Ezekiel 8-9
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And he brought me to the entrance of the court, and when I looked, behold, there was a hole in the wall. Then he said to me, “Son of man, dig in the wall.” So I dug in the wall, and behold, there was an entrance. And he said to me, “Go in, and see the vile abominations that they are committing here.” So I went in and saw. And there, engraved on the wall all around, was every form of creeping things and loathsome beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel. And before them stood seventy men of the elders of the house of Israel, with Jaazaniah the son of Shaphan standing among them. Each had his censer in his hand, and the smoke of the cloud of incense went up.
Now, because these elders are not limited to seventy but they come from the seventy, scholars presume that this isn’t a reference to the Sanhedrin (the early form of the Sanhedrin), but more probably a group representing lay—that is, nonpriestly—leaders in Jerusalem. Political figures. So here we go again: state sponsored idolatry. State-sponsored, again, by the people who should know better. They’re burning incense in the dark. It’s described as this room of pictures. Each one is there in this room of pictures. Now the pictures, these images, are going to correspond to the list of animals in verse 10:
So I went in and saw. And there, engraved on the wall all around, was every form of creeping things and loathsome beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel.
So there are engravings of unclean things on the walls and they’re burning incense there. Now Taylor has a short commentary, this is part of the Tyndale Old Testament Commentary series, that comments on this. I think it’s worth a quick read. Taylor writes this about this section:
Engraved upon the walls (portrayed, 10, EVV, is inadequate for a word meaning ‘incised’ or ‘carved in relief’) [ Basically that means they were reliefs, is what he’s saying] were all kinds of creeping things, loathsome beasts, and idols.
Creeping things (Heb. remeś) are specifically mentioned as part of God’s good creation (Gen. 1:24); they are not by definition all unclean [ Just because it creeps doesn’t mean it’s unclean], as the AV of Leviticus 11:41 would suggest, for the word translated ‘creeping things’ in that context is the Hebrew šereṣ. They do, however, include many reptiles and small verminous creatures that scurry and slither over the ground, from snakes to scorpions, and these certainly were unclean. The serpent-deities known from Egyptian, Canaanite and Babylonian religions give grounds for supposing that this incident reflects the widespread influence of foreign cults on Israelite worship, cultivated no doubt from political, more than purely religious, motives.
Basically, that’s an allusion to alliances—political alliances. Again, allowing this sort of influence as some sort of positive, political, good-will gesture within the context of Israel. So I read the quote just to make the point that the language suggests, like Taylor says, the widespread influence of other Ancient Near Eastern cults. This is why there’d be certain specific unclean creeping things engraved in relief on the walls. So, apart from the idolatry, you have also the issue of alliances with these pagan states that themselves—you know, God was supposed to be their king, so that’s a violation—but then one of the reason that you don’t do that is not only that you want to show that you trust God but also because you’re going to be infected by what they believe. And sure enough, that’s what you get here.
Now as far as the role of incense (I only bring this up, and I’d have to look for it… it popped into my head here), I had a friend in graduate school in an Israelite religion seminar one time who did a paper on the role of incense in worship. It’s really hard to find material on that. If I could find it (it might be in his dissertation, and that probably means I can’t post it). If I find just his paper-paper then I could, but I’ll give it a look because I could post that. But anyway, the bottom line here is that you used incense not only, as many commentators say, “They used it in the tabernacle so that you couldn’t smell the animal stink.” Well, okay, that probably has something to do with it, but think of it this way: when you entered into sacred space, this is where you used incense. So you weren’t depending on the incense cloud to filter outside the tabernacle where they were killing the animals and burning them, and the animal poop and all this stuff. That’s a residual effect, but that isn’t why you did it. You used incense in sacred space for a very simple reason: it marked that space different than other space. In other words, you couldn’t just walk around the Israelite camp or the city of Jerusalem and smell incense. When you smelled incense it was a clue to your senses—it should have been a clue to your brain—that okay, this was divine territory, this is divine turf, because this is burned on holy ground, sacred ground. It distinguished the place from other places. That’s a really important part of the logic of why you would use incense—to distinguish the sacred from the profane, from the normal. We spent a lot of time on this in Ezekiel [sic.,Leviticus], talking about how these distinctions were made. Incense is part of that. So if you take that back to Ezekiel, what do you have? You have Israelites burning incense to these unclean figures carved on the walls, and the connotation was, “These are our gods.” They are sacred. We are marking out space for them, as though the space they occupy is holy and sanctified and sacred. Of course, for Ezekiel this is just abominable. If you’re the reader and you’re an orthodox Israelite, you’re thinking, “This is horrible!” So what does Ezekiel say in verse 13, right after he’s done describing that, he says:
He said also to me, “You will see still greater abominations that they commit.”
