Ezekiel: Son of Man

At a Glance

Who wrote it: Ezekiel son of Buzi, a priest taken to Babylon in the first deportation of 597 BC. The book is mostly his, arranged and expanded by his followers.

When: His dated prophecies run from 593 to 571 BC. Some of my people’s teachers were uneasy with the book, because its rules for a future Temple clash with the Law of Moses.

Where it fits: Ezekiel prophesied among the exiles in Babylon. He was taken there in 597 BC, before Jerusalem fell in 586 BC (2 Kings 24:10–25:21), and the book follows him through the fall and beyond.

Where I quote it: Not directly. But God calls Ezekiel son of man over ninety times, the phrase I used most for myself. My picture of the good shepherd who seeks the lost is Ezekiel’s (Ezekiel 34; Luke 19:10; John 10:11).

If you only read three chapters: Ezekiel 1, Ezekiel 34 and Ezekiel 37.

Words to Know

Son of man — in Hebrew ben adam, literally son of Adam, meaning a human being. Your Bible may translate it mortal.

Glory — in Hebrew kavod, the visible, blazing presence of God.

Sign-act — a prophecy acted out instead of spoken, like a piece of street theater.

Gog of Magog — the mysterious invader in chapters 38 and 39, a favorite of end-times preachers.

The Book in Brief

Ezekiel is a priest. He was taken to Babylon in 597 BC with the first group of exiles from Judah, and he speaks to them there. Most of the book is in his own voice, and many of its messages are dated.

Chapters 1 to 3 tell how he is called. By the Chebar canal the heavens open. He sees a storm cloud, four winged living creatures, great wheels with rims full of eyes, and a throne with a figure like a man on it. God gives him a scroll to eat, calls him son of man, and makes him a watchman who must warn a rebellious people. He is also struck silent, able to speak only when God gives him a message.

Chapters 4 to 24 are warnings that Jerusalem will fall. Ezekiel acts them out. He lies beside a model of the besieged city, eats siege rations, and shaves his head. In a vision he is carried to the Temple in Jerusalem, where he sees idols and false worship, and he watches the glory of God leave. He tells stories of an unfaithful wife and two wicked sisters, rejects the saying that children pay for their parents’ sins, and condemns the city’s leaders and false prophets. In chapter 24 the siege begins, and Ezekiel’s wife dies. He is told not to mourn her in public.

Chapters 25 to 32 are messages against the nations around Judah, among them Ammon, Edom, Tyre and Egypt.

Chapters 33 to 39 turn to hope. A survivor from Jerusalem arrives with the news that the city has fallen, and Ezekiel can speak freely again. God condemns the selfish shepherds of Israel and promises to be the shepherd himself. The people are promised a new heart and a new spirit. In a valley of dry bones, Ezekiel watches the bones come together and live as an army. Two sticks joined in his hand picture Israel and Judah made one nation again. Chapters 38 and 39 describe an attack on Israel by Gog, from the land of Magog, who is defeated.

Chapters 40 to 48 are the last vision, dated twenty-five years into the exile. Ezekiel is taken to a high mountain and shown a new Temple, measured out room by room. God’s glory returns to it by the east gate. A river flows from beneath its threshold, grows deeper as it goes, and heals the sea it flows into. The land is divided among the tribes, and the book ends with a new name for the city, which says that the LORD is there.

In this book, God never addresses Ezekiel by his name. God calls him ben adam, son of man, over and over, more than ninety times.¹ It simply means human being. Your modern Bible may translate it mortal. It is a reminder of how small the prophet is beside the glory he sees.

The Son of Man was the phrase I used most often for myself. People still argue about what I meant by it. In Ezekiel it means a frail human being. In the book of Daniel, it means a heavenly figure like a son of man who comes with the clouds and is given a kingdom (Daniel 7:13–14). I used it both ways. I said the Son of Man had nowhere to lay his head (Luke 9:58), and I said the Son of Man would come with the clouds (Mark 14:62). Both meanings were in my scriptures.

