Ezekiel 20

Summary

These two chapters in Ezekiel rehearse parts of Israel’s tragic history in different ways. This episode discusses both chapters, but devotes more attention to several controversial and difficult passages in chapter 20. Ezekiel 19 is a lamentation that uses animal and plant imagery to describe the demise of Israel’s last few kings. Chapter 20 reviews Israel’s history of apostasy and Yahweh’s gracious refusal to abandon them altogether.

Inspiration

But I thought it was interesting and pointed it out for this particular reason: How does this help us think better about inspiration? (I'm going to use that word "better.") A lot of people have this notion that inspiration means that the writer's head is empty, that the writer's mind goes blank and then God sort of fills it with words. This is the way verbal, plenary, full inspiration is taught to a lot of Christians: that the writer doesn't really have much to do with the process. These are the words of God, and so God puts them in the writer's head. The writer might not even be cognizant of what's going on. They're not really even understanding what they're doing. It's just God downloading it.

Chapter 20

Let's go into chapter 20. We get some things in here that are going to take us into the kind of stuff that I like to look at: Israelite religion and maybe some of the darker elements of that. There's some controversy here in this chapter when we get to Ezekiel 20. I don't really want to take the time to read the whole thing, but we might end up doing that. What we have here in chapter 20 is, in a nutshell, a description or overview (not necessarily a travelogue, but an overview) of Israel's past history. Naturally, when Israel's history gets overviewed (especially if it's the prophets), it's going to be about how bad Israel was—their constant complaining and rebellion against the Lord. This is going to be described either in prose narrative or it's going to have certain imagery associated with just being a pain in God's neck, so to speak. Just this constant resistance and complaining and rebellion and—of course—apostasy as well. Deuteronomy 32 is another one of these, where the chapter goes through Israel's behavior from Egypt on into the wilderness and how they went astray and worshiped other gods and so on and so forth. That's kind of what you're going to get here in Ezekiel 20. There are a number of repetitive themes. One is, of course, the rebelliousness of Israel despite God's mercy.

That's going to be a thing that's repeated. Another one is the wilderness wanderings themselves. There's a constant reference to that.

And then, thirdly, the motive of Yahweh's concern for his own name. In this chapter, this is going to be repeated a number of times and repeatedlyit's the reason why God acts to deliver them. "I'm going to do this for the sake of my own reputation." That language to us is familiar, either through preaching or our own reading of the Old Testament (God doing something for the sake of his name), but sometimes we don't situate that in the context of the Deuteronomy 32 Worldview, where God has decided to elect or choose his own nation, and it's not one of these other ones! He abandons or disinherits the other nations to the lesser gods (to the sons of god in Deuteronomy 32:8), and then he creates Israel from Abraham right after the Babel incident. These are all God's decisions—to disinherit this bunch and to create a new nation from the loins of Abraham (and, of course, Sarah). This is God's decision to do that, so if he just sort of lets them die or fade into history, if he doesn't intervene, if he doesn't save a remnant, then the other nations, of course, and their gods (think about it) could look at Yahweh and think all sorts of things: "You were inept. You were impotent. You couldn't pull this off. What a stupid idea." So God acts in the interest of his own name, his own person. I'll say a little bit more about that in a moment, because that's a recurring thing that's sort of a big deal in chapter 20. But there are other things here. We might as well just jump into it here.

Ezekiel 20:1–3 ESV

In the seventh year, in the fifth month, on the tenth day of the month, certain of the elders of Israel came to inquire of the Lord, and sat before me. And the word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, speak to the elders of Israel, and say to them, Thus says the Lord God, Is it to inquire of me that you come? As I live, declares the Lord God, I will not be inquired of by you.

We've seen something like this before. We get the date formula and it works out to July or August of 591 B.C, so we're still a few years from the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple. Ezekiel was taken in the second wave of captivity.

The elders who were there with him (the Jewish leadership that's there in Babylon)... they show up. They've done this before (in chapter 14). They come and sit at Ezekiel's feet. If you recall the discussion back then, maybe they've come again here in chapter 20 in the hope of hearing some news about the homeland. "What do you know? Has God shown you anything, Ezekiel, about what's going on back there? Has God said anything to you about how long we're going to be here? When are we getting out of here?" That sort of thing. It's probably the latter, in terms of God's response in verse 3:

As I live, declares the Lord GOD, I will not be inquired of by you.

