Punishment and the Glory Departs

Summary

Ezekiel 8 and 9 falls in the section of Ezekiel that concerns two themes: the punishment of Jerusalem and the departure of the glory of God. In Chapter 8 we’re introduced to some specific points of Israelite idolatry – worship of Asherah and worshipping the creator as though he were part of creation. Ezekiel 9 hearkens back to our earlier episode about God keeping a record of the faithful. The judgment vision also takes us back to similar events like the death angel at Passover.

Introduction to 8 & 9

let’s jump in here to Ezekiel 8. Again, just to sort of get a little bit of context for this: We’re doing 8 and 9 today, and these chapters fall into a pretty significant section of the book. Chapters 8 through 11 really concern two themes, and that is, these are visions of punishment for the people of Jerusalem, but the section also deals with the circumstances that lead to the departure from the temple of the glory of God. That’s a big thing in Ezekiel: the loss of the glory, which of course would naturally coincide with the destruction of the temple. But the second one people have sort of heard about, it’s kind of famous: the Ichabod passage—the glory has departed. We’re not there yet, but this is the section in which that’s going to happen, chapters 8 through 11.

Now, you will recall that Ezekiel 4 and 5 had been sign acts, you know, Ezekiel doing—for lack of a better term—dramatizations, visualizations of this impending punishment of Judah and the city of Jerusalem, and of course, the temple. So now we’re getting into, not sign acts describing this, but visions that Ezekiel has. So the object, the target, the theme is the same, but this is kind of a different experience for Ezekiel and a different delivery of the same kind of message.

Now in chapter 8 we’re going to be getting into some of the specifics about the idolatries that are being punished, so particularly it’s going to add details to what we’ve covered in Ezekiel 6. Remember the big theme in Ezekiel 6 is “why is God doing all this stuff to us?” and the answer is “because you’re idolaters.” Specifically, what was in the cross hairs there was state-sponsored idolatry in chapter 6. So now we’re going to get some more specifics about what all that concerned and then in chapter 9 we’re going to get this vision of divine executioners sent by God. It’s sort of a vision/allegory of what is going to happen at the hand of Nebuchadnezzar in this impending invasion and destruction of Jerusalem and the temple.

So let’s just begin. We’ll read in Ezekiel 8. We’ll just start there. I don’t know that we’ll read every verse of both passages, but we’ll read a lot of them, so let’s just go to Ezekiel 8:1. It says:

Ezekiel 8:1–4 ESV

In the sixth year, in the sixth month, on the fifth day of the month, as I sat in my house, with the elders of Judah sitting before me, the hand of the Lord God fell upon me there. Then I looked, and behold, a form that had the appearance of a man. Below what appeared to be his waist was fire, and above his waist was something like the appearance of brightness, like gleaming metal. He put out the form of a hand and took me by a lock of my head, and the Spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven and brought me in visions of God to Jerusalem, to the entrance of the gateway of the inner court that faces north, where was the seat of the image of jealousy, which provokes to jealousy. And behold, the glory of the God of Israel was there, like the vision that I saw in the valley.

In the sixth year, in the sixth month, on the fifth day of the month…

We’ll just pause there. That would be—if you’re keeping track of the chronology and the dates—that would be roughly 14 months after the initial vision of chapter 1. So…

In the sixth year, in the sixth month, on the fifth day of the month… the hand of the Lord GOD fell upon me there.

As I sat, you know, in my house, the hand of the Lord fell upon me there. He’s with, in verse 1, the elders of Judah. This is going to be a different group than the elders that I’ll mention later, but back to the text here.

2 Then I looked, and behold, a form that had the appearance of a man. Below what appeared to be his waist was fire, and above his waist was something like the appearance of brightness, like gleaming metal.

Now that should sound familiar. Let’s just pause there. That’s language drawn from Ezekiel chapter 1, except in this case we’re not going to get the wheels and the throne, and the fire—the fiery throne—all that stuff. We get:

…a form that had the appearance of a man. Below what appeared to be his waist was fire, and above his waist was something like the appearance of brightness, like gleaming metal.

Again, this very radiant thing. Verse 3:

3 He put out the form of a hand and took me by a lock of my head, and the Spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven and brought me in visions of God to Jerusalem, to the entrance of the gateway of the inner court that faces north, where was the seat of the image of jealousy, which provokes to jealousy. 4 And behold, the glory of the God of Israel was there, like the vision that I saw in the valley.