Wheels within wheels

Ezekiel’s book opens in Babylon, by a canal called the Chebar, among the exiles. The heavens open, and he sees a storm cloud with fire flashing, four living creatures with four faces and four wings, wheels gleaming, as it were a wheel within a wheel, their rims full of eyes, and above them a throne, and on the throne a likeness as the appearance of a man (Ezekiel 1:4–26).

Ezekiel can barely describe it. He keeps saying as it were and the appearance of the likeness of.

The important thing is where he saw it. Not in the Temple in Jerusalem. In Babylon, among the exiles. The God of Israel was not stuck in a building. God went with the exiles.

In the 1960s and 70s, writers claimed that Ezekiel had seen a spaceship. One of them was a NASA engineer who drew up plans for it.² It made a good paperback. It is not what Ezekiel was describing. He was trying to say that God’s glory was bigger than anything he had words for, and that it had come to the people in exile.

The vision frightened my people’s teachers. They ruled that this chapter should not be taught to just anyone.³

Go deeperWhat the Babylonian records say about the exiles

Ezekiel’s world turns up in Babylonian records too.

A Babylonian chronicle, a year-by-year record kept on clay tablets, says that in the seventh year of Nebuchadnezzar the king marched against the city of Judah, captured it on the second day of the month of Adar, and set up a king of his own choosing. That was March of 597 BC, the first deportation, the one that took Ezekiel.⁴

The king who was taken away was Jehoiachin. German excavators at Babylon found tablets from the royal storehouses that list rations of oil and grain. Among the names is Yaukin, king of Judah, with his five sons.⁵ The last page of 2 Kings tells that a later king of Babylon freed him from prison and gave him a regular allowance for the rest of his life (2 Kings 25:27–30).

Another group of about two hundred tablets comes from a town called Judah-town, Al-Yahudu in the Babylonian language, somewhere in the Babylonian countryside. The oldest is dated 572 BC, the same years as Ezekiel’s last dated prophecy, and the latest 477 BC. In them, Judeans lease farmland, grow dates and barley, borrow and lend silver, and sign contracts before witnesses. Many of their names still carry the name of their God.⁶

These were not prisoners in a camp. That agrees with Ezekiel, where the elders of Judah come and sit in his house (Ezekiel 8:1), and with the letter Jeremiah sent to the exiles: Build houses and dwell in them. Plant gardens and eat their fruit (Jeremiah 29:5). They were settled, and they were far from home.

Street theater

Ezekiel acts out his prophecies.

He builds a model of Jerusalem under siege out of a brick and lies beside it on his left side for 390 days and on his right side for forty (Ezekiel 4:1–6). He eats siege rations, measured by weight, cooked over dung. He shaves his head and beard, and burns a third of the hair, strikes a third with a sword and scatters a third to the wind (Ezekiel 5:1–2).

When his wife dies, the desire of your eyes, God tells him not to mourn in public, as a sign of the grief that will be too great for mourning when Jerusalem falls (Ezekiel 24:15–24).

I did sign-acts too. I rode into Jerusalem on a donkey. I overturned tables. I cursed a fig tree. I broke bread and said it was my body. My people knew how to read a prophet who acted things out.

The glory leaves

In chapters 8 to 11, Ezekiel is carried in a vision to the Temple in Jerusalem. He sees idols in its walls and women weeping for a foreign god at its gate. And he sees the glory of God rise from the Temple and leave.

It goes out the east gate and stops on the mountain which is on the east side of the city (Ezekiel 11:23).

That is the Mount of Olives. In Ezekiel’s vision, God’s glory left the Temple and waited on that hill. I wept over the city from that hill, and I prayed there on my last night, and I was arrested there.

Go deeperTammuz, the god the women wept for

In the vision of the Temple, Ezekiel is led to the north gate and sees the women sit there weeping for Tammuz (Ezekiel 8:14).

Tammuz is the Hebrew form of Dumuzi, a shepherd god of Mesopotamia. In the old Sumerian poems he is the husband of the goddess Inanna, whom the Babylonians called Ishtar. He dies and goes down to the land of the dead, and the women who love him mourn. People wept for him every year in the heat of summer, when the pastures dried up.⁷ The fourth month of the Jewish calendar, which falls in June and July, is still called Tammuz.

