, they are destined to be punished by God, and so there is nothing to fear from them, however they may threaten the prophet.
12. And a wind lifted me. We repeatedly see this prophet as a passive subject of prophecy, being lifted, borne off, stood on his feet, by divine powers.
Blessed be the LORD’s glory from its place. One often proposed emendation reads instead of barukh, “blessed,” berum, “in the rising of,” which yields not a line of dialogue but a narrative report about the divine chariot: “When the LORD’s glory rose up from its place.” This emendation is encouraged by the fact that in paleo-Hebrew script the letters mem and kaf look fairly similar, so a scribe could easily have erred. The emended reading flows more smoothly into the next verse and a half reporting the ascent of the divine chariot, but the Masoretic Text has been retained in this translation because it has become prominently enshrined in the Hebrew liturgy.
14. bitter did I go, with an incensed spirit. The prophet’s disturbed emotional state reflects his troubled sense that the prophetic mission will be very arduous, perhaps impossible.
15. Tel Abib. Though this looks like a Hebrew name, “mound of the sprouting season,” and modern-day Tel Aviv drew the name from here, it is actually Akkadian and means “mound of the flood.”
where they dwelled. This might be a scribal duplication.
17. lookout. The lookout or watchman, as can be inferred from the appearance of the term in narrative contexts, was someone posted on an elevation to look for the approach of hostile forces. Thus, the prophet is appointed to look out for imminent disaster triggered by Israel’s bad behavior and to warn them, as a watchman would.
18. but his blood I will requite of you. This is a much grimmer formulation of the burden of prophecy than that given to other prophets: Ezekiel is obliged to work under an imminent death sentence if he fails to adequately warn the transgressors.
22. the valley. Although some render this as “plain,” the Hebrew term clearly derives from a verbal stem that means “rift” or “split,” and it refers to a valley—in the case of Jordan, the riverbed and the surrounding banks.
23. the LORD’s glory was standing there. Repeatedly in Ezekiel, “the LORD’s glory” (or “majesty”) refers to the divine “chariot” described in chapter 1.
24. And a spirit entered me and stood me on my feet. As before, Ezekiel is a virtual puppet of the divine spirit. This is an idea that will be picked up in Daniel.
shut yourself within your house. Some have seen this as a contradiction of the previous injunction to the prophet to “warn” Israel, compounded by the fact that in the next verse God says He will impose a condition of complete muteness on the prophet. But such oscillations should not surprise us, especially if we assume that all these divine instructions have some relation to the psychology of this particular prophet. In that case, at one moment he feels an absolute imperative to reprove the people, a responsibility he needs to carry out on the pain of death. At another moment, despairing of the very possibility of in any way changing the course of action of these stubborn rebels against God, he shuts himself up in his house and sinks into a condition of total silence.
25. they have put cords on you and bound you with them. Since the prophet has already shut himself up in his house, it is unclear why anyone would feel the necessity to bind him in cords in order to prevent him from going outside. Perhaps this statement should be construed as a metaphor: “they” (the people) have through their actions imposed on the prophet a condition of isolated withdrawal, as though they had bound him with cords.