Now let’s just stop there. If you’ve heard a lecture of mine on the Two Powers in Heaven, this is a passage that I will often reference in regard to how “two powers language” is used in a passage where the Spirit becomes one of the figures in that passage. So the Spirit gets drawn into, or described through the use of “two powers language.” And you say, “I’m not following.” Well, here’s what I mean. Look at the terminology. Verse 2:

Ezekiel 8:2 ESV

Then I looked, and behold, a form that had the appearance of a man. Below what appeared to be his waist was fire, and above his waist was something like the appearance of brightness, like gleaming metal.

Okay, so Ezekiel’s sitting there. He’s in his hut, his house, with these elders and he sees the appearance of a man, and that below the waist was like fire and above the waist was something like the appearance of brightness—language drawn from Ezekiel 1. So he’s seeing the figure he saw in Ezekiel 1, which we know from Ezekiel 1 was referred to as both “the glory of God” and in chapter 10 (which we haven’t gotten there yet, but we’ve already mentioned in it conjunction with chapter 1), that figure was also called “the God of Israel.” So, as we talked in chapter 1, we have this anthropomorphized language about the God of Israel. Okay, fine, we’ve been there before, we’ve seen that. But then in verse 3, “he,” apparently this man, the form of a man—the anthropomorphized God of Israel— put out the form of a hand and took me by a lock of my head. More anthropomorphic language. But then it says this:

Ezekiel 8:3 ESV

He put out the form of a hand and took me by a lock of my head, and the Spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven and brought me in visions of God to Jerusalem, to the entrance of the gateway of the inner court that faces north, where was the seat of the image of jealousy, which provokes to jealousy.

Now here’s where we get the ruach entering into this. So the question is: well, who lifted him up? Was it the anthropomorphized man or was it the Spirit? And the waters get muddied even more because he’s taken to a place and he says, “the glory of the God of Israel was there,” in the place that he was taken

to. You say, “Wait a minute… I thought you were already looking at it. I

thought this anthropomorphized man who was called ‘the Glory’ in chapter 1 is the one picking you up! How can the one picking you up be the one you see in the place where you’re transported?” So the language here is not only two figures, apparently, but since we have the ruach, the Spirit, mentioned, this becomes Old Testament fodder for a three-person Godhead. Now ruach, of course, can mean “wind,” so you could say, “the wind lifted me up between earth and heaven and brought me in visions of God to Israel.” But since this isn’t a literal journey—this is a visionary experience—and because of some of the other things that are said about the Spirit in the book of Ezekiel, most scholars very readily recognize that this is the Divine Spirit—either a divine spirit or the Divine Spirit (the Spirit of God, whatever)—and not just wind.

So you’ve got what looks like two figures, but the two are sort of confused as one, and then you have this introduction of a third. So who’s lifting him up? How can he see the God Israel in the place to which he’s taken when the description used of the God of Israel for the one picking him up matches chapter 1? Who’s the God of Israel in the picture? Is it the one picking up or the one he sees when he gets there? We grant that this is a vision, and visions aren’t supposed to be precise… they’re not supposed to observe the laws of physics and all this stuff. They’re like dreams or whatever. But the issue is the language of the text. It’s not that we can’t sort of map this out in real space-time kind of thing. That isn’t our problem… it isn’t really the issue.

The issue the way this language is used of two or three beings—and not only used, but they’re blurred. The distinctions between them get blurred in places in this passage and in other passages, too. So I just want to alert people to the fact that here’s a passage that becomes fodder for, not only the Two

Powers in Heaven discussion that occurred in the Jewish context (in ancient Judaism—at least prior to the second century A.D.), but it also becomes fodder for perhaps the Spirit of God is a member, is like, these other two, is to be identified with these other two. Again, this is just a glimpse of Old Testament stuff from which the doctrine of a Trinity will develop.

Now, for those of you who remember an earlier study, you know there’s a lot more to this. The human Yahweh—the Yahweh as a man in the Old Testament—becomes the focal point because of the incarnation of Jesus and what New Testament writers say about Jesus. I made the comment before that just as Jesus is but isn’t God, the Spirit is but isn’t Jesus to the New Testament writers. I deal a lot with that in Unseen Realm. There are several places where the Spirit of the Lord is swapped out for the Spirit of Jesus—two places where Paul says the Lord Jesus is the Spirit, you know that kind of thing. What the New Testament writers are doing is kind of like what happens here in Ezekiel 8—they’re using terminology that you could easily associate with two separate beings—one or the other—and then injecting the Spirit into the conversation.