So this was an old, foreign rite, and Ezekiel’s vision puts it at the gate of the LORD’s house. The same vision shows more. On the walls of a chamber inside the Temple are drawings of creeping things and animals, and seventy elders stand before them with incense (Ezekiel 8:10–11). In the inner court, about twenty-five men stand with their backs to the Temple and their faces to the east, bowing to the sun (Ezekiel 8:16).

The vision does not blame outsiders. It names the elders of the people and the women of Jerusalem.

The sin of Sodom

Ezekiel 16 is hard to read. It pictures Jerusalem as an unfaithful wife, in language so graphic and violent that many readers today are disturbed by it, and should be.⁸

But in the middle of it is a verse you need to know. Jerusalem is compared to her sister Sodom:

Behold, this was the iniquity of your sister Sodom: pride, fullness of bread, and prosperous ease was in her and in her daughters. She also didn’t strengthen the hand of the poor and needy (Ezekiel 16:49).

Pride, too much food, comfort, and no help for the poor. That was a prophet’s summary of the sin of Sodom.

Sour grapes

My people had a proverb. The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge. It meant: we are suffering for our parents’ sins.

Ezekiel says God has had enough of that proverb. The soul who sins, he shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father (Ezekiel 18:2–4, 20).

Then he describes a righteous man: he does not oppress anyone, he gives back the pledge a debtor gave him, he does not rob, he has given his bread to the hungry, and has covered the naked with a garment, and he does not take interest (Ezekiel 18:7–8).

And then the heart of it: Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked? says the Lord GOD; and not rather that he should return from his way, and live? … Therefore turn yourselves, and live! (Ezekiel 18:23, 32).

The shepherds who fed themselves

Ezekiel 34 is the chapter I lived by.

Woe to the shepherds of Israel who feed themselves! Shouldn’t the shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat. You clothe yourself with the wool. You kill the fatlings, but you don’t feed the sheep. You haven’t strengthened the diseased. You haven’t healed that which was sick. You haven’t bound up that which was broken. You haven’t brought back that which was driven away. You haven’t sought that which was lost (Ezekiel 34:2–4).

The shepherds are the kings and the rulers. They fed on the flock.

So God says, I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep … I will seek that which was lost, and will bring back that which was driven away, and will bind up that which was broken, and will strengthen that which was sick (Ezekiel 34:15–16).

Then God says something more. Behold, I, even I, will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep, he tells the fat ones, because you thrust with side and with shoulder, and push all the diseased with your horns, until you have scattered them abroad (Ezekiel 34:20–21).

When I said that the Son of Man came to seek and to save that which was lost (Luke 19:10), I was saying Ezekiel 34. When I told the story of the shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to find one, I was saying Ezekiel 34. When John remembers me saying, I am the good shepherd (John 10:11), I was claiming the job God had taken back from the kings. And when I spoke of the Son of Man separating the sheep from the goats, by what they had done for the hungry and the sick (Matthew 25:31–46), I was standing in that chapter.

A heart of flesh

I will also give you a new heart, and I will put a new spirit within you. I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26).

It is close to Jeremiah’s new covenant. A law written on the heart. A heart that can feel.

Can these bones live?

Then Ezekiel 37. The prophet is set down in a valley full of dry bones. God asks him, Son of man, can these bones live? He answers, Lord GOD, you know.

He prophesies, and the bones rattle together, and sinews and flesh come on them. But there is no breath in them. So he prophesies to the breath, the wind, the spirit, all one word in Hebrew, ruach. And the breath comes into them, and they live and stand on their feet, an exceedingly great army (Ezekiel 37:1–10).

Then God tells him what the bones are. These bones are the whole house of Israel. Behold, they say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost. We are completely cut off” (Ezekiel 37:11).

It is a vision about a nation in exile that had given up. God would bring them home. Black churches in America have sung about these bones for generations, and I understand why.

