The Cornerstone Biblical Commentary series provides up-to-date, evangelical scholarship on the Old and New Testaments. Each volume is designed to equip pastors and Christian leaders with exegetical and theological knowledge to better understand and apply God€™s Word by presenting the message of each passage as well as an overview of other issues surrounding the text. The commentary series has been structured to help readers get at the meaning of Scripture, passage-by-passage, through the entire Bible.
The New Living Translation is an authoritative Bible translation, rendered faithfully into today€™s English from the ancient texts by 90 leading Bible scholars. The NLT€™s scholarship and clarity breathe life into even the most difficult-to-understand Bible passages€”but even more powerful are stories of how people's lives are changing as the words speak directly to their hearts. That's why we call it €œThe Truth Made Clear.€
David L. Thompson (Ph.D., The Johns Hopkins University) has written scores of popular and professional articles. His books include Bible Study That Works and God€™s Healing for Hurting Families. Dr. Thompson, an ordained elder in The Wesleyan Church, has pastored several churches.
Eugene Carpenter (Ph.D., Fuller Theological Seminary) is Scholar in Residence and Professor of Old Testament, Hebrew, and Biblical Theology at Bethel College, Mishawaka, IN. He has authored and contributed to several books including commentaries on Exodus and Deuteronomy.
CORNERSTONE BIBLICAL COMMENTARY
By David L. Thompson Eugene CarpenterTYNDALE HOUSE PUBLISHERS, INC.
Copyright 2010 David L. Thompson
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-8423-3435-8Contents
Contributors to Volume 9.................................viGeneral Editor's Preface.................................viiAbbreviations............................................ixTransliteration and Numbering System.....................xiiiEZEKIEL..................................................1DANIEL...................................................285
Chapter One
Ezekiel David L. Thompson
INTRODUCTION TO Ezekiel
In the book of Ezekiel readers encounter perhaps the most striking and eccentric (some have said deranged!) figure among Israel's prophets. He is also among the most theologically daring and creative of the prophets. Ezekiel survived spiritual, social, and national upheaval, as well as personal trauma. In the midst of it all he heard and saw the God of Israel in unprecedented ways. He then expressed these visions in extraordinary passages, many of which are difficult to understand.
In spite of the difficulties confronting interpreters, the book of Ezekiel addresses God's people powerfully and uniquely. Generations trying to come to terms with their role and stake in human tragedy have found instruction here. Persons seeking to contextualize the ancient faith in their own worlds have found caution and guidance. People of God struggling to make sense of the loss of everything that gave meaning and structure to their lives, and others groping for hope in their apparently dead-end situations, have heard a life-giving word here.
AUTHOR
If we identify the prophet Ezekiel as the author of this book, as has traditionally been done, we have some information about him. Ezekiel was a Zadokite priest, the son of a certain Buzi (1:3), living in Judah during the decades leading up to the first conquest of Jerusalem by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar (2 Kgs 24). From his youth, Ezekiel followed priestly Torah and imbibed priestly convictions (4:14); he had become passionately committed to Israel's whole Torah and her historic covenant faith. Along with other intelligentsia, artisans, leaders of Judah, and King Jehoiachin, he had been deported by Nebuchadnezzar to Babylon and settled in a community at Tel-abib on the Kebar River near Nippur (1:1-3). In his thirtieth year-the fifth year of King Jehoiachin's exile (593 BC)-the Lord commissioned him as a prophet to the rebellious nation of Israel, especially to the exiled community (2:1-5; 3:15). Four and a half years later his beloved wife died (24:1, 15-18). Ezekiel continued his prophetic ministry at least through April 571 BC, the time of his last dated oracle (29:17-21). We have no information regarding the close of his ministry or the end of his life or the precise relationship between him and "his" book as it now stands, beyond what may be inferred from the book itself. The book itself does, however, offer extensive information about Ezekiel's passions, convictions, theology, and ministry.