In effect, this is where your Trinitarian thinking comes from. It’s not an invention, it’s a repurposing and a reuse of Old Testament language. Now you have Jesus in the conversation for the New Testament writer. Again, the Trinity is not a new, innovative contrivance—it’s a repurposing of stuff in the Old Testament. Let’s just move beyond that because that’s pretty well-worn territory for at least the Naked Bible Podcast crowd.

We see mentioned here in verse 3 the “image of jealousy.” It’s also going to be mentioned in verse 5. So I read through verse 4, which said:

Ezekiel 8:4–6 ESV

And behold, the glory of the God of Israel was there, like the vision that I saw in the valley. Then he said to me, “Son of man, lift up your eyes now toward the north.” So I lifted up my eyes toward the north, and behold, north of the altar gate, in the entrance, was this image of jealousy. And he said to me, “Son of man, do you see what they are doing, the great abominations that the house of Israel are committing here, to drive me far from my sanctuary? But you will see still greater abominations.”

That’s verses 5 and 6. Now let’s talk about the image of jealousy a little bit. It’s kind of a natural point of curiosity. What is this thing? I think there’s a clue in verse 3. In verse 3, Ezekiel is brought to the inner court that faces north, and then in verse 5, of course, we read:

So I lifted up my eyes toward the north, and behold, north of the altar gate, in the entrance, was this image of jealousy.

Now Block in his commentary has a little note here. He notes:

The Solomonic temple had two courts inside the inner and outer walls, respectively (2 Kings 21:5 and 23:12). The gate of the inner court denotes the gateway through the inner wall, by which access is gained to the courtyard surrounding the temple building itself. In verse 5, the gate in question is identified as the Altar Gate, presumably because the great altar of sacrifice was visible through this gate from the outer court.

If you are either familiar with or are remembering a diagram of Solomon’s temple you can kind of orient yourself, but the key observation that we’ll come back to here is that this image, whatever it was, is basically right at the altar—right at the entryway where the altar is, it’s positioned somewhere in proximity to the altar. Now the terminology itself for “image of jealousy” is a little bit different here than your typical terminology for idols. We have the word “image,” at least the ESV translates image as tsemel, which refers to something sculpted. This term only occurs in two other places in the Hebrew Bible: Deuteronomy 4:16 is one of them, where we have the pesel akem tmunat kal tsamel, roughly translated “the sculpted form of every tsemel,” whatever that is. In that verse it refers to any image of a deity that would be the object of Israelite devotion, but shouldn’t be. So anything that would stand in the place of Yahweh that was a carved image or a graven image or some sort of manufactured image, that’s what Deuteronomy 4:16 was talking about, so it’s kind of a generic reference.

We get a little more specific, though, in the second occurrence of this: 2 Chronicles 33:7,15—so this is the other chapter. There are two chapters where this occurs. And this is in reference to Manasseh’s abominable image, Manasseh’s—the thing that he created and installed there in the temple precinct, which 2 Kings 21:7 refers to as pesel, but then it’s followed by ha aserah. You could translate that as “an idol; a graven image; a graven form of Asherah.” Again, something engraved or carved is a better word for it. A carved form of Asherah. Now, Asherah is probably familiar to some people in the audience. Asherah was a goddess in Canaanite religion. Asherah was the—we might use the word wife—but the consort, the sexual partner—but some would say wife—of El. In Canaanite religion El was the highest deity. He’s not really the one who runs the show, that’s Baal—Baal turns out to be sort of the co-regent or the vizier if you want to use that term. But El was sort of this father god figure and Asherah becomes the mother goddess in Canaanite religion, because together El and Asherah give birth to seventy lesser gods. One of them is Baal, although in other texts Baal appears to be something of an outlier. Baal is called the “son of Dagon,” so there’s this big scholarly discussion: is El Dagon, is Dagon El, are they two different things, what’s Dagon mean? I’m not going to bother rabbittrailing there. But we’ve got here seventy lesser gods produced, procreated by El and Asherah. Baal is called the son of Asherah and he’s also called the son of Dagon, and that sort of thing, so without rabbit-trailing into that issue, we can see what Asherah is—she’s a goddess, a female consort of El. If you’re an Israelite, El is both a generic term for deity and El is a term that biblical writers are going to use of Yahweh of Israel. There are verses that say Yahweh is El or Yahweh is ha el—the El… the real El, the true El, that sort of thing.

