The Cornerstone Biblical Commentary series provides up-to-date, evangelical scholarship on the Old and New Testaments. Each volume is designed to equip pastors and Christian leaders with exegetical and theological knowledge to better understand and apply God’s Word by presenting the message of each passage as well as an overview of other issues surrounding the text. The commentary series has been structured to help readers get at the meaning of Scripture, passage-by-passage, through the entire Bible.
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David L. Thompson (Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University) has written scores of popular and professional articles. His books include Bible Study That Works and God’s Healing for Hurting Families. Dr. Thompson, an ordained elder in The Wesleyan Church, has pastored several churches.
Eugene Carpenter (Ph.D., Fuller Theological Seminary) is Scholar in Residence and Professor of Old Testament, Hebrew, and Biblical Theology at Bethel College, Mishawaka, IN. He has authored and contributed to several books including commentaries on Exodus and Deuteronomy.
CORNERSTONE BIBLICAL COMMENTARY
By David L. Thompson Eugene CarpenterTYNDALE HOUSE PUBLISHERS, INC.
Copyright © 2010 David L. Thompson
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-8423-3435-8Contents
Contributors to Volume 9.................................viGeneral Editor's Preface.................................viiAbbreviations............................................ixTransliteration and Numbering System.....................xiiiEZEKIEL..................................................1DANIEL...................................................285
Chapter One
Ezekiel David L. Thompson
INTRODUCTION TO Ezekiel
In the book of Ezekiel readers encounter perhaps the most striking and eccentric (some have said deranged!) figure among Israel's prophets. He is also among the most theologically daring and creative of the prophets. Ezekiel survived spiritual, social, and national upheaval, as well as personal trauma. In the midst of it all he heard and saw the God of Israel in unprecedented ways. He then expressed these visions in extraordinary passages, many of which are difficult to understand.
In spite of the difficulties confronting interpreters, the book of Ezekiel addresses God's people powerfully and uniquely. Generations trying to come to terms with their role and stake in human tragedy have found instruction here. Persons seeking to contextualize the ancient faith in their own worlds have found caution and guidance. People of God struggling to make sense of the loss of everything that gave meaning and structure to their lives, and others groping for hope in their apparently dead-end situations, have heard a life-giving word here.
AUTHOR
If we identify the prophet Ezekiel as the author of this book, as has traditionally been done, we have some information about him. Ezekiel was a Zadokite priest, the son of a certain Buzi (1:3), living in Judah during the decades leading up to the first conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar (2 Kgs 24). From his youth, Ezekiel followed priestly Torah and imbibed priestly convictions (4:14); he had become passionately committed to Israel's whole Torah and her historic covenant faith. Along with other intelligentsia, artisans, leaders of Judah, and King Jehoiachin, he had been deported by Nebuchadnezzar to Babylon and settled in a community at Tel-abib on the Kebar River near Nippur (1:1-3). In his thirtieth year-the fifth year of King Jehoiachin's exile (593 BC)-the Lord commissioned him as a prophet to the rebellious nation of Israel, especially to the exiled community (2:1-5; 3:15). Four and a half years later his beloved wife died (24:1, 15-18). Ezekiel continued his prophetic ministry at least through April 571 BC, the time of his last dated oracle (29:17-21). We have no information regarding the close of his ministry or the end of his life or the precise relationship between him and "his" book as it now stands, beyond what may be inferred from the book itself. The book itself does, however, offer extensive information about Ezekiel's passions, convictions, theology, and ministry.
The dominantly autobiographical character of the book of Ezekiel suggests that the prophet himself wrote substantial portions of the work (by his own hand or through a scribe, as Jeremiah did through Baruch). Repeated connection of Ezekiel with the message reception formula ties massive amounts of the book directly to him, with no evidence in these oracles preventing a written connection. This remains true, even though the dates (e.g., 8:1) most likely locate the oracles that immediately follow them rather than entire segments or sections they introduce. Association of the prophet with the actual recording of at least some of what he heard and saw tends in the same direction (24:2; 43:11).
The book's pervasive first-person stance could also suggest that Ezekiel himself was responsible not simply for recording various oracles but for shaping and structuring the present book. The unusual attention to precise dating of oracles and Ezekiel's explicit connection to the chronological matters in the book could support this (24:2). Some other exilic/postexilic prophets give precise attention to dates (e.g., Hag 1:1; Zech 1:1), but the number of chronological references in Ezekiel (14), the import of this chronological flow to the unfolding structure of the book, and the interrelationships between this chronology and the prophet's experience as spokesman for the Lord are striking. The prophet's apparent connection with extensive portions of the book has also led many to attribute the whole to him, precisely because they perceived throughout the work the pervasive influence of the same person. Further, nothing in the book points necessarily to a writer and readers after the fall of the Neo-Babylonians or beyond any significant return of exiles to Judah. These and other factors allowed S. R. Driver to summarize critical opinion at the opening of the twentieth century by declaring "No critical question arises in connection with the authorship of the book [of Ezekiel], the whole from beginning to end bearing unmistakably the stamp of a single mind" (1909:279; similarly Cornill 1907:315-316).
Various Views of Authorship. Identification of the prophet as the author, however, is not a foregone conclusion. Among the church fathers, Jerome questioned the link between Ezekiel and the book. Like all the prophetic books and many other biblical works, the book of Ezekiel comes to us anonymously. The book names no author or editor(s). The Talmud notes that "the men of the Great Synagogue wrote Ezekiel" (b. Hagigah 14b); this probably refers, however, to their work of copying (perhaps editing) rather than authorship. Specifically how much, then, of the material in the book of Ezekiel can be traced to Ezekiel's hand, and to what extent does Ezekiel's hand figure in the literary structure and logic of the book we now have?
As early as 1756, Oeder questioned the literary integrity of the book, regarding chapters 40-48 as a spurious addition to Ezekiel's work of chapters 1-39 (Pfeiffer 1941:525-526). In 1792, Corrodi reckoned that chapters 33-39 did not come from the prophet either (Pfeiffer 1941:526). Against the majority opinion in nineteenth-century critical scholarship, already in the 1830s, Zunz (followed by Seinecke in the 1880s) concluded that the book of Ezekiel was actually pseudepigraphic, composed by an unknown writer centuries after Ezekiel. Convinced of the structural and stylistic unity of the book, once they had separated it from Ezekiel on other grounds, they found it necessary to attribute the whole to later, unknown hands. Still, the majority of scholars were not persuaded to set aside the book's apparent connection of the prophet with substantial materials in the book, if not with the book as a whole. Again in the 1930s C. C. Torrey championed a "Pseudo-Ezekiel," with its core written around 230 BC, but he failed to convince many (Eissfeldt 1965:366, 369).
Kraetzschmar introduced the idea of multiple recensions as a key to the book's composition (1900). Focusing on parallel texts and doublets found in the book, Kraetzschmar thought two recensions by Ezekiel himself, one in the first person and a shorter recension in the third person, were later joined by a redactor. Many credit G. Hlscher's 1924 work, Hesechiel: Der Dichter und das Buch (Ezekiel: The Poet and the Book), with providing the main...
