[Dialogue] The Origins of the Bible, Part XV: Ezekiel

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Thursday November 13, 2008 



The Origins of the Bible, Part XV
Ezekiel



When Americans are asked to name the great presidents of this nation, four names appear more often than any others: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. The thing that each of these presidents has in common is that they presided over a time of trauma, transition and change in our nation's history: Washington at the birth of our nation; Lincoln during the dissolution of the Union; Wilson over World War I; and Roosevelt during both the great depression and World War II. This list thus begs the question: Does the nation in crisis call forth great leaders? Or do leaders become great because they have to deal with a crisis? I suggest that it is the latter, but historians will debate that forever. 
When we study the prophets, the same question arises. Does a crisis in the life of the Jewish people serve to call great people into leadership or do these leaders become great because they had to deal with a crisis? Once again I suspect it is the latter, but biblical scholars will debate this forever. There have been two great crises in Jewish history where the extinction of the whole nation was a real possibility. One was in the 20th century when six million Jews were exterminated by the Nazi government in Germany. The other was the time of the conquest of the Jews at the hands of the Babylonians and their subsequent exile in the land of Babylon. 
The crisis in the 20t
h century called David Ben-Gurion into leadership. The earlier biblical crisis, occurring in the first half of the 6th century BCE, called the Prophet Ezekiel into leadership. This week in our series on the origins of the Bible we turn to a consideration of this great figure upon whom the continuation of the Jewish nation literally hung. 
The book of Ezekiel is the third of the "Major Prophets." We have looked already at the first two, Isaiah and Jeremiah. Ezekiel is probably not as well known as these, but perhaps he should be. His star still burns brightly in the Jewish diadem as a critical life in Jewish history. 
It is hard to recreate the person Ezekiel from the text of the book that bears his name, since we now know that the text has been edited a number of times, corrupted badly and even that chapters 40 to 48 are generally regarded as a later addition to this text by another author, a kind of II Ezekiel. Yet there is a real figure that stands in the shadows behind the words of this book, one who lived in history and who changed the character of the Jewish people. Since his life overlapped with Jeremiah they shared some common background. Let me review it. 
In the late eighth century BCE, the nation of Assyria was the scourge of the Middle Eastern world. They had a disciplined and fierce military establishment. The first nation to develop horse-drawn iron chariots, the precursor of tank divisions, to hurl into battle, they destroyed their enemies on every side. The Northern Kin
gdom of Israel fell to them in 721 BCE and, in the process, its people became known as "The Ten Lost Tribes" that today live only in mythology. The fate of these Jews in defeat was to be removed from their land, resettled across the Assyrian Empire and ultimately to disappear in to the DNA and gene pool of the Arab- Semitic world. The Southern kingdom of Judah, with its capital in Jerusalem, survived this scourge by becoming a vassal state of Assyria, who then ruled that world with an iron fist until falling to the rising power of Babylon in 612 BCE. After a period of consolidating their power, the army of the Babylonians swept down on and destroyed Judah and Jerusalem in 596 BCE. This was the first time the city of Jerusalem had been conquered in 400 years. For the "Holy City," believed by the Jews to be the dwelling place of God, to fall was devastating. Leading Jewish citizens were then rounded up and marched off to Babylon to be resettled as an underclass in the service of their conquerors. They appeared destined to disappear as the Northern Kingdom had done about 125 years earlier. Among those exiles, however, was a young prophet whose name was Ezekiel, who was apparently a member of a well respected priestly family. In that crisis this young man rose to become a determinative leader of his people. 
The first problem to be faced in the exile was that of survival as an identifiable people. What could keep these exiled people intact and separate, the bearers in history of a natio
nal destiny? Even if they never saw their homeland again, they had to create the desire in their descendents to do so. The fate of the Jews of the Northern Kingdom must not be allowed to be the fate of these Jews. Ezekiel saw that as his primary task. 
This man was a psychiatrist's delight. He had vivid dreams, perhaps even in Technicolor, which he used to galvanize his people. Two of his dreams made such indelible impressions on future generations that they have been turned into Negro spirituals and used to illumine the black experience of being first exiled from their native Africa and second being enslaved by their white oppressors. The first of these spirituals was based on the first chapter of Ezekiel, and proclaimed that "Ezekiel saw the wheel, way up in the middle of the air," words that expressed a yearning for deliverance to come from on high. The second, based on Ezekiel 37 was entitled "Dem bones gonna rise again." In this dream, Ezekiel saw the Jewish nation under the analogy of a valley filled with dead, dry, fleshless bones. There was no hope of restoration or resurrection. God speaks to Ezekiel in this dream, addressing him by his favorite title, "Son of Man," to ask: "Can these bones live again?" To which Ezekiel replied, "Lord, only thou knowest!" Hope for a future life for the Jewish nation was at that time beyond Ezekiel's imagination. Behind both of these dreams was the biblical idea that God was the source of life. 
In the Jewish myth of creation it was the breath o
f God that was breathed into Adam, transforming him from being an inert body of clay into a God-infused living soul. God's breath had also been identified in the Jewish tradition with the wind that animated the forest. Now, Ezekiel's dream proclaimed, the breath of God also has the ability to recreate the lifeless Jewish nation. So it was that in Ezekiel's dream the breath of God blew over that valley and caused those dead bones to be reassembled. That is, "the toe bone connected to the foot bone, the foot bone connected to the ankle bone, the ankle bone to the leg bone" until they were all standing up again. The Jewish nation was destined to be revived with the life force, the breath of God. 
That dream now became Ezekiel's task to fulfill. Of course it was a task that no one person could accomplish on his or her own. It would indeed be the task of several generations. One person, however, had to have the dream, see the vision, stamp it on the minds of his people and turn it into a reality. That person was Ezekiel. 
The exiled people under Ezekiel's influence made separation, which was the prerequisite to survival, their highest priority. In three distinct ways they set out on a national agenda to make themselves different, to keep themselves separate and to maintain their Jewish identity. 
First, they resurrected the ancient Sabbath Day observance, a tradition that had long ago fallen into disuse. They codified every detail of the Sabbath. Jews not only refrained from work on that day,20they even immobilized themselves. A Sabbath Day's journey was defined as three-fifths of a mile. No Jew could walk more than that on the Sabbath without violating the law. These Jews were "different" and "separate," and to remain so they made these Sabbath Day observances the very mark of their Judaism. This was the time when the seven day creation story with which the Bible now opens was written and added to their sacred text. Its purpose was to ground the Sabbath Day observance in the act of creation as the command of God. 
The second thing they did was to adopt kosher dietary laws. The Jews would not eat the flesh of swine or shellfish and Jewish food had to be prepared in kosher kitchens. So Jews never ate with Babylonians. It was, they said, the law of God, designed to keep them separate. 
The third thing they did was to revive the practice of circumcision that had also fallen into disuse. This meant that they literally carved into the flesh of every Jewish male the mark of Judaism, making intermarriage very difficult and enhancing separation. 
To ground these practices in the will of God a group of priestly writers, inspired by Ezekiel, edited the entire sacred narrative of the Jews so that these traditions were seen as unique to the entire history of their call from God to be God's people. Thus the priestly version of the scriptures came into being. 
It worked. The Jews were the only defeated and exiled people in human history to return intact to their homeland after defeat a
nd exile to reestablish their national history. That vocation was burned deep into the Jewish psyche and would forever remain a characteristic of these people. They would need it again some 2,500 years later: in 70 CE, Jerusalem was destroyed again, this time by the Romans, and the Jewish people were scattered across the face of the earth. The maps of human history contained no Jewish state from 70 until 1948, when the nation of Israel was established in accordance with the Balfour Declaration of 1917. During that exile time the Jews endured many horrors, much persecution and even the Holocaust, but the lessons of Ezekiel were too deep to be ignored and so they survived once more to return to the land of their fathers and mothers. 
I do not mean to minimize the pain and dislocation that the return of the Jews to Israel and to the land of Palestine caused in 1948 and since. I do mean to suggest that a people who can maintain their national identity for almost 1900 years as a homeless people is a remarkable accomplishment. They have Ezekiel to thank for this survival.