So now if you’re the reader you’re thinking, “What else could they possibly be doing?” Well, they could be doing a lot of things, and you’re going to get it here again with more specifics in the chapter. Verse 14:
Then he brought me to the entrance of the north gate of the house of the Lord, and behold, there sat women weeping for Tammuz.
Weeping for Tammuz. Now Hebrew here, when it actually refers to Tammuz, the Hebrew text here has a (sorry for the grammar spasm again) has a definite article prefixed Tammuz: ha tammuz. And if you remember about satan in Job 1, you do not prefix a definite article to a proper personal name. You just don’t do that. So this isn’t actually a reference to the deity Tammuz himself, but it’s certainly something connected with Tammuz. Or it refers to (this is probably the best way to look at it) the ritual act—the religious act—of weeping for Tammuz, which was well-known throughout the ancient world. People wrote songs for this, they used descriptions from Mesopotamian and Sumerian stuff, and it worked its way into the Greek culture and the Syro-Palestinian culture. There were odes to Tammuz, weeping for Tammuz, to commemorate Tammuz. If you don’t know anything about Tammuz, I’ll just give you a short reference. So the fact that they put a definite article on it refers to some specific ritual or some specific song, or maybe some specific literary piece or genre—not technically to the deity himself because of the definite article. But either way it’s directed at the deity, so that’s kind of like a distinction without a difference, or six of one and half dozen of another. But I just thought I’d point it out.
This is from DDD, I believe… no this is from Harper’s Bible Dictionary, the article written by Richard Clifford, who’s an author I particularly like. I don’t always agree with him, but he always says something useful
Tammuz is the Hebrew form of Dumuzi, which is a Sumerian term for “proper son.” Tammuz was a god widely honored from the third millennium, B.C., in Mesopotamia, onward. The vast and complex Mesopotamian literature about this god shows three essential aspects of him: as lover and consort of Inana [ a goddess], as one held in the underworld and mourned because of his absence [ in other words, in Mesopotamian stuff, Tammuz dies and rises from the dead again; that’s why the people are mourning—because of his absence], and as the embodiment of spring vegetation, and then of vegetation in general.
So Tammuz was a fertility deity and fertility didn’t just mean weird, aberrant sexual rituals. It meant fecundity for the land—for cattle, for crops, that sort of thing. And that’s important because you eat that stuff. That’s what keeps you alive. Clifford continues:
Many laments are preserved that bewail “the far one” who has disappeared. Detained in the underworld, the laments reflect the aspect of Tammuz as god of vegetation. His disappearance is connected to the drying up of the steppe in summer. His cult may have been brought to Israel by the Assyrians in the 9th and 8th centuries, B.C. Aspects of Tammuz became synthesized with west Semitic gods of similar characteristics. Baal Hadu, for example, went down to the underworld, died, rose, and was mourned during his absence. [ That’s a specific reference to Baal, as the Canaanites knew him.] Some of Dumuzi’s traits also appear in Adonis, a god first attested in Greece in the 5th century B.C. Ezekiel’s vision of four sins being committed in Jerusalem at the temple [That’s the chapter we’re in, chapter 8], the third of which is a group of women weeping for Tammuz in the North Gate, refers to this. The women in Ezekiel are mourning this dying and rising god. [ Now catch this—this is the point that I like that Clifford observes.] The action is an abomination to Ezekiel, who believes that God does not die, and therefore cannot be mourned.
