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Ezekiel's Geometric Vision of the Restored Temple: From the Rod of His Wrath to the Reed of His Measuring*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2009

Bennett Simon
Bennett Simon*
Affiliation:
Harvard Medical School
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Extract

“I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of His wrath.” (Lam 3:1)

“Now there was a wall all around the outside of the temple area. The length of the measuring reed in the man's hand was six long cubits, each being a cubit and a handbreadth in length; so he measured the thickness of the wall.” (Ezek 40:5)

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ARTICLES
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 102 , Issue 4 , October 2009 , pp. 411 - 438
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 2009

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References

1 Translations of biblical passages are from the nrsv in the New Oxford Annotated Bible (