Go deeperHow my people read the valley of dry bones

Was Ezekiel’s valley a real raising of the dead, or a picture? My people argued about it. In the Talmud, the great collection of the rabbis’ teaching, Rabbi Eliezer says the dead whom Ezekiel raised stood on their feet, sang a song and died again. Rabbi Judah says it was only a parable. Another teacher, Judah ben Bathyra, is said to have declared that he was their descendant, and to have shown the tefillin, the small prayer boxes, that his grandfather had left him from them.⁹

The vision was painted, too. In 1932, excavators at Dura-Europos, a Roman border city on the Euphrates in what is now Syria, uncovered a synagogue whose walls were covered with scenes from the scriptures. One panel shows Ezekiel’s valley, with the bodies coming together and standing up. The room was decorated in the middle of the AD 200s, and the city fell to the Persians a few years later, about AD 256.¹⁰ So Jews were painting this vision on their synagogue walls almost eighteen hundred years ago.

Gog of Magog

Chapters 38 and 39 describe an invasion by Gog, of the land of Magog, who comes from the far north with a great army and is destroyed on the mountains of Israel.

This is a favorite of people with end-times charts. They have claimed that one of the names in it, Rosh, means Russia, and that Meshech is Moscow. In the Hebrew, rosh most likely just means chief, making Gog the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal (Ezekiel 38:2), and Meshech and Tubal were peoples in what is now Turkey.¹¹ The book of Revelation borrowed Gog and Magog for its own vision (Revelation 20:8).

The river from the Temple

Ezekiel ends with a vision of a new Temple, measured out in detail over nine chapters. Then water starts trickling out from under its threshold, flowing east.

It gets deeper as it goes, ankle-deep, knee-deep, waist-deep, then a river too deep to cross. It flows down into the Dead Sea and makes its water fresh. Fishermen spread their nets along the shore. On both banks grow trees whose fruit never fails, each with its leaf for healing (Ezekiel 47:1–12).

Revelation took that river and those trees for the last page of the Bible (Revelation 22:1–2). And John remembers me standing up at a festival and saying, He who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, from within him will flow rivers of living water (John 7:38). No single verse says exactly that. Ezekiel’s river is one of the likeliest sources.¹²

The last words of the book are the new name of the city: The LORD is there (Ezekiel 48:35).

Go deeperThe Temple that nearly kept the book out of the Bible

The book of Ezekiel nearly did not make it into the Bible, if an old story is right. The Talmud says that some teachers wanted to withdraw the book because its words seemed to contradict the Law of Moses. One teacher, Hananiah son of Hezekiah, is said to have saved it. He sat in an upstairs room with three hundred jars of lamp oil until he had worked out how the two could agree.³

Here is what troubled them. In the last nine chapters, Ezekiel is shown a new Temple and the rules for it, and some are not the rules of Moses. For the Sabbath, Ezekiel’s prince offers six lambs and a ram (Ezekiel 46:4); the Law asks for two lambs (Numbers 28:9). At the new moon, Ezekiel asks for one bull, six lambs and a ram (Ezekiel 46:6); the Law asks for two bulls, a ram and seven lambs (Numbers 28:11). Only the sons of Zadok may serve at the altar. The other Levites, who had served idols, are given lesser work, such as guarding the gates and killing the sacrifices (Ezekiel 44:10–16).¹³

The vision is dated to about 573 BC, fourteen years after the city fell (Ezekiel 40:1). One of its rules goes further than the Law. When the land is shared out among the tribes, foreigners who live among Israel and raise children there are to be counted as the native-born among the children of Israel, and each is to receive land in whatever tribe he lives (Ezekiel 47:22–23).

Check It Yourself

Look up: Ezekiel 34:1–16, then Luke 15:3–7 and Luke 19:10.

You will find: the shepherds who fed themselves, the God who seeks the lost, and my stories built on it.

Then read Ezekiel 16:49. See how a prophet summed up the sin of Sodom.

The Short Version

• God calls Ezekiel “son of man,” meaning a human being. I used that phrase most often for myself.
• He saw God’s glory in Babylon, among the exiles, and saw it leave the Temple for the Mount of Olives.
• He said Sodom’s sin was pride, excess and failing the poor, and that children do not pay for their parents’ sins.
• Ezekiel 34, the shepherds who fed themselves and the God who seeks the lost, is the chapter I lived by.
• Gog and Magog is not about Russia. Ezekiel’s river of healing became the last page of Revelation.