The dominantly autobiographical character of the book of Ezekiel suggests that the prophet himself wrote substantial portions of the work (by his own hand or through a scribe, as Jeremiah did through Baruch). Repeated connection of Ezekiel with the message reception formula ties massive amounts of the book directly to him, with no evidence in these oracles preventing a written connection. This remains true, even though the dates (e.g., 8:1) most likely locate the oracles that immediately follow them rather than entire segments or sections they introduce. Association of the prophet with the actual recording of at least some of what he heard and saw tends in the same direction (24:2; 43:11).
The book's pervasive first-person stance could also suggest that Ezekiel himself was responsible not simply for recording various oracles but for shaping and structuring the present book. The unusual attention to precise dating of oracles and Ezekiel's explicit connection to the chronological matters in the book could support this (24:2). Some other exilic/postexilic prophets give precise attention to dates (e.g., Hag 1:1; Zech 1:1), but the number of chronological references in Ezekiel (14), the import of this chronological flow to the unfolding structure of the book, and the interrelationships between this chronology and the prophet's experience as spokesman for the Lord are striking. The prophet's apparent connection with extensive portions of the book has also led many to attribute the whole to him, precisely because they perceived throughout the work the pervasive influence of the same person. Further, nothing in the book points necessarily to a writer and readers after the fall of the Neo-Babylonians or beyond any significant return of exiles to Judah. These and other factors allowed S. R. Driver to summarize critical opinion at the opening of the twentieth century by declaring "No critical question arises in connection with the authorship of the book [of Ezekiel], the whole from beginning to end bearing unmistakably the stamp of a single mind" (1909:279; similarly Cornill 1907:315-316).
Various Views of Authorship. Identification of the prophet as the author, however, is not a foregone conclusion. Among the church fathers, Jerome questioned the link between Ezekiel and the book. Like all the prophetic books and many other biblical works, the book of Ezekiel comes to us anonymously. The book names no author or editor(s). The Talmud notes that "the men of the Great Synagogue wrote Ezekiel" (b. Hagigah 14b); this probably refers, however, to their work of copying (perhaps editing) rather than authorship. Specifically how much, then, of the material in the book of Ezekiel can be traced to Ezekiel's hand, and to what extent does Ezekiel's hand figure in the literary structure and logic of the book we now have?
As early as 1756, Oeder questioned the literary integrity of the book, regarding chapters 40-48 as a spurious addition to Ezekiel's work of chapters 1-39 (Pfeiffer 1941:525-526). In 1792, Corrodi reckoned that chapters 33-39 did not come from the prophet either (Pfeiffer 1941:526). Against the majority opinion in nineteenth-century critical scholarship, already in the 1830s, Zunz (followed by Seinecke in the 1880s) concluded that the book of Ezekiel was actually pseudepigraphic, composed by an unknown writer centuries after Ezekiel. Convinced of the structural and stylistic unity of the book, once they had separated it from Ezekiel on other grounds, they found it necessary to attribute the whole to later, unknown hands. Still, the majority of scholars were not persuaded to set aside the book's apparent connection of the prophet with substantial materials in the book, if not with the book as a whole. Again in the 1930s C. C. Torrey championed a "Pseudo-Ezekiel," with its core written around 230 BC, but he failed to convince many (Eissfeldt 1965:366, 369).
Kraetzschmar introduced the idea of multiple recensions as a key to the book's composition (1900). Focusing on parallel texts and doublets found in the book, Kraetzschmar thought two recensions by Ezekiel himself, one in the first person and a shorter recension in the third person, were later joined by a redactor. Many credit G. Hlscher's 1924 work, Hesechiel: Der Dichter und das Buch (Ezekiel: The Poet and the Book), with providing the main impetus for opening these questions to critical study (Childs 1979:357). Analyzing the book's style, Hlscher assigned to Ezekiel only those portions of the book he regarded as poetic-170 of 1,273 verses-leaving the rest to a fourth-century-BC writer who completely reshaped the prophet's work. By 1943, Irwin could lament the fact that the "newer commentaries" he read on these questions could agree on little more than that the book was composite (it had not been written as a whole by Ezekiel) and that the editorial and redactional process of producing the work as we have it began with Ezekiel (Irwin 1943:23). Irwin noted the highly tentative nature of conclusions drawn and claimed the failure to reach consensus was due to the lack of "clear criteria of originality" for distinguishing the prophet's words in the present text (1943:24).
