1And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 2“And you, man, you shall surely judge the city of bloodshed and make known to her all her abominations. 3And you shall say, Thus said the Master, the LORD: O city shedding blood in its midst, to cause her time to come, and she makes foul things for herself in defilement. 4In your blood that you shed you are guilty, and in your foul things that you make you are defiled, and you bring your days close and come to the end of your years. Therefore do I make you a disgrace to the nations and a revilement to all the lands. 5Those near and those far shall revile you, O defiled in name, great in disorder. 6Look, the princes of Israel, each with his strong arm, were within you so as to shed blood. 7Father and mother they treated with contempt within you. Toward the sojourner they acted oppressively in your midst. Orphan and widow they wronged within you. 8My holiness you despised and My sabbaths you profaned. 9Slanderers there were within you so as to shed blood, and they ate on the mountains among you. Lewdness they did in your midst. 10A father’s nakedness was laid bare within you. The menstruant’s defilement they took by rape within you. 11And each man did an abomination with his fellow man’s wife, and each defiled his daughter-in-law in lewdness, and each took his sister, his father’s daughter, by rape. 12They took bribes within you, so as to shed blood. Advance interest and accrued interest you took, and you got ill gain from your fellow men through oppression. And Me you have forgotten, said the Master, the LORD. 13And look, I have struck My palm over your ill-gotten gain that you acquired and over your bloodguilt that was in your midst. 14Will your heart stand the test, will your hands be strong, in the days I am about to set against you? I am the LORD. I have spoken and I have done. 15And I will disperse you among the nations and scatter you in the lands, and I will wipe out your defilement from you. 16And you shall be dishonored before the eyes of the nations, and you shall know that I am the LORD.”
17And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 18“Man, the house of Israel has become dross to me. They are all bronze and tin and iron and lead, in a kiln of silver dross they are. 19Therefore, thus said the Master, the LORD: Inasmuch as they all have become dross, therefore will I gather them into Jerusalem, 20a gathering of silver and bronze and iron and lead and tin into the kiln to fan fire upon it for smelting. So will I gather My anger and My wrath and fan the fire and smelt you. 21And I will gather you in and fan the fire of My fury upon you, and you shall be smelted within it. 22As silver is smelted within a kiln, so shall you be smelted, and you shall know that I, the LORD, have poured out My wrath upon you.”
23And the word of the LORD came to me, saying, 24“Man, say to her: You are an unclean land. She was not rain-washed on the day of anger. 25The plot of her prophets is in her midst. Like a roaring lion rending prey they devoured lives; treasure and riches they took, they made her widows many in her midst. 26Her priests outraged My teaching and profaned My sacred things. They did not distinguish between sacred and profane, they did not teach the difference between clean and unclean. They averted their eyes from My sabbaths, and I was profaned in their midst. 27Her nobles in her midst were like wolves rending prey, to shed blood, to destroy lives, so as to take ill-gotten gain. 28And her prophets daubed the walls with plaster, seeing empty visions and divining lies, saying, ‘Thus said the Master, the LORD’ when the LORD had not spoken. 29The people of the land committed oppression and robbed and wronged the poor and the needy and oppressed the sojourner lawlessly. 30And I sought from them a man to mend the fence and stand in the breach before Me for the sake of the land so as not to destroy it, and I found none. 31And I poured out My anger upon them, in the fire of My fury I made an end of them. Their way I paid back on their head,” said the Master, the LORD.
CHAPTER 22 NOTES
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3. in its midst. This phrase (a single word in the Hebrew) and one variant are constantly repeated in this prophecy, emphasizing the idea that the corruption has penetrated to the very heart of the city.
4. you bring your days close and come to the end of your years. The obvious reference is to the time of judgment; but the preposition rendered as “to” here, ʿad, is unusual, and a number of Hebrew manuscripts show instead ʿet, “the time of.” The phrase “the end” does not appear in the Hebrew but is assumed here to be implied.
7. Father and mother . . . sojourner . . . Orphan and widow. Although the prophet has begun with the sin of idolatry (“foul things”), he now moves on to violations of the familial order and the perpetration of social injustice. From this he will go on (verses 10–11) to acts of sexual indecency, something that appears to have particularly enraged him.
9. Slanderers . . . so as to shed blood. Slander is used as a weapon to condemn the innocent to death or to provoke acts of violence against them, either out of simple hatred or in order to seize the property of those whose blood is shed.
they ate on the mountains. As before, the reference is to a pagan ritual meal.
10. The menstruant’s defilement they took by rape. Sex with a menstruating woman is forbidden even when there is mutual consent. Here the prophet assumes that she would not agree to have sex during her period, so she is taken by force, two taboos thus violated in one fell swoop. The same situation pertains to the rape of the sister in the next verse.
11. his father’s daughter. In a polygamous marriage, she might well be only his half sister, but this is still incest.
18. dross. What follows might possibly be an elaborated allusion to Isaiah 1:22, “your silver has turned to dross.” In any case, it exemplifies Ezekiel’s penchant for adopting quasipoetic strategies in his prose prophecies. The metaphor of silver cheapened by dross is extended through verse 21.
19. Inasmuch as they all have become dross. What follows is an image of measure-for-measure justice: the people have debased their intrinsic value, turned silver into dross; now God will take together all this debased metal and burn it away in a fiery kiln.
20. fan the fire and smelt you. Since one of several synonyms for “anger” that are used here, ḥeimah, “wrath,” is derived from a root that means “heat,” the anger jibes nicely with the metaphor of the burning furnace.
21. you shall be smelted within it. As smelting is a process that burns away impurities, the suggestion is that the base elements of the people will be destroyed but a virtuous core will remain.
25. The plot of her prophets. The general meaning of the noun qesher (literally, “knot”) is “plot” or “conspiracy.” There is not much warrant to render it as “gang,” as does the New Jewish Publication Society. The Septuagint, however, reads ʾasher nesiʾeha, “that her princes,” which is attractive because it eliminates the duplication of “prophets” in verse 28 in this catalogue of miscreants.
they made her widows many. This is the obvious consequence of killing the husbands.
26. They did not distinguish between sacred and profane . . . between clean and unclean. This is the special responsibility of the priests, as Ezekiel, himself a priest, was keenly aware.
28. And her prophets daubed the walls with plaster. This covering up of cracks in the figurative wall of the people is inspired by the elaboration of that image in 13:10ff.
30. a man to mend the fence and stand in the breach. That man would be the authentic prophet, who speaks truth to the people and acts to turn them from their evil ways and thus averts God’s assault on the city through the very breaches that the people have made. Ezekiel, of course, is speaking about Jerusalem while himself prophesying in Babylonia. There is no recognition here of his older contemporary Jeremiah, surely a man who tried to stand in the breach. Ezekiel would have known, or at least heard about, Jeremiah before he himself was exiled in 597 B.C.E.
31. Their way I paid back on their head. The translation follows the contours of the Hebrew idiom (still more literally, “gave on their head”), which implies payback for misdeeds.