Basically, "My timetable isn't going to be arranged and carried out on the basis of what you want. It's just not going to happen." So God isn't very pliant here when the elders show up again. We've seen earlier in chapter 14 and other chapters why that is. It's because they're just as bad as the generations that have preceded them. "Yeah, you're here and you're alive. You should be thanking God that you're alive. But that doesn't mean that God looks at you as though you're any better than the people who have lost their lives and the people who will lose their lives back in Jerusalem." We talked about that a lot with Ezekiel 18 and the individual accountability issue. Verse 4 is God, again, speaking to Ezekiel:

Ezekiel 20:4 ESV

Will you judge them, son of man, will you judge them? Let them know the abominations of their fathers,

Now here we're back to this "sins of the fathers" thing, which we just talked about with Ezekiel 18, so the question here would be: does this contradict chapter 18, with its emphasis on individual accountability? And the answer here is the same as it was in chapter 18: no! Remember when we talked about chapter 18, that the "sins of the fathers" language is part of why the exile was happening, but it wasn't the whole basis. Chapter 18 also reminded us that the current generation of Israelites were just as much to blame. So there would only be a contradiction if the current generation was innocent. "Hey, why are we getting punished for the sins of our fathers?" But that isn't the case! They're also just as bad. They aren't innocent. Block writes a nice little summary here:

Yahweh’s disposition toward Israel is transparent; to him the nation has historically been merely one of the Canaanite nations. In his development of this thesis the prophet will raise two primary arguments. First, Israel’s total depravity is reflected in that the people have been idolatrous since their beginnings in Egypt. Second, enraged by their response to his grace, Yahweh had decided already while they were wandering in the desert to scatter them among the nations (v. 23), but had delayed the punishment until the cup of iniquity was full.

“Hey, you were just like the other ones and I chose you, etc.” That act of grace (choosing them when he had disinherited all the other ones) is making Yahweh angry because of their response to it. What do we expect God to think? God is basically saying, “Look, the whole nation in its whole history…” (and this is part of the point of chapter 20—rehearsing the whole history) “…from the day I brought you people out of Egypt up until now, this has been your pattern. You are no more innocent than the generations that preceded you. This has been the consistent, constant pattern."

So what you have in chapter 20, from this point at verse 5 all the way to verse 31 (which is going to be pretty close to the end of the chapter) is a wholesale arraignment or accusation or rehearsal of Israel's apostasy up to the present day. That's the purpose of this chapter (to reiterate this point). We'll pick up with verse 5:

Ezekiel 20:5–14 ESV

and say to them, Thus says the Lord God: On the day when I chose Israel, I swore to the offspring of the house of Jacob, making myself known to them in the land of Egypt; I swore to them, saying, I am the Lord your God. On that day I swore to them that I would bring them out of the land of Egypt into a land that I had searched out for them, a land flowing with milk and honey, the most glorious of all lands. And I said to them, ‘Cast away the detestable things your eyes feast on, every one of you, and do not defile yourselves with the idols of Egypt; I am the Lord your God.’ But they rebelled against me and were not willing to listen to me. None of them cast away the detestable things their eyes feasted on, nor did they forsake the idols of Egypt. “Then I said I would pour out my wrath upon them and spend my anger against them in the midst of the land of Egypt. But I acted for the sake of my name, that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations among whom they lived, in whose sight I made myself known to them in bringing them out of the land of Egypt. So I led them out of the land of Egypt and brought them into the wilderness. I gave them my statutes and made known to them my rules, by which, if a person does them, he shall live. Moreover, I gave them my Sabbaths, as a sign between me and them, that they might know that I am the Lord who sanctifies them. But the house of Israel rebelled against me in the wilderness. They did not walk in my statutes but rejected my rules, by which, if a person does them, he shall live; and my Sabbaths they greatly profaned. “Then I said I would pour out my wrath upon them in the wilderness, to make a full end of them. But I acted for the sake of my name, that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations, in whose sight I had brought them out.

So on and so forth. This is the pattern. "This is what you did, this is how you reacted to my grace, and I should have just sort of rid myself of you. But I didn't because of the sake of my name." This is the pattern you're going to get throughout the chapter.

