Alter does not mince words. “Ezekiel is surely the strangest of all the prophets.” Next, he gives a little background. “He was a Jerusalem priest, in all likelihood part of the group of an exiled elite that was deported to Babylonia with King Jehoiachin in 597 B.C.E., a decade before the destruction of Jerusalem and the more general exile. His entire activity as a prophet took place in Babylonia.” Ezekiel’s prophecies reflect his vocation in the priesthood. “Ezekiel often exhibits distinctively priestly concerns—with purity and impurity, with the Temple and architectural configurations, and with the regimen of sacrifices. But what most distinguishes Ezekiel is that so much of his prophesying is conducted in a condition that looks like God-intoxicated derangement…. His power as a prophet stems from the hallucinatory vividness and utter originality of his visions.”
In Ezekiel 1:4, Ezekiel seems to see an image of God. Alter explains the uniqueness of Ezekiel’s specific prophecy, “a storm wind was coming from the north, a great cloud, and fire flashing, and radiance all round it…. God reveals himself in fire and lightning and cloud…. It combines the pyrotechnic paraphernalia of divine revelation with imagery evidently borrowed from sundry Mesopotamian sources—the wheeled throne, the four faces of the creatures like the four faces of the Babylonian god Marduk, the iconic animals…. It is visibly poetic prose…. The words do not scan as poetry, yet some of the diction is poetic…. Ezekiel has devised a prophetic prose-poetry that has scant precedents.” Alter then details, in Ezekiel 1:28, exactly how unique this vision is, “the look of fire with radiance all round. Like the look of the rainbow that is in the clouds on a day of rain, this was the look of the radiance all round, the look of the likeness of the glory of the Lord…. Never before in biblical literature has God’s “glory,” kavod, been given such visual realization.”
Alter gives a little historical background and a linguistic lesson in Ezekiel 3:15, “Tel Abib. Though this looks like a Hebrew name, “mound of the sprouting season,” and modern-day Tel Aviv drew the name from here, it is actually Akkadian and means “mound of the flood.”” Ezekiel often repeated himself. In Ezekiel 7:4, Alter relates one such echo, “you shall know that I am the Lord. This is a virtual refrain in Ezekiel. The idea behind it is that until now the people, pursuing its refractory ways, behaved as though YHWH did not exist, but as they bear the terrible punishment for their acts, they will be forced to recognize His existence and power.” Alter describes some more linguistics of note in Ezekiel 9:4, “trace a mark on the foreheads. The word for “mark,” taw, is the last letter of the Hebrew alphabet. In paleo-Hebrew script, the form of this letter was an X. The saving mark on the forehead recalls the mark that saves Cain from retribution.”
In Ezekiel 20:12, Alter details the history of the time period, “And My sabbaths, too, I gave to them to be a sign between Me and them. In the late monarchic period and on into the era of exile, there was an increasing emphasis on the centrality of the sabbath, as attested in passages in Jeremiah and Trito-Isaiah as well as in Ezekiel. The portability of the sabbath as a community-affirming observance may have made it especially appealing in a time when the Temple was no longer accessible.”
Alter is quick to point out a poetic flourish. In Ezekiel 26:16, he states, “They shall don shuddering. In a shrewd metaphorical move, the Tyrian princes, having shed all their finery, clothe themselves not in garments but in shudders.” In Ezekiel 27:11, Alter points out another bit of poetry—or, rather, lack there of, “Men of Arvad. One should note that Ezekiel readily slips from poetry—virtually required by the qinah, the lament form—into prose, with no real change in content. This is not a prophet who is entirely comfortable in verse.”
In Ezekiel 33:16, Alter describes a finer point of theology, “All his offenses that he committed shall not be recalled for him. In Ezekiel’s vision of divine justice, a person lives in a condition of constant existential choice: the wicked man can reverse the dire consequences of all his previous trespasses by deciding to do what is right, and the righteous man can cancel all the good effects of his acts of justice by sliding into acts of wickedness.” Alter also notes when previous books of the bible are referenced. In Ezekiel 36:10, it is Genesis, “I will multiply humankind upon you. The mountains have been shorn of human population by the devastating conquest. Now they will again abound with people. The verb “multiply” and the term for “humankind,” ‘adam, obliquely recall the Creation story: the national restoration is to be a second Genesis.”
Finally, Ezekiel spends the last few chapters of the book going through the minutia of a second Temple is mystifying detail. In Ezekiel 41:2, Alter helps break it down, “And the width of the entrance was ten cubits, and the supports of the entrance five cubits on each side. Most modern translations seek to impart coherence to this whole account of the layout of the Temple by choosing terms familiar in our own architecture—“vestibules,” ledges,” “porticoes,” and the like—and rearranging the tangled syntax. But, in fact, even if we knew the precise meaning of these architectural terms, which we do not, Ezekiel’s report of spatial entities and their dimensions is quit bewildering. The clarity, then, of the modern translation is illusory, and the present translation is meant to replicate the bewilderment conveyed in the Hebrew.”
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