Kraetzschmar, Hlscher, and others modifying and extending their research turned scholarly attention to the process by which the book arose, from earliest materials by the prophet or another person through successive handlings by other readers and on to the book as we have it. Study of this compositional process, eventually known as redaction criticism, entailed close examination of the history of the traditions taken up in the book and the ways in which persons handling Ezekiel's text modified it with glosses, explanations, modifications, extensions, insertions, and rearrangement of related materials (the foci of redaction criticism). Materials that an earlier generation discarded as "secondary" accretions in order to uncover the "authentic" or "genuine" words of Ezekiel were now viewed as clues to the literary journey from the prophet's writings to the book as we have it (cf. contrasting approaches of Torrey 1930:71 and Eichrodt 1970:18-22).
Walther Eichrodt and Walther Zimmerli present the best recent examples of a form- and redaction-critical approach to Ezekiel. Both writers seek to discern the original text of the prophet and to explain the relationship of every other word in the text to those original writings of the prophet, aiming in the end to interpret the book as we have it. Zimmerli's commentary is widely regarded as the pinnacle of scholarly work on Ezekiel from the tradition-historical, redaction-critical perspective. Both Zimmerli and Eichrodt offer rich theological interpretations of the book. At the same time, both scholars invest major effort and space in enterprises that remain highly speculative.
In spite of his immense respect and sympathy for Zimmerli's work, Brevard Childs lodges theological and exegetical critiques against it. His objections highlight difficulties in the tradition-historical, redactional-critical approach to biblical texts. Childs retains more confidence than many in our present ability to distinguish the prophet's original writings from later additions to and alterations of the text leading to the book as we have it. Even so, he makes the general point that Zimmerli (1979:369) makes the "original 'Grundttext'" (foundational or basic text) to which his traditio-historical work leads him the primary text for the work of exegesis. Thus, a reconstructed "original" text, not the canonical text, becomes the main text to be interpreted (1979:369). More specifically, Childs claims Zimmerli has "missed the significance of the canonical process," which not only shaped the text (as Zimmerli has seen) but brought that process to a definitive end when it fixed the canonical text. A "pre-canonical stage" in the text's development is substituted for the "normative canonical text" as the target of interpretation. Consequently, Zimmerli "runs the danger of losing the inner dynamic of the full canonical passage," reducing attention to the literary entity of the book of Ezekiel with its own integrity, not to be identified with the sum of its parts. Finally, Childs challenges the assumption that introducing the historical work of tracing the redactional-canonical process actually enhances illumination of the text in every case. Sometimes helpful, often "hypothetical and fragile," the value of the observations seems overestimated (1979:370).
