King James Version · Babylon and the exile
Ezekiel 46
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Thus saith ; The of the inner court that looketh toward the east shall be shut the six working days; but on the it shall be opened, and in the day of the it shall be opened. And the prince shall enter by of the porch of that without, and shall stand by the post of the , and the priests shall prepare his burnt offering and his , and he shall at the threshold of the : then he shall go forth; but the shall not be shut . Likewise the people of the land shall at the door of this before in the and in the new moons. And the burnt offering that the prince shall offer unto in the shall be six lambs , and a ram . And the meat shall be an ephah for a ram, and the meat for the lambs as he shall be able to give, and an hin of oil to an ephah. And in the day of the it shall be a young bullock , and six lambs, and a ram: they shall be . And he shall prepare a meat , an ephah for a bullock, and an ephah for a ram, and for the lambs according as his hand shall attain unto, and an hin of oil to an ephah. And when the prince shall enter, he shall go in by of the porch of that , and he shall go forth by thereof. But when the people of the land shall come before in the solemn feasts, he that entereth in by of the north to shall go out by of the south ; and he that entereth by of the south shall go forth by of the north : he shall not return by of the whereby he came in, but shall go forth over against it. And the prince in the midst of them, when they go in, shall go in; and when they go forth, shall go forth. And in the feasts and in the solemnities the meat shall be an ephah to a bullock, and an ephah to a ram, and to the lambs as he is able to give, and an hin of oil to an ephah. Now when the prince shall prepare a voluntary burnt offering or voluntarily unto , one shall then open him the that looketh toward the east, and he shall prepare his burnt offering and his , as he did on the : then he shall go forth; and after his going forth one shall shut the . Thou shalt daily prepare a burnt offering unto of of the first year : thou shalt prepare it every morning. And thou shalt prepare a meat for it every morning, the sixth part of an ephah, and the third part of an hin of oil, to temper with the ; a meat continually by a perpetual unto . Thus shall they prepare , and the meat , and the oil, every morning for a continual burnt offering. Thus saith ; If the prince give a gift unto any of his sons, the thereof shall be his sons’; it shall be their possession by . But if he give a gift of his to one of his servants, then it shall be his to the year of ; after it shall return to the prince: but his shall be his sons’ for them. Moreover the prince shall not take of the people’s by , to thrust them out of their possession; but he shall give his sons out of his own possession: that my people be not scattered every man from his possession. After he brought me through the entry, which was at the side of the , into the chambers of the priests, which looked toward the north: and, behold, there was a place on the two sides westward. Then said he unto me, This is the place where the priests shall boil the trespass offering and the , where they shall bake the meat ; that they bear them not out into the utter court, to the people. 21Then he brought me forth into the utter court, and caused me to pass by the four corners of the court; and, behold, in every corner of the court there was a court. 22In the four corners of the court there were courts joined of forty long and thirty broad: these four corners were of one measure. 23And there was a row of building round about in them, round about them four, and it was made with boiling places under the rows round about. Then said he unto me, These are the places of them that boil, where the ministers of the house shall boil the of the people.
The 1611 translation, public domain. Its original printing included the Apocrypha, which is why the deuterocanonical books can be read here. Notes and cards are EKLI’s own.
The world at this moment · Babylon and the exile, 612 BC to 539 BC ›
Babylon replaces Assyria, Jerusalem and its temple are destroyed in 586 BC, and the leadership of Judah lives in Mesopotamia without a king, a temple, or a country.
- Babylon
- Nebuchadnezzar II rebuilds the city on a scale meant to be seen from a distance: the Ishtar Gate in glazed blue brick, the processional way, the ziggurat, and gardens later counted among the wonders of the world. Babylonian tablets record rations issued to the captive king Jehoiachin of Judah by name, which is one of the tidier points of contact between the Bible and the archives.
- Egypt
- Briefly resurgent. Pharaoh Neco marches north, kills King Josiah at Megiddo, and installs and deposes kings in Jerusalem, until Babylon beats him decisively at Carchemish in 605 BC. Jeremiah spends his career saying that betting on Egypt is suicide, and is proved right.
- Judah
- Deported in stages, then destroyed. The temple is burned, the walls broken, and the leadership marched to Mesopotamia. What happens next is one of the strangest survivals in history: a people keeps its identity without land, king, or sanctuary, and comes out of it with its scriptures more central than before.
- Further afield
- An extraordinary century for ideas everywhere at once. Thales and the first Greek philosophers, Solon's reforms at Athens, the Buddha in India, Confucius and Lao Tzu in China, and Zoroaster in Persia all fall within a few generations of the exile.
All of Ezekiel