JUDAICA - Wisdom In Torah

ezekiel
In the same year Jeremiah had his altercation with Hananiah
ben Azzur, who prophesied the imminent fall of Babylon
and the return, within two years, of King Jehoiachin and
his exiles (Jer. 28).
The situation of the exiles can be gathered from Jeremiah’s
letter to them, which was sent about this time (Jer. 29).
There, too, prophets (whom Jeremiah brands as false) encouraged
in the people expectations of a speedy end to their
exile – which Jeremiah was at pains to quash. He not only
exhorts them to be reconciled to their captivity, he communicates
to them an oracle (ch. 24) unconditionally condemning
Jerusalem to a horrible end. Hope in the future of Jerusalem is
futile and wrong; the future belongs to the exiles from whom
the nation will be regenerated (so 24:6f.).
In 591 Psammetichus made a state visit to some shrines
on the Syrian coast, probably not without political overtones.
About two years later, evidently in collaboration with Egypt
and its Palestinian allies, Judah revolted. Nebuchadnezzar
called out a powerful army which laid siege to Jerusalem in
January 588. Shortly afterward, Psammetichus died, but his
successor, Apries, maintained his policy. An Egyptian force
marched into Palestine, giving Jerusalem temporary relief
(Jer. 37:5; 34:21). But it was soon beaten back, and the siege
resumed until famine brought Jerusalem to its knees in the
summer of 586.
None of the neighbors of Judah was destroyed in the revolt;
Tyre and Egypt are known to have preserved their independence.
During or directly after Jerusalem’s ordeal, Tyre
was besieged by Nebuchadnezzar for 13 years (Jos., Apion,
1.21), the end being reckoned between 575–72. The city came
under Babylonian control, but was not sacked. Only in 568/7
did Nebuchadnezzar finally move against Egypt (Pritchard,
Texts, 308d); the outcome of that campaign is unknown, but
Egypt remained independent until its conquest by Cambyses
of Persia in 525.
The whole span of Ezekiel’s dates falls within the reign of
Nebuchadnezzar (605/4–562). He and he alone appears in the
book as the conqueror of Judah and the appointed scourge of
God for the nations. Every clear historical allusion in the book
is to this, or some preceding, period. Especially significant is
the book’s ignorance of events later than its last date. Its author
lived to see the failure of his Tyre prophecy, and emended it
in 571. However he did not know that not Nebuchadnezzar,
but Cambyses, would conquer Egypt (525) – which would not
then go into a 40-year exile; and that Babylon’s end would
not be sanguinary and fiery (21:36ff.) but virtually bloodless
(539). Persia is mentioned only as an exotic adjunct to
the forces of Tyre and Gog – indicating that the author was
ignorant of what happened from 550 on, when Cyrus united
Media and Persia into the nucleus of the Persian Empire. If
the author(s?) of 34–48 lived later than 538, they would have
seen the confuting of all their restoration prophecies and programs
by events. In sum: no post-571 anachronism has left its
mark in the book to necessitate the assumption of another
hand than Ezekiel’s.
That the locale of the prophecy is Babylonia is said several
times (1:1; 3:11; 15; 11:24) and implied by the era of “our
exile” (33:21; 40:1). Several prophecies have an explicitly exilic
standpoint or audience (11:15ff.; 12:11ff.; 13:9; 14:22; 20:34ff.;
24:21b; note also the peculiarly Ezekelian usage of “on the soil
of Israel,” unnatural for someone living in the land of Israel,
12:22; 18:2; 21:7; 33:24).
At the same time, the almost exclusive focus on Jerusalem
in the doom prophecies and the passionate addresses to
her have given rise to the view that at least part of the prophecy
originated in Jerusalem – the present exilic cast of the
whole being editorial (so Rashi at 1:3, combining statements
in the Mekhilta to Ex. 12:1 and 15:9). However, the lack of a
convincing explanation for such an alleged editorial transfer
of originally Jerusalem prophecies to Babylonia leads one to
ask whether the anomaly of Ezekiel’s prophecy, given its Babylonian
setting, is really so implausible.
Ezekiel fails to discriminate between exiles and homelanders
in his diatribes; his audience is an undifferentiated
“rebellious house,” i.e., they are unconscious of any deep-dyed
guilt and expect shortly a turn for the better in their fortunes;
and they are encouraged in this by their prophets (ch. 13).
The situation corresponds to what is known from Jeremiah
to have obtained in Jerusalem the year prior to Ezekiel’s call
(see above). However, Jeremiah’s letter reveals that precisely
the same situation obtained among the Babylonian exiles. So
much so that Jeremiah’s major concern is to create a cleavage
between the exiles and the Jerusalemites with regard to
their hopes for the immediate future. Both his exhortation to
become reconciled to a long captivity and his prediction of
an inexorable and total doom for Jerusalem are intended to
make the exiles despair of Jerusalem’s survival, to tear them
from the hopes they attached to the city. Only so could they
be brought to repentance and the realization of their destiny
as the “good figs” (Jer. 24:7).
The implications of Jerusalem’s fate were thus hardly less
profound for the exiles than for the Jerusalemites themselves
(indeed most of the exiles were from Jerusalem, II Kings
24:14ff.). Had Jeremiah been in Tel Abib he would have found
no topic of more absorbing concern to his audience than the
future of the city; and his letter shows what the tenor of his
message to them would have been: “laments, and moaning,
and woe.”
An exiled Ezekiel’s preoccupation with Jerusalem (not
quite exclusive; his calls to repentance are directed at the exiles,
cf. Jer. 24:7, end) is unexceptionable. Anomalous among
prophets is his continuously addressing an audience that is apparently
hundreds of miles away. But the appearance is misleading.
Prophecies against foreign nations, an established
genre, always involve an incongruity between the ostensible
audience (the foreign nations) and the real one – the Israelites
for whose ears the prophecies are really meant and for
whom they bear a vital message. Similarly an exiled prophet’s
address to Jerusalem would have been meant for the ears of
his immediate environment. Since in fact and spirit that en-
642 ENCYCLOPAEDIA JUDAICA, Second Edition, Volume 6