A few things here before we jump back in. Did you notice in verse 5 the wording "on the day when I chose Israel" and it was a reference to Israel being in Egypt there in verse 5 through 9? That takes us into a couple of difficulties, or maybe potential difficulties. Perhaps a better way to say it would be several issues related to the names of God in Israel's history. If you think, ", I don't know what you're talking about here"... Well, did God choose Israel when they were in Egypt? What about the patriarchs? Didn't God choose to create Israel from nothing (speaking theologically there)? They didn't exist, but he obviously used Abraham and Sarah to start the nation. Wasn't that long before Egypt? What's this language about "the day I chose Israel" with the reference to going down to them in Egypt and telling them to forsake their gods and then taking them out of Egypt? What's going on here? I'll give my two cents after reading what Block writes:

The selective nature of Ezekiel’s use of Israel’s sacred traditions is obvious. He is silent on Egypt as a house of slavery and on Yahweh’s redemptive activity. Israel’s history commences with Yahweh’s election, self-revelation, covenant, and promise. Why he began his history of Israel in Egypt rather than with the patriarchs is not clear. He was surely familiar with the Priestly tradition of the Abrahamic covenant, by which Yahweh promised to enter into a special relationship with the patriarch and his descendants, and to give them the entire land of Canaan as their own possession (Gen. 17:1–8). Perhaps the prophet perceived the patriarchs as the pious archetypal recipients of God’s blessings (cf. 33:24).

24 “Son of man, the inhabitants of these waste places in the land of Israel keep saying, ‘Abraham was only one man, yet he got possession of the land; but we are many; the land is surely given us to possess.’

So it’s evident that Ezekiel knows about the patriarchs (that’s Block’s point) and that Abraham was a godly man. So why not begin with Abraham? Back to Block:

More likely, he seems to have grasped the full significance of Israel’s encounter with Yahweh in Egypt. The patriarchal traditions were too closely linked with El Shadday, the divine name associated with promises of covenant relationship. But Egypt is the place where promises are fulfilled. According to Exod. 6:2–8, it is as Yahweh, the same God’s covenant name, that this transpires.

Now this takes us into this whole issue... I'm going to go to Exodus 6. The key verse is verse 3, but I'll begin in verse 2:

Exodus 6:2–3 ESV

God spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am the Lord. I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty, but by my name the Lord I did not make myself known to them.

2 God spoke to Moses and said to him, “I am the LORD [YAHWEH]. 3 I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as God Almighty [El Shaddai], but by my name the LORD [YAHWEH] I did not make myself known to them.

So you look at that and source critics (people who would be proponents of the JEDP theory... this is a key verse for them. To them, this justifies dividing up the Pentateuch (the Torah) into sources, one of the criteria of which would be divine names. There's the J source (Jehovah or Yahwist source), then E would be "El" words like El Shaddai or El or Elohim or something like that. So if you're familiar with JEDP, this is one of maybe a good 6 to 8 criteria to divide the Pentateuch/Torah into sources. So this passage is a big deal because it says very plainly (or at least seems to say very plainly):

I appeared to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, as El Shaddai, but by my name YAHWEH I did not make myself known to them.

I don't want to go off into JEDP. There is another way to understand this text where it doesn't draw this hard and fast distinction between the names, so there's that. But for our purposes here, what Block is saying when he brings this up is, "Look, if we take Exodus 6 here at face value, God has appeared to Moses on the mountain (the burning bush incident) where he reveals the name: I am that I am." It's from hyh or hwh in old Semitic ("I am or I cause to be" or something like that). Again, I have a thing on the website about the meaning of the divine name. You could just go up there and look at it and reading.

At the burning bush, God (in this story, at least) introduces himself to Moses by this particular name. You're going to read lots of stories in your English Bible up to Exodus (all the way through Genesis) and you're going to see the divine name here and there. People would say that's the sources being brought together and this is editing and Moses didn't write this stuff... We're putting all that aside. (Though Jesus said he did ....uhmm)

If you go with the biblical story—if you take Exodus 6 to mean what it says—then this incident (historically speaking, in the flow of Israel's history)... This would be the incident here where we have this covenant name given to Moses. So if we take it for what it is, this is sort of a turning point, and it happens in conjunction with God saying, "I've heard the cries of my people in Egypt. I'm going to send you down there and we're going to get them out and Israel is going to be reborn as a nation." So that might be what Ezekiel is thinking when he says "on the day I chose Israel" when they were in Egypt. This incident may be what he's thinking about—when God comes to Moses and says, "I want you to refer to me now as Yahweh because I am that I am." Yahweh is the third person form of hyhor hwh. That's where it comes from. This would be a turning point in the history of the people. Maybe this is what Ezekiel is thinking. Maybe this is why he sort of starts the history of the people in Egypt, rather than with the patriarchs. Could be. We don't really know for sure, but it's kind of an interesting point because if you read this it's clear enough in your English Bible. You read Ezekiel 20 and you might think, "Wait a minute! This isn't really when Israel as a people began. It began with the selection of Abraham and Sarah and God's supernaturally enabling them to have a child, and all that stuff. What about all that, Ezekiel? Why are you starting with the people in Egypt?" Well, this might be the reason—the revealing of the covenant name.

