VOL. XX.

Queen's Quarterly

January, February, March, 1913

No. 3

THE TEACHING AND INFLUENCE OF EZEKIEL.

MY share in the matter of Ezekiel at the present times is

limited to some notice of the teaching of the prophet and of his influence upon the later history and career of Israel. Ezekiel belongs distinctly and consciously to the goodly fellowship of the prophets, the long succession of men, named and nameless, who discovered for themselves and for us a true religion, a sound morality and a God beside whom there is no other. As such he penetrates into the domain of spiritual things, and comes back to teach mankind what he has seen. Whereupon his fellowmen in the years that follow take heed to his teaching and are moved and moulded by that which he has shown to them.

Like nearly every other writer who has made any considerable contribution to Old Testament literature, Ezekiel wrote and taught much about his God, the supernatural divine being who controls the destinies of men and nations. The prophet's own experience of life and his observation of human events lead him to hold a remarkably distinct belief in the activities of this God. In imagination he sees his God coming from the north in a fantastic chariot, and throughout the book he represents his own utterance as put into his mouth by his God, "The word of the God comes unto him," "The hand of the God is upon him." The mysterious chariot of his God passes before his sight with its noise, its color and its brightness. The God lifts him up and transports him from one place to another, bids him perform strange, symbolic acts, and in a word dominates the entire course of the prophet's life and activity.

Ezekiel imports more anthropomorphism into his conception of God than do some of the other prophets before and after him. The imagery of his opening visions, the great number and the length of the speeches which he represents his God as making, the touches of conversational familiarity, as in the

incident of the women who are seen weeping for Tammuz, the all allusions to bodily organs and to human passions, the representation of God as a lover and husband, all these combine to raise in the mind the picture of a God not altogether emancipated from the human form in which our earliest thoughts of the divine are moulded.

The God of Ezekiel is still essentially a national deity. He is not indeed restricted in the old territorial sense, the very course of events having liberated him from Sinai and Zion and having removed his abode to some dim region in the north among the Hills of God, which the prophet seems to identify with the Garden of Eden. At the same time, Ezekiel's God is chiefly, almost entirely, interested in the affairs of Israel, their sin, their punishment, their redemption, their worship, their Temple. God indeed exercises power and sway over other peoples but when these are named and their affairs canvassed, it is in relation to Israel and to Israel's God that they are viewed. "I am against thee Pharaoh King of Egypt, and all the inhabitants of Egypt shall know that I am the Lord because they have been a staff of reed to the House of Israel."

Ezekiel's God is extremely jealous of the recognition which is his due from men and nations. Throughout the book there echoes like a burden or refrain the demand that men shall know that he is God. The denunciation of evil, the threatening of doom, the promise of restoration, are uttered in order that those concerned, whether individuals or communities,"may know that I am the Lord." This mode of speech is Ezekiel's dramatic way of insisting that everything in life, joy or woe, sin or forgiveness, must be estimated from a religious standpoint. Men reckoned without God, but Ezekiel brings their God among them and bids them understand their experience in the light of faith.

With all a prophet's intensity Ezekiel gives to his God an extreme intolerance of sin. A great part of the book is taken up with vituperation against the sins which are so forbidding in his sight. He will pour out his fury upon the sinners and accomplish his anger upon them; he will recompense them for all their abominations. They have not executed my judgments, but have despised my statutes, have polluted my sabbaths and their eyes were after the idols of their fathers. The quality of holiness in God is developed by Ezekiel throughout the book