Ezekiel 5

A small remnant were to be gathered carefully and bound up in his skirts, yet even of them some would be cast into the fire, and a fire go forth from them into all the house of Israel. If this has special reference to any particular portion of the Jewish people, it would naturally be to that small remnant who remained in the land, but were either cut off with Gedaliah, or went down into Egypt to perish there. The general sense is, manifestly, that only the smallest part of a small remnant should survive these sweeping calamities. A better remnant were saved out of the exiles in Chaldea—this revelation of exterminating judgments on those who remained in Judah being one of the divinely ordained means for their moral culture and restoration to piety and to their own land. H. C.

4. The siege being thus represented, the condition and suffering of the inhabitants are to be prefigured. They are exhibited by the condition of one who, bound as a prisoner or oppressed by sickness, cannot turn from his right side to his left. The prophet was in such a state. Shalt bear their iniquity. The scapegoat was to bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited (Lev. 16: 21, 22), in order that their sins might thus be removed and be remembered no more—so was the prophet, in a figure, to bear their iniquities for a fixed period, in order to show that, after the period thus foretold, the burden of their sins should be taken off, and the people be forgiven. B. C.

5. Here the interpretation of the symbols begins. This represents the doom of Jerusalem—the long-loved and honored city of the exiles in Chaldea, to whom Ezekiel is prophesying. He is setting before them the judgments about to fall on her—long and richly due for her great sins. That she is “in the midst of the nations and countries about her,” looks to her central position among the nations of Western Asia and Northeastern Africa, and to her prominence before all those nations as a people governed and judged by the only living God. H. C.

The middle place was in the East the place of honor, and it was not unusual for nations to regard the sanctuary, which they most revered, as the centre of the earth. In the case of the Holy Land this was both natural and appropriate. Egypt to the south, Syria to the north, Assyria to the east and the Isles of the Gentiles in the Great Sea to the west, were to the Jew proofs of the central position of his land in the midst of the nations (cf. Jer. 3: 19). The habitation assigned to the chosen people was no doubt purposely chosen by Jehovah. It was suitable at the first for separating them from the nations; then for the seat of the vast dominion of Solomon, carrying his arms and commerce in every direction; then when they learned from their neighbors the idol-worship, against which they were specially called to protest, their central position was the source of their punishment. Midway between the mighty empires of Egypt and Assyria the Holy Land became a battlefield for the two powers, and suffered alternately from each as for the time it became predominant. B. C.

Theodoret explains these words thus: “He gave them, he says, the middle of the earth for a dwelling-place. To the east and north of them lay Asia; to the west Europe, linked with them by the sea; to the south Libya. That was done that the nations might be able to learn from the Jews piety and the ordinances of the law.” On the same text Jerome makes the comment: “The prophet bears witness that Jerusalem lies in the middle of the world, and is the navel of the earth. That city is placed among the heathen, that all the nations which dwell round about Jerusalem might follow the God who is known in Judea and whose name is great in Israel.” The exposition of the words of Ps. 74: 12 (according to the Septuagint and Vulgate versions) agrees well with this: “God, our King, has wrought salvation in the centre of the earth.” This centre, it is said, is the place of the cross of Christ, with reference to which these same words from the Psalms are inscribed in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre also. In this sense an ancient Christian poet says:

Here is earth’s central point, and here is victory’s sign.”

And Victorinus of Poitou:

“That holy place, earth’s central spot, we know,

Jerusalem and all Palestine belong practically to a peninsula, which lies in the centre of the Old World, and to which Ararat also belongs. Let one take on the globe the distance from Ararat to the south of Suez, with a pair of compasses, and make a circle with that as a radius; the circle so made will cut the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Aral, the Caspian Sea, the Sea of Asoph, the Black Sea, the Sea of Marmora, and finally, the eastern part of the Mediterranean. On the height of that peninsula, at the sources of the Tigris and the Euphrates, lay Paradise, according to the Mosaic story; near thereto, on Ararat, the ark rested, at an equal distance exactly from the northeastern extremity of Asia (at Behring’s Straits) and from the Cape of Good Hope—in the middle of the longest land-line of the Old World. This central spot, the plateau of Armenia, was the original seat of the human race, the starting-point for the first Adamic dispersion as well as for the second Noachic dispersion. Von Raumer.

5-17. We have here the explanation of the foregoing similitude: This is Jerusalem. The prophet’s head, which was to be shaved, signified Jerusalem, which by the judgments of God was now to be stripped of all its ornaments, to be emptied of all its inhabitants, and to be set naked and bare, to be shaved with a razor that is hired (Isa. 7: 20). The head of one that was a priest, a prophet, a holy person, was fittest to represent Jerusalem, the holy city. Now the contents of these verses are much the same with what we have often met with, and still shall, in the writings of the prophets. H.

11. “Mine eye shall not spare, neither will I have pity, but I will recompense their way upon their head.” In this vision God showed Ezekiel that He would bring down His fearful and unsparing wrath upon His own Church, which had gone away from Him and identified itself with the world. The vision is meant equally for us. God never changes. He will treat the Christian Church as He treated the

Jewish. His fierce anger will be felt both by ministers and people who turn His truth into a lie and use the Christian name as a cover for lust and greed. H. Crosby.

13-17. These verses expand and reiterate the thought that these judgments are the stern demand of Divine justice and the outburst of irrepressible indignation, designed not only as a fearful retribution upon the guilty Jews, but as a lesson of solemn instruction and admonition to all surrounding nations. This assumes that the principles on which God dealt with the Jewish nation were not unique and special, but general, and applicable, therefore, to all nations of every age and clime, and hence to our own nation and people. This fact deserves to be seriously pondered. In the case of the Jews, God has taught us how He will judge and punish every other guilty nation, including, of course, our own. If it be asked, Why such threatenings against Jerusalem and the Jews of Judea, in the prophecies of Ezekiel, borne only to the exiles in Chaldea? The answer is at hand. Those Jews in their native land were their own brethren and fathers; that city was their own loved home. These judgments, therefore, appealed to their tenderest sympathies, and were brought thus vividly before their mind for their moral good. The Divine hope and purpose were to impress them with God’s abhorrence of idolatry, to open their eyes to its guilt, and turn their heart effectually from this great national sin. H. C.