I'm in the minority here, and there are really technical, theological reasons why people would dispute this (none of which, I think, are very compelling, but that's me). I'm with Frank Moore Cross at Harvard (who is now deceased but I think did the most important work here) in concluding that Yahweh means "he who causes to become or to come into existence" and that sort of thing. That would really fit well with the context, because the point is not that there are no Israelites. The point is that Israel is not its own entity—they're slaves in Egypt. And God says, "I'm going to send Moses down there and bring them out, and we're going to rebirth them. They are now going to become a nation. This is something new. And I'm going to cause this to be by my power. I'm going to go down there with acts of power to defeat the gods of Egypt and bring them out and they will be my people." That makes a lot of sense to me. There are reasons why other critical scholars resist that, but I'm not going to bore you with all those details. But I think what Block is suggestion is coherent, that this may be what Ezekiel is thinking. He might be thinking of Exodus 6. He might be thinking of this moment in history and this is why he says what he says in this particular place.

As far as keys to this, just adding a few thoughts to that... You do get a reference to the house of Jacob here. If you think about it and go back to chapter 20, you have here in verse 5:

On the day when I chose Israel, I swore to the offspring of the house of Jacob…

Jacob is Israel. It's not like Ezekiel has forgotten about the patriarchs because he mentions the house of Jacob. Does that help? I think it helps. We can't say that Ezekiel doesn't know anything about the patriarchs or he doesn't care, so that's the point. We need to factor that in. Secondly, if you think about the whole line here in verse 7 (after God had brought them out of Egypt):

7 And I said to them, ‘Cast away the detestable things your eyes feast on, every one of you, and do not defile yourselves with the idols of Egypt; I am the LORD your God.’

If you're thinking of the Egyptian story, where would this come in? You could say, "The idolatry kind of did start even before the time in Egypt." Remember the story going back to the house of Jacob. Jacob is told to get rid of the teraphim(gods), and we have this specific incident with Rachel, where she pretends she's having her period and she's sitting on the teraphim that Jacob wants to get rid of and she doesn't want to get rid of them—that whole episode. So you do have references to Israelites (people in the house of Jacob) that are doing questionable religious things even before they go into Egypt. So we don't read about idolatry in the early chapters of Exodus when the people are slaves in Egypt. We just read about them getting delivered. For Ezekiel to say this in the context of the burning bush event (if he is thinking of that and thinking this is when Israel was called/chosen, that God picked them out of Egypt and he told them to quit being idolaters)... You might look at that and say, "There's nothing in the book of Exodus about their idolatry. Well, you have this thing before they go down to Egypt, so there could have been this thing going on. Who's to say what they were doing in Egypt? That's really what I want you to think about. There's no indication in the Torah anywhere about what the Israelites were doing religiously in Egypt. We don't know if they were all pure Yahweh worshipers. We don't know if some of them sort of redefine the worship of Yahweh in idolatrous ways. We've read that even in the book of Ezekiel itself. People were doing that thinking they were worshiping Yahweh. We don't know anything about what they were doing.

So for Ezekiel to connect idolatry with the period in Egypt... Even though we don't read about that specifically in the early chapters of Exodus, that should not be viewed as some sort of historical mistake or lead to the idea that Ezekiel doesn't know what he's talking about. He would certainly know better than we do because he's closer to the fact and they're going to have their own traditions and what-not. You could make the argument that even though this is an argument from silence (we don't know anything), it's reasonable to think that the Israelites would have had a mixture of idolatry in there when they were in Egypt because every place else that we read about them (every other moment of their history, every other period) they're doing that, so why would that be an exception? Again, that's a reasonable argument.

I would add this, though: I think this could be a reference to what happens at Sinai (the whole golden calf incident). And I think if we know how to read that a little bit better we can make an argument (I'll be honest—it's an implied argument) that the nation of Israel in Egypt during the period of slavery was not theologically as pure as the driven snow. I think we can make a reasonable argument based on what happens at Sinai. If you remember the story of the golden calf, they're there at the foot of the mountain and we have Moses go up. He doesn't come back for a long time (we know the story). Aaron is weak and is talked into making a golden calf for the people to worship. "This the god (or gods) who brought you out of Egypt" and so on and so forth. And we look at that and we think, "What a bunch of idiots! How is it reasonable at all to have gone through the Red Sea event and then to get to Sinai and look at this golden calf and say it's the God who brought us out of Egypt? It makes them look like morons."