Again, God is eternal. This isn't some sort of denial, even on Clifford's part of the incarnation and what-not. Clifford is actually a Catholic. He's going to go with the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. He's a Catholic priest. So that isn't why he's writing this. He's just saying that for the Israelites, this is pre-incarnation, and anything that we would associate with the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ—to an Israelite, well, God is eternal. If he's from everlasting to everlasting, he doesn't die so you can't mourn him. And that's what made this abominable. That's what made it offensive to Ezekiel and the rest of his people, at least those who shared his theology. Verse 15, the chapter goes on:
Then he said to me, “Have you seen this, O son of man? You will see still greater abominations than these.”
I mean, we've been through a bunch of layers of this already, and God—the figure that took Ezekiel by the hair, God of the Spirit, or whoever—brings him to this place and says, "It gets worse than this!" So what's going to follow here is
abhorrent for a number of reasons that are going to become apparent. It's abhorrent because it worships the creator as though he were part of the creation, and it's also abhorrent because it involves turning the back—the people who bow down are turning the back—on the presence of Yahweh. That becomes very offensive. Let me just read. I don't want to get too far ahead of myself. Let's just read verse 16 and you'll get the point here—both of them.
And he brought me into the inner court of the house of the Lord. And behold, at the entrance of the temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, were about twenty-five men, with their backs to the temple of the Lord, and their faces toward the east, worshiping the sun toward the east.
The picture is pretty evident. They're worshiping. The Hebrew term there is hvh— bowing down, then la shamesh. Bowing down to the sun toward the east. Now this takes us in all sorts of different directions. It's an offense to turn your back on the presence of God, but it really takes us into astral or sun-cult stuff in Israelite religion. Now I want to read a section of DDD, and I'll try to remember to tell you when I'm going in and out of this here. Most of this is going to be from DDD because Lipinski has a nice short article on sun-worship in Israel. I'll just jump in at the beginning here. He says:
As used in the Bible, Hebrew shemesh is never an actual divine name. It's never used as a proper personal name. Palestinian toponomy [MS: that's the name of places] of biblical times reflects, nevertheless, the Canaanite cult of the sun god, as shown by place-names like Beth-shemesh, house of the sun, and En-shemesh, the spring of sun, Ir-shemesh, the city of the sun. [ Beth-shemesh is found in Joshua 15:10, for example; En-shemesh—Joshua 15:7; Ir-shemesh—Joshua 19:41] All these preserve the memory of sanctuaries devoted to the solar deity. [ Of course, the sun is worshiped very widely in the Ancient Near East, so he's saying, "Hey, traces of this show up in Canaanite cult centers that are remembered through these place names in the Hebrew Bible."] Surprisingly enough, Hebrew anthroponomy [those are personal names, people names] does not contain obvious traces of a solar cult.
Then he goes into the example of Samson. Look at the first three consonants in Samson-sms. In Hebrew it's shin-mem-shin. Those are the three consonants for sun: shemesh-shem-shon.
So:
Hebrew anthroponomy does not contain obvious traces of a solar cult. For Samson's name may simply mean "little son," as suggested by the diminutive suffix -on.
That's a feature of Hebrew grammar. You add -on to something that makes it little, makes it diminutive. So "little son," is actually what Samson means literally.
He says,
Though the Aramaic proper name Shimshai, which shows up in Ezra 4:8-9 and a few other place, could just mean "sunny" or "sun-lit."
So he's saying there's no real clear evidence that we have a cult of Shamash or Shemesh the sun-god in the Hebrew Bible, even though you have place names that are associated with it. The reason he goes into personal names is that often people would name their kids after the god they worshiped, and he's saying, "Look, in the Hebrew Bible anyway, you don't have any clear examples of someone naming their kid after this deity." So that's probably good evidence that the deity itself, Shamash, as a deity was not worshiped in Israel and therefore not the object of worship here in Ezekiel 8. But the description is nevertheless idolatrous and telling for other reasons, so let's just keep going with some of the stuff that Lipinski says here:
The lack of evident traces of solar worship in Hebrew anthroponomy [ again, personal names] seems to indicate that the cult of the sun was not very popular in Syrio-Palestine in the Iron Age, contrary to Egypt and Mesopotamia. The sun god was a minor deity for the Phoenicians and the Arameans, despite the role of the Ugaritic sun goddess Shapash plays in literary ritual texts of the late Bronze Age. The Deuteronomistic writer mentions worship of the host of heavens comprising the sun, the moon, and the planets, or the celestial objects only during the half of the century of the reins of Manasseh and Ammon (2 Kings 21:3 and 23:5). Therefore, scholars generally suppose that this was an Assyrian astral cult which was imposed upon Judah as a symbol of subjection and vassal status. Its condemnation in Deuteronomy 4:19 and 17:3 [ Where have you heard those verses before? Those are part of the Divine Council world view, that you don't bow down and worship the sun, moon, and stars; they get called elohim; that language gets linked to Deuteronomy 32:8-9, the gods of the nations, the sons of god, all this stuff] reflects the views of the same Deuteronomistic school and does not imply any older practices.
