Don't Know Much About the Bible - Kenneth C. Davis [108]
But in spite of this loving attention, the unfaithful wife becomes degenerate:
“You trusted in your beauty, and played the whore because of your fame, and lavished your whorings on any passer-by…. You took your sons and your daughters, whom you had borne to me and these you sacrificed to them to be devoured. As if your whorings were not enough! You slaughtered my children and delivered them up as an offering to them….” (Ezek. 16:15ff.)
“Therefore, O whore, hear the word of the Lord: Thus says the Lord God, Because your lust was poured out and your nakedness uncovered in your whoring with your lovers, and because of all your abominable idols, and because of the blood of your children that you gave to them, therefore I will gather all your lovers, with whom you took pleasure, all those who loved you and all those you hated; I will gather them against you from all around, and will uncover your nakedness. I will judge you as women who commit adultery and shed blood are judged, and bring blood upon you in wrath and jealously.” (Ezek. 16:35-38)
This image of God as the angry, jilted lover who will turn his wife out naked to be raped and punished is very much at odds with the prophetic image in Hosea (see page 222) in which the adulterous wife is punished but then forgiven.
Of Ezekiel’s prophetic visions, the most famous and memorable is his description of the Valley of the Dry Bones:
The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones, and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. I will lay sinews on you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live and know that I am the Lord.”
So I prophesied as I had been commanded; and as I prophesied, suddenly there was a noise, a rattling, and the bones came together, bone to its bone. (Ezek. 37:1-7)
Over the centuries, this prophetic vision has been interpreted in various ways. In his own time, Ezekiel was describing the revival of Judah after the Exile. More recently, Jews have seen it as a prophecy of the post-Holocaust creation of the modern state of Israel. And others see it more broadly as the promise of a resurrection after death, a concept central to Christian beliefs but which has figured less prominently in Jewish theology.
Summing up Ezekiel’s message in A History of the Jews, historian Paul Johnson wrote,
In essence this weird and passionate man had a firm and powerful message to deliver: the only salvation was through religious purity. States and empires and thrones did not matter in the long run. They would perish through God’s power. What mattered was the creature God had created in his image: man…. The Christians were later to interpret this fearsome scene [The Valley of the Dry Bones] as an image of the Resurrection of the dead, but to Ezekiel and his audience it was a sign of the resurrection of Israel, though of an Israel closer to and more dependent on God than ever before, each man and woman created by God, each individually responsible to him, each committed from birth to the lifelong obedience of his laws…. It was Ezekiel and his visions which gave the dynamic impulse to the formulation of Judaism. (pp. 81-82)
Ezekiel’s book concludes with a vision of Jerusalem, restored to life by the divine breath or spirit—an act recalling the very Creation in Genesis—through which Israel is revived. Following the Return, Ezekiel describes how the new and perfect Temple