Well... maybe not. Maybe this is what they're thinking; follow along here. This is a calf—a golden calf there at Sinai. In Israelite thinking, this may have been the way they conceived of (wrongly, aberrantly) their God—as a calf, or more particularly, as a bull. You say, "What are you talking about?" Well, in Genesis 49:24 we have a phrase where the God of Israel is called the “Mighty

One of Jacob”—the abir ya yaaqob. This is a title of Yawheh in Psalm 132:2, Isaiah 49:26, Isaiah 60:16 (this is much later material. Abir (aleph, bet, yodh, resh—for those who know Hebrew) is spelled identically to the word for "bull": aleph, bet (with a dagesh in it), yodh, resh. In terms of consonants, there's no difference here. This is why some scholars think "Mighty One of Jacob" could be translated "the bull of Jacob." (This is the same word you get in Psalm 22 for the bulls of Bashan, by the way, and just bulls generically.) Here's why you should care: because Canaanite "El" (the lead god of the Canaanite pantheon) is referred to as a bull in Ugaritic texts. It's a different term; it's the Ugartic equivalent of the Hebrew sor (bull). The Ugaritic term is tur. But here's the point. Since we know that Canaanite El was viewed as the highest deity and we also know (from the Hebrew Bible) that the God of Israel is referred to with the same El term (we can argue about whether it's a proper name or not, but it's just the term for deity. We have El Shaddai, El Elyon, El-this, El-that—all these things for the God of Israel)… In the minds of many Israelites... You've gotta realize, folks, that they don't have Bibles. They don't even have teachers. There's no written revelation at all. So when they're thinking of the High God, it's quite plausible to think that at least some Israelites would have conflated El from Canaan or Ugarit from the God of the patriarchs. It's very reasonable to think that. So if one of the ways that God is described is a bull and then you make a golden calf at Sinai and say this is the God who brought you out of Egypt, there would be a lot of Israelites who would look at that and say, "Well, yeah—we get that. That makes sense. Let's have a party!"

It's still idolatry because ... well, we know what God's reaction to it is. We know we're going to get one of the commands about not making graven images. We know all that. But the people there could be doing the same kind of thing we see later in the book of Ezekiel, when they're bowing down to the sun and they think they're worshiping Yahweh because he's the highest God up in the heavens. They're doing sort of the religious math that wouldn't have been strange to many of them. Now, it's worse for the people later in Israel's history in the book of Ezekiel—back with the solar worshipers and all that. It's worse because they do have written material. They know they're not supposed to be making images of things in heaven and earth and all that. They know that. Well, the people at Sinai don't have any of that, so it's very conceivable that this act that they do at Sinai made sense to many Israelites there. But then you're going to have some that say, "I think we should wait for Moses to come down from the mountain. I don't know about this because this just kind of looks like what Egyptians would do and what other peoples would do. We should wait for Moses. We don't know if he's dead"... the whole thing playing out.

What I'm saying is Ezekiel, again, might have been thinking of this sort of incident and this sort of religious behavior back at Sinai. If that's the case, that could indicate (here's your implied argument for what's going on with the Israelites while they're in Egypt as slaves) that they were doing this all along. They could have been worshiping the God of the patriarchs along with idols. Or they could have thought of him in these terms. We just don't know. We're not told in Exodus what the situation was. But you get an episode like this, where if you put yourself in that historical context... Again, we can look at it with a wider net here and see how Yahweh is described in certain passages as the abir (which can certainly be translated "bull")... We look at that sort of thing, and without them knowing any better, that's what they could have been doing. That could have been Yahweh worship in Egypt during the years of bondage. It's not like God is happy with it because they're slaves. They're slaves in Egypt. God decides at the time of Moses, "Okay, we're going to act. I'm going to get them out of Egypt. We're going to bring them back to this mountain, and you're going to tell them who I am. We're going to refer to me by this covenant name. This is my covenant name. I'm bringing them out. I am making them anew. This is the new birth for the nation. We're going to hit the reset button here. You're going to bring them to this mountain and I'm going to give them my laws. I'll give them my commands and spell out for them how I want to be worshiped and how I don't want to be worshiped."