When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance,
when he divided mankind,
he fixed the borders of the peoples
according to the number of the sons of God.
But the Lord’s portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage.
So his view is basically—well, the reason why this shows up here, the reason why it was a problem in Israel was because the Assyrians, as part of not destroying the southern kingdom, or as part of subjugating as much of the Israelite turf as they could—remember Judah gets saved from the Assyrian invasion… We talked a little bit about that before when we talked about the inviolability of Zion. That was the last episode last week. He's saying that Israelites—though the northern kingdom certainly was subject to this and then eventually destroyed. So then his feeling is that there is still some sort of vassalage going on here, that this astral cult found its way into the Promised Land area because of the Assyrians, and then to sort of have good relations with the Assyrians you had Judahite kings adopt some of these worship forms. I think that makes sense. That's not a unique view. What Lipinski's saying here is pretty much the standard way that scholars would look at this. Now he has more to add that's kind of interesting. He says:
The horses and chariots of the sun mentioned in 2 Kings 23:11...
I might as well just look at that verse and read it to you here. This is, again, part of the campaign to weed out the worship of other gods here in 2 Kings 23 it says:
11 And he removed the horses that the kings of Judah had dedicated to the sun, at the entrance to the house of theLORD, by the chamber of Nathan-melech the chamberlain, which was in the precincts. And he burned the chariots of the sun with fire.
So there were actually horses and chariots of the sun in the temple compound that were destroyed. And so Lipinski says here:
The horses and chariots of the sun, as well as Ezekiel's vision of the men prostrating themselves before the rising sun in Ezekiel 8:16, are somewhat different circumstances. In fact, the horses and the chariots were placed at the entrance to the temple of Yahweh [ which is what we just read in the verse] and the men [ now catch this] were practicing their cult in the same temple facing eastwards towards the gate by which Yahweh, the God of Israel, has entered the sanctuary. [ Of course the effect, though, is still to turn his back on him because Yahweh's in the sanctuary—in the Holy of Holies.] These features indicate that the sun's chariot was perceived as Yahweh's vehicle [ remember Yahweh is the rider on the clouds] and that the men seen by the prophet were not sun worshipers (Shamash worshipers) but they were actually devotees of Yahweh. Just as child sacrifice performed in the valley of Ben Hinnom was intended by the people who did it to honor Yahweh.
Again, it's aberrant worship that people are doing certain things thinking that they're worshiping Yahweh. They presumed they were worshiping Yahweh when they bowed down to the sun, but this was contrary to Deuteronomy 4:19-20. This 55:00 gets even more interesting because there are vestiges of this in modern
Judaism. They think they're worshiping Yahweh by bowing down to the sun, like
Deuteronomy 4:19-20 doesn't even exist. It's idolatry, but the people doing it, Lipinski says, they're not thinking, "Oh, we're bowing down to Shamash." They're thinking, "Oh, we're bowing down to Yahweh. We make these chariots to the sun because Yahweh is the sun." They're sort of worshiping the right object but they're doing it in a horrible way. They're doing it in a forbidden way. But this carries over to modern Judaism. Listen to this by Lipinski, this is very interesting:
Relics of this ritual practice are found perhaps in the Blessing of the Sun, the Birkat HaChama, a rabbinic prayer service in which the sun is blessed in thanksgiving for is creation, and its being set in motion in the firmament on the fourth day of the world (Genesis 1:16-19). The ceremony is held once every 28 years, most recently on the 18th of March, 1981. [ That tells you when the book was written.] It takes place on the first Wednesday of month of Nissan after the morning prayer when the sun is about 90 degrees above the eastern horizon. The blessing starts with Psalm 84:12, "The Lord God is a sun and shield."