Some clarification

So you have a terminological issue going on here; you have an identification

issue going on here. In terms of orthodox Israelite thinking, Yahweh is the El, he is the true El, which means the other El (or the other Els) are imposters. But it would be very easy for an Israelite, especially if they were encouraged by a priest, to say, “Oh, well Yahweh is just El—this El in Canaanite religion, so some of the stuff that the Canaanites do is okay. And one of the things that the Canaanites believe is that El has a wife, and that’s Asherah. So it’s okay if we bring Asherah into the temple, El would be okay with that. Yahweh is El, so Yahweh’s okay with having a goddess here.” You can see the easy path this took, and this is one of the things that the prophets are constantly harping on— distinguishing Yahweh from other Els, other elohim, other Els. This is part of the problem. This is why they have to do it so often and with such force and with such frequency.

So let’s go back to Asherah and ask the obvious question: Well, was Manasseh’s image, therefore, an image of this goddess, Asherah? Now the image of Asherah could be, again, a sculpted goddess figure. There are things called asherimin sanctuaries or high places that were not images of the goddess herself but are poles—the Asherah pole. Some English translations will have that for asherim.

It’s not definite, but it’s likely, that it’s probably a phallic symbol, because Asherah has to do with fertility and that sort of thing. So Manasseh’s image could be either an image of the goddess herself—something that looks sort of humanoid, feminine—or more likely, probably, an Asherah pole. So is this what Ezekiel is talking about?

Now, Block and others (he’s not alone here) says that well, probably not because Josiah according to 2 Kings 23:6 Josiah had destroyed Manasseh’s Asherah pole or Asherah figure from the temple. A part of Josiah’s reformation is to get rid of this thing. Well that, of course, is true, but there’s actually other evidence that this image was indeed an image of Asherah—whatever that was (is it a pole, it is something that looks more identifiable as a goddess—that part we can’t really know). But there’s other image that does take this phrasing and link it to Asherah, so if that’s the case, if that evidence is sound (we’re going to talk a little bit about it in a moment), what this probably means for the sake of the book of Ezekiel, is that sometime after Josiah tore this thing down somebody put another one in there. They created another Asherah tsemel, another Asherah image, and they installed it near the altar. So that could be what we’re looking at.

Now what’s the other evidence that here in Ezekiel we might be looking at another Asherah figure? Well, there are really four lines of evidence, and some of this is going to be familiar. Some it’s going to require the Hebrew alphabet, so for those who have a knowledge of the Hebrew alphabet, you’ll get more out of this than those who don’t, but I’m going to go through it real quickly anyway. There are four elements to this argument.

Asherah figure

One is the Septuagint. The Septuagint in this place in Ezekiel 8 doesn’t read, “the image of jealousy,” it reads, “the image of the buyer,” which sounds really odd (semel qn or qnh, the feminine form, would likely have been the Hebrew that produced the Septuagint translation “the image of the buyer”). Now in the Masoretic text, “image of jealousy” is tsemel ha qnh. You notice how they sound very similar. Septuagint Guy, whoever the translator was, the text he was using— it looks like it read tsemel qn’ or tsemel qnh. It’s qnh—that’s the lemma for buying and acquiring. Whereas the Masoretic text “image of jealousy” would be q (qoph), n (nun), aleph, possibly followed by a heto vocalize it. So very, very similar spellings, but they are completely different words. Now here’s the point: you have a text… I should say this to make things more complicated: The qnaleph thing, you could have the aleph drop out and just use the he on the ending for vocalization. That can happen, too. It happens in Hebrew morphology and Hebrew manuscripts. So you could have two scribes either looking at slightly different words or the same set of consonants and drawing different conclusions about how to translate it. But the Septuagint has “image of the buyer,” so that’s the first part of the evidence—the consonants. What consonants are there, and depending on what consonants you think might be there, which lemma—which 25:00 Hebrew word—is that? Is it a word that means “jealousy” or is it a word that means “to acquire” or “buy?”