Critiques of this sort have produced significant responses in the most recent interpreters of Ezekiel. Moshe Greenberg has developed what he calls a "holistic" approach to interpretation, seen in his Anchor Bible Commentary on Ezekiel (1983 and 1997). First, Greenberg begins with the Masoretic Text as the "least shaky foundation" for the study of the book of Ezekiel that we possess (1983:20). In one way or another, it must ultimately go back to the prophet himself. Removed at least eight centuries from the prophet himself, the Masoretic Text cannot be regarded as a "verbatim record" of Ezekiel's publication, Greenberg reasons, because of the changes known to occur in the course of extended scribal transmission. Nevertheless, it serves as our primary source for the study of this prophetic book "until proved unreliable by anachronism (linguistic, historical, or ideational), or indubitable [textual] corruption, or intolerable variations in style or texture" (1983:19). In the case of Ezekiel, the ancient versions provide only limited access to stages preceding the Masoretic Text, and help from Qumran texts is sparse. Second, Greenberg is thoroughly skeptical of scholarly attempts to reconstruct an "original" Ezekiel and track the development of the present book from that reconstruction. He considers such endeavors often flawed by the imposition of modern and often unexamined assumptions regarding composition and style that fail to hear the ancient text on its own terms (1983:20-21). Even where the Septuagint presents sufficient divergence as to raise the question of another layer in the literary development of the book, Greenberg is inclined to suggest Ezekiel as his own first editor, leading to such a Vorlage for the Septuagint (1997:396). Finally, Greenberg tries to immerse himself in the text of Ezekiel as a piece of ancient literature with its own compositional conventions, shaping, and patterning often quite at odds with modern intuitions. He proceeds with the working assumption that "the present book of Ezekiel is the product of art and intelligent design," the product of "an individual mind of powerful and passionate proclivities." In the book "a coherent world of vision" emerges, "contemporary with the sixth-century prophet and decisively shaped by him, if not the very words of Ezekiel himself" (1983:26-27).
Leslie Allen sees his work on Ezekiel in the Word Biblical Commentary as something of a "rapprochement" between Zimmerli and Greenberg, between a mainly historical-critical inquiry and a primarily literary approach (1994:xxiv). Allen finds no reason to deny substantial tracts of the book and much of its design to Ezekiel. The prophet had plenty of time to commit his prophetic reports to writing, and the messenger formula consistently ties Ezekiel to the oracles that inaugurate literary units. Working with "redaction criticism of a moderate kind" (1994:xxiii), Allen also sees indication that others have amplified the prophet's own work, "equally partaking of prophetic authority by continued use of Ezekiel's messenger formula." Regularly throughout the text Allen sees literary units composed of "three layers: (1) a basic oracle, (2) a continuation or updating that stays relatively close to the basic oracle, and (3) a closing oracle that stands apart from the earlier two pieces." He concludes that the first two layers belong to Ezekiel, while the third comes from "heirs of his work ... concerned to preserve it and adapt it to the needs of a succeeding generation" (1994:xxv). All of this has happened by perhaps the early 540s BC, for the book shows no signs either of the fall of the Neo-Babylonian empire nor of a return of exiles to Judah (1994:xxv-xxvi; so also Greenberg 1983:15). Allen avoids Zimmerli's pitfall of making a reconstructed text the basis of his reading by reversing Zimmerli's reading strategy. Zimmerli stands beside the Ezekiel he has reconstructed and reads looking forward through the trail of redactional commentary to the book as a whole. Allen proposes to read from the present text back to Ezekiel, with the emphasis on reading the edited text (i.e., the canonical text) as an early "re-reading" of the prophetic record "from a later standpoint" (1994:xxvi).
Daniel Block argues that very little of the scribal, compositional, and editorial work entailed in producing the book of Ezekiel need be removed from the prophet's own hand (1997:17-23). Conceding some "editorial clarifications by later hands" such as 1:2-3, he nevertheless sees no evidence to demand extending the "chronological, geographic, and temperamental distance between prophet and book" common in the history of the critical study of Ezekiel (1997:23). This commentary will proceed mainly along the lines of Greenberg and Block. Theologically and theoretically I have no serious quarrel with Allen's moderate redaction criticism. But I lack confidence in our ability (especially my own!) to consistently delineate various layers of redaction in documents like Ezekiel. Where editorial and redactional work seems clearly present, I will use it to illuminate the reading of the Masoretic Text as it now stands. For convenience, I will refer to Ezekiel as the author, without reentering debate about the precise stages of the composition of the book.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from CORNERSTONE BIBLICAL COMMENTARYby David L. Thompson Eugene Carpenter Copyright 2010 by David L. Thompson. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