It's 84:11 in English order. So that's how the prayer, the blessing, starts. It's an antithetic image that suggests that sunlight granted by the Lord and the protection he provides against heat. The prayer also contains Psalm 19, in which you also have lines about the sun:
6 Its rising is from the end of the heavens,
and its circuit to the end of them,
and there is nothing hidden from its heat.
So that part of Psalm 19 is in this Jewish blessing. The prayer ends with Isaiah 30:26: "The light of the sun (the or ha hama) shall be sevenfold as the light of the seven days." Lipinski says:
There can be little doubt that the sun was conceived in biblical times as a vivid symbol of Yahweh's glory. Yahweh's coming is described already in Deuteronomy 33:2 and Habakkuk 3 and 4 as the rising of the sun and his glory comes from the east, according to Isaiah 59:19 and Ezekiel 43:2 and 44:2. While Isaiah 60:19 announces that Yahweh's glory will replace the sunlight when the New Jerusalem will arise. This solar symbolism might have represented a danger for the purity of Yahweh's worship. [ You think? (laughs)] For the sun, the moon, and the stars are even somewhat personified in Joseph's dream. [ Remember Josephs dream back in Genesis 37] Job judges it necessary to profess that he never raised his hand in homage to the sun or the moon, and he even avoids using the word shemesh, "sun," replacing it by the word or, "light."
So what does all this mean? Well, it means that in ancient Israel you had Yahweh being worshiped as the sun. You had Yahweh being worshiped as a thing he had created. Very clearly, Genesis describes the sun being a created thing, created by God. And so you had Israelites thinking they were worshiping Yahweh when they were violating very clear commands about worship of Yahweh—who to worship and who not to worship. So, on the one hand it's like you can kind of pat the Israelites on the back and say, "Oh, at least they weren't worshiping Shamash or Shemesh, the sun." Well, okay, but they were still committing idolatry. Again, Lipinski is saying this idea might have logical or even biblical roots because this language used about Yahweh that shows up in the Hebrew Bible is there. But notice that the verses about Yahweh being associated with the sun and coming from the east and what-not, none of those declare that he is a created being or he is a created thing, as if he's part of the creation. And that was the problem, that you're worshiping—to use Paul's terminology— you're worshiping the creature instead of the creator, which is Paul's definition of idolatry!
Even though there's sort of biblical stuff that you can read and know what they were thinking, depending chronologically on when this or that was written, you could look at certain passages and say, "Okay, this is what they're thinking, this is why they're doing it. It's not so bad." Well, in Ezekiel's mind and in God's mind (because God is showing this to Ezekiel and calling it an abomination) it was bad. I think it's a good lesson for us about—yeah, we want to worship God, but there is a way God wants to be worshiped. And there are ways God doesn't want to be worshiped. That's actually important, and it comes out in something like Ezekiel 8 in a pretty dramatic fashion.
So you go through this whole list of abominations and it ends here in chapter 8 with this worshiping of the sun. In verse 17 we read:
Then he said to me, “Have you seen this, O son of man? Is it too light a thing for the house of Judah to commit the abominations that they commit here, that they should fill the land with violence and provoke me still further to anger? Behold, they put the branch to their nose.
So the chapter ends with God basically saying, "This provokes me to anger." This odd phrase about putting the branch to their nose is something that's kind of interesting. I don't want to spend much time on it, but it's a very odd term in the Targums, which is the Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible, the word that is used there refers to "stench." So it's kind of like all these things, instead of being a sweet-smelling savor to me like proper worship is (using the language of Leviticus), God is saying "It stinks. It just stinks." They put the branch to their nose. That is a possible reference, not to something like a branch that had its own aroma. I hate to put it this way—and here we go with Ezekiel being scatalogical again—but it could refer—and this is indefinite, it's only a supposition that scholars have because of what the Targum does with this term, zemorah—it could be a reference to basically what you wipe your butt with. Then that becomes the thing—remember the wave offering in Leviticus? That becomes the thing that is offered to God. God says, "This stinks." So again, it's very graphic, potentially scatalogical language in Ezekiel for what God really thinks about what he's seeing, what's going on.