–John Shelby Spong
 























Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong




Penny Carson,of Peterborough, Ontario, writes: 
I am a Sunday school teacher at the George Street United Church. Christmas is coming, and that means a Christmas pageant. If the material in the story of Jesus' birth is not history, then I don't know what to do about our children's Christmas pag
eant and still be true to this new understanding of the Jesus birth stories as myth. Would you give me some suggestions as to how I might handle this – quickly? Christmas will soon be here.




Dear Penny,

Why is it that people think that something has to be historically accurate in order to be portrayed dramatically? No, of course it is not history that a star announced Jesus' birth. Stars were used to announce a number of historic births in the Jewish tradition, Isaac and Moses among them. It is not history that a star can wander across the sky so slowly that wise men can keep up with it or that this star can actually stop over wherever the wise men are supposed to dismount. It is not history that Middle Eastern magi will follow a star to the birthplace of a new king of the Jews, who in fact is said to be the son of a carpenter. Neither do angels sing to hillside shepherds in the middle of the night to tell them about the birth of a baby in Bethlehem. Shepherds do not then go to find this child in a crowded village with no clues other than that the babe is wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger. 
That, however, is not what these narratives are about. The gospel writers knew that they were not writing history, they knew they were creating an interpretive portrait. That is also what you are doing when you present their portrait in a pageant. Why not then open the pageant with the words, "Once upon a time." Would that not signal that this20is not history but like all great myths is still profoundly true and significantly important? 
Perhaps you might also present a commentary to accompany the pageant. That commentary could then explain the sources on which the gospel writers were drawing for their details and thereby explain the meaning of these symbols. For example scholars know today that Matthew's story of the wise men and the gifts of gold and frankincense come out of Isaiah 60, where kings come to the brightness of God's rising, they come on camels and they bring gold and frankincense. The star in the East is lifted out of the Balaam and Balak story in Numbers 22-24. The manger/crib is a reference to Isaiah 1. The swaddling clothes come out of the Wisdom of Solomon and on and on we could go. A friend of mine who is a priest in the Church of England tried to write a contemporary version of the Christmas story but found it had little appeal to his audience. I do not think people respond to attempts to take the mystery out of an ancient tale. That does not mean, however, that they think the ancient tale is literally true or actually believable. 
Perhaps we ought not to worry that for a few days each year people suspend their rational faculties and enter a world of magic where stars do wander and angels do sing and wise men do travel and virgins do conceive. There is enough time each year to deal with reality, maybe Christmas is the time for pretending. What is important is that we need to know that pretending20is exactly what we are doing.

–John Shelby Spong








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