Old Testament · Major Prophets
יְחֶזְקֵאל
Visions by the canal, wheels of glory, street-theater signs, and dry bones learning to live.
The strangest of the major prophets and the most visually extravagant. A priest deported to Babylon receives visions of wheels within wheels and creatures with four faces, is told to lie on his side for months, to shave his head with a sword, and not to mourn his wife's death as a sign to the people. The famous valley of dry bones is a picture of a nation, not of individuals, and the answer to whether the bones can live is deliberately left to God. Ezekiel also does something that shocked his contemporaries: he watches the glory of God leave the temple in stages, eastward, which was thought impossible. The last nine chapters describe a temple in measurements so precise that people have been building models of it ever since.
If you remember one thing
The vision at the start is of God's glory on wheels, mobile, arriving in Babylon. The exiles' worst fear, that they had been left behind, is answered in the first chapter.
“I will give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you.”
Ezekiel 36:26
Ezekiel 4:12-15
Told to bake bread over human dung as a sign, and permitted cow dung instead when he objects. Deliberately degrading, and the objection is preserved.
Ezekiel 16 and 23
Two extended allegories portraying Jerusalem and Samaria as sexually unfaithful, in language explicit enough that some Jewish traditions restricted their public reading. The violence in the imagery troubles many readers and should not be passed over quickly.
Ezekiel 20:25-26
That God gave them statutes that were not good. Read variously as handing them over to the practices they chose, or as a reference to laws given in judgment.
Named here rather than skipped. Where Christians read a passage differently, we say so instead of choosing for you.
Everyone here has a write-up, drawn from the same records that explain the names while you read the text.
A priest carried to Babylon with the first exiles, Ezekiel prophesied in strange visions and street-theater signs, the fiery wheels of God's glory departing the temple, and a valley of dry bones rising to live again as the promise of Israel's resurrection.
Taken young into the Babylonian court, Daniel rose by wisdom and unbending faith, refusing the king's food, reading dreams and the writing on Belshazzar's wall, and emerging unharmed from the lions' den. His later visions map the rise and fall of empires to the end.
The one righteous man of his generation, who built a ship on dry ground on the strength of a warning about weather he had never seen. After the flood God set the rainbow as the sign of a covenant made with every living creature.
The names attached to prophets and officials to identify them: Isaiah son of Amoz, Ezekiel son of Buzi, Hosea son of Beeri, Joel son of Pethuel, Jonah son of Amittai, Zechariah son of Berechiah son of Iddo, Baruch son of Neriah, Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel.
The figure in Ezekiel 38 and 39 who leads a coalition from the remote north against a restored and unwalled Israel, and is destroyed there. Ezekiel calls him the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal, of the land of Magog.
David's two priests. Abiathar had escaped the massacre at Nob and joined David in the wilderness, carrying the ephod. Zadok's line came from Eleazar. At Solomon's accession Abiathar backed Adonijah and Zadok backed Solomon, and Abiathar was removed.
A wealthy man of Uz, described as blameless and upright, who loses his children, his property, and his health in a single stroke, and spends thirty-eight chapters demanding an explanation from God. His three friends come to comfort him, sit with him in silence for seven days, and then start talking.
Games built on this book’s people and story.
