Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/865

Rh E Z E K I E L 829 &quot; whose right it is&quot; (chaps, xi. 14-21 ; xvii, 22-24 ; xx. 40-44 ;xxi. 32 [27]). 2. The eight chapters which follow (xxv.-xxxii.) belong to the period which elapsed between the beginning of the siege and the announcement of the capture of Jerusalem; xxix. 17-21 is an exception, belonging to the 27th year of the prophet s exile, and perhaps also chap, xxv., which has no date. During this period the pro phet had no word to speak concerning Judah and Israel. 1 In these chapters the divine woe is pronounced against the seven neighbouring nations which had shown most hos tility to Judah and Israel, namely, Ammon, Moab, Edom, Philistia, Tyre, Sidon, and Egypt. The oracles relating to Tyre and Egypt are of great length. The others are com paratively brief. With regard to Tyre its capture and ruin by Nebuchadnezzar are foretold : and it is predicted that within a very short time Egypt shall be desolate forty years. The addition (xxix. 17-21) made seventeen years afterwards is apparently due to the fact that the earlier prediction regarding Tyre (xxvi. 7-14) had not been literally fulfilled. This section contains several passages that are specially interesting from a literary point of view. The description of the great merchant city in chap, xxvii. is noticeable for the richness of its details, and also for the vigour with which the comparison to a ship is carried out in ver. 5-9, 20-36. Striking also is the dirge (chap, xxviii. 12-19) upon the king: &quot;Thou deftly made signet-ring, full of wisdom, and perfect in beauty thou hast been in Eden, the garden of God ; every pre cious stone was thy covering, the sardius, the topaz, and the diamond. . . . Beside the overshadowing cherub did I place thee ; thou wast upon the holy mountain of God ; thou walkedst up and down in the midst of stones of fire. Thou wast perfect in thy ways from the day that thou wast created, till iniquity was found in thee. By the multitude of thy merchandise they have filled the midst of thee with violence, and thou hast sinned ; therefore I will cast thee as profane out of the mountain of God, and the overshadow ing cherub shall destroy thee from the midst of the stones of fire.&quot; As Tyre had been likened to a ship, so is Egypt with great minuteness of detail likened to a cedar in chap. xxxi. In chap, xxxii. follows a corresponding dirge, in which the assembled nations are represented as mourning women singing their lament over Egypt s grave. 3. The remainder of the book (xxxiii. -xlviii.) dates from after the fall of Jerusalem. In chap, xxxiii. we read how the prophet s dumbness was taken away in the twelfth (more probably the eleventh 2 ) year of his exile, on the day when tidings were brought of the ruin of the city. There upon chap, xxxiv. opens with a brief retrospect, in which the former avarice, idleness, and cruelty of Israel s shepherds which have led to such disaster are exposed and rebuked. But the future the immediate and the distant chiefly occupies the prophet s mind. He tells of a coming shepherd, &quot; David,&quot; under whose rule great and uninterrupted pros perity is to be secured. Edom is to be finally destroyed, but the twelve tribes are to be resuscitated and gathered together in their own land once more. A final battle has yet to be fought with Gog from the land of Magog, who shall come up against the chosen people with a great army, but only to be utterly destroyed, that Israel may thence forward dwell in safety, wholly secure from ny possible repetition of former calamities. Then follow in detail the final arrangements of the reorganized theocracy. The new 1 The language of xxiv. 27, taken along with that of xxxiii. 22, has led many to the conclusion that Ezekiel was literally dumb during this period, and that the oracles belonging to it must necessarily have been written, not spoken. But xxix. 21, dating from a much later period, requires to be also considered in this connexion. He may possibly have been speechless on certain subjects only. s So the Peshito and a few of the MSS. See Ewald, Hitzig, Bleek. temple, its dimensions, construction, furniture, are described; new laws as to sacrifice and festival are given for the priests, prince, and people of the new commonwealth. Directions are given for the equitable partition of the Holy Land among the twelve tribes, and for the building of the new city, which is to be called by the new name Jahveh Shammah, &quot; the Lord is there.&quot; In all these regulations a general formal resemblance to the Pentateuchal legislation is abundantly manifest; but the differences of detail are no less striking. The following may be mentioned among others. Ezekiel s temple is larger, but simpler, than that of Solomon. The distinction between the Holy and the Most Holy Place is much less marked. Both ark and high-priest are passed over in silence. The priesthood is specifically Zadokite. The &quot;prince&quot; has priestly functions assigned him. The morning burnt-offering is brought into special prominence; of the great festivals, the passover and the feast of tabernacles alone are noticed. The feast of pentecost is omitted, nor is any mention made of the great day of atonement, but an observance unknown in the Pen tateuch, on the 1st and 7th of the first month, is proposed instead. The genuineness of the book of Ezekiel has seldom been questioned. Some perplexity has been caused by the state ment in the Talmud (Bala bathra 15, 1) that the men of the great synagogue &quot; wrote &quot; Ezekiel. This obscure expression, by which most probably mere editing was meant, has been deprived of some of its importance by Kuenen s demonstration of the unhistorical character of the entire tradition regarding the great synagogue. To wards the close of last century some doubts were ex pressed by Oeder, Vogel, and an anonymous English writer in the Monthly Magazine (1798), with regard to the genuineness of the last nine chapters, which were supposed rather to be of a Samaritan origin, and by Corodi with respect also to chaps, xxxviii. and xxxix.; but these doubts were unanimously set aside by the not too conservative critics of that period. Zunz (GottesdienstlicJie Vortrage, 1832; also Gesammelte Schriften, i. 217 /., 1875) was the first to impugn the genuineness of the entire work, his thesis, in its most recent form, being that no such prophet as Ezekiel ever existed, and that the present work bearing that fictitious name was written somewhere between the years 440 and 400 B.C. His arguments are partly of the a priori kind, such as that the special predictions con tained in it (xvii. 16, xxiv. 2, 16, &c.) are inconsistent with the genuineness of the book, and that it is inconceiv able that in 570 B.C. any prophet could ever have thought of suggesting a new division of the Holy Land, or of drafting a new law-book, or of sketching the plans of a new temple and city. He argues further from the silence of other scriptures, particularly of Jeremiah and of the book of Ezra, with regard to Ezekiel ; from certain allusions in the book itself, such as those to Daniel, to the wine of Halybon, &amp;lt;fec. ; also from its grammatical and linguistic peculiarities. There is still practical unanimity, nevertheless, among critics of all schools in the opinion that the stamp of Ezekiel s in dividuality is unmistakably and even obtrusively visible in every page of the book that bears his name. Keil and Kuenen agree in holding him to have been its author, and its editor as well. He is believed indeed not to have reduced it to its present form till near the close of his life; and many have embraced the opinion of Ewald, that the earlier dates have in some cases been incorrectly given by him. The text, it ought to be remembered, however, has reached us in a somewhat impure state. The question principally discussed in recent years, and likely to be discussed for some time to come, in connexion with Ezekiel s name is not whether he wrote less than tradition has assigned to him, but rather whether he may