Second (to muddy the waters a little bit more): qnh, the verb that ends with the h, with the he, “to acquire or buy,” can also mean “create.” This is a well-known biblical lemma (biblical Hebrew word). It’s controversial because this is the lemma that’s used in Proverbs 8, specifically Proverbs 8:22. The ESV translates, “the Lord possessed me,” “the Lord qnh-ed me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of old.” This is, of course, the chapter on Lady Wisdom. If you go up to thedivinecouncil.com, there’s a brief essay there about the relationship of Jesus to wisdom. It’s important because Proverbs 8:22 portrays wisdom as a co-creator, someone who was there when God fashioned the world. In Proverbs 8:22 right around to verse 30 or so, wisdom is cast as sort of the agent of creation—someone who’s there helping or participating in creation. Well, wisdom has some real interesting things said about it in Second Temple Jewish literature. Wisdom is part of the divine council, wisdom is seated at the right hand of God, all this sort of thing. Now Jews of the day, many of them thought that wisdom was sort of a code word for “Torah.” There are Jews that actually believed and taught in the Second Temple period that the Torah was like a deity—the Torah was divine. The Torah was personified by this language. Of course, what others did was know that wisdom wasn’t the Torah, wisdom was a second divine figure—part of the Two Powers in Heaven thinking. And in the New Testament, wisdom gets applied to Jesus. Of course, the New Testament says that Jesus was the co-creator so that would make sense, but what the problem is is that when you go back to Proverbs 8:22, you have this verb qnh.

And if you translate it “create,” well then you have the co-creator being a created being—and of course, the New Testament denies this about Jesus, so we have a big theological discussion. Now you can read the thing on thedivinecouncil.com,

“Jesus and Wisdom.” Ultimately, qnh can be translated other things besides “aquire” or “buy.” It could be translated as “possess,” it could be translated as “create,” it could be translated as “bring forth” because in Proverbs 8:22 it’s used in parallel with other lemmas that mean “to bring forth” (which, of course, doesn’t require a beginning point, it just requires the introduction of something or the unveiling of something—something made apparent that before was not apparent). This was a huge part of the early Christological discussion, as you can imagine, in the early Church. You’ll find out if you read the article on the divine council.com that “create” is not a very good translation in terms of the attributes of God because if wisdom is an attribute of God (even though you want to argue it’s personified), you can’t have God creating wisdom as a co-creator because, well, didn’t God have wisdom before that? How could you have the God of the Bible lacking wisdom? It doesn’t make any sense. By definition, you wouldn’t have the God of the Bible if he lacked wisdom. And how would he be smart enough to create it because he knew he would need it… he wouldn’t know that because he wasn’t wise! So “create” is really a problematic translation, which is why many people prefer something else. ESV has “possessed” here, for instance. Again, this was a focal point of early Christological discussion, but qnh does not require “create” as a translation. Even if you wipe Jesus and the binitarian thing off the table, you’re left with the problem of how God can lack wisdom, and that’s a significant Jewish Old Testament theological problem. But let’s take this back to Ezekiel. Let’s say that the text read that the image, the tsemel qnh (qoph, nun, he), and let’s say that qnh can mean create. Now we have the image of the creator, if it’s masculine. But if it’s feminine—masculine would be qn’, again with Hebrew pointing, you’d have a masculine participle. The feminine would be qnh. If it was feminine, you’d have the image of the creatress, and that is a clear reference to Asherah, because that’s what she was. She was the creatress. So “image of jealousy” might not really be a good way to read it. You might have to go with the Septuagint here and then translate it as “the image of the creator” or “the image of the creatress.” Either way you have idolatry. If it’s masculine, you’d have Israelites making a graven image of the God of Israel, which they’re specifically commanded not to do. But since this language is used of Manasseh’s Asherah image, a lot of scholars are going to say, “Look, the feminine would make sense here, the image of the creatress,” and so what you’re dealing with here in Ezekiel 8 is another image of Asherah—whether it’s

30:00 her as a feminine form or a phallic symbol like the Asherah pole, we don’t know. But I think that’s probably what we’re looking at here. We have an Asherah image. And Block states, even though he doesn’t want to go with the Asherah thing because of what happened under Josiah, he says this—and I think it’s a really good observation, he says

The position of this tsemel [this image right at the altar] is overtly idolatrous and poses a direct challenge to Yahweh.

Because it’s at the atoning altar! I mean, what does that say about their theology? It doesn’t say anything good! (laughs) It says lots of bad things. The people would have known what this was, and would have been horrified—if you’re an orthodox Israelite anyway—you’re horrified with this. And then Ezekiel says, “But you’re going to see still greater abominations.” You have to be thinking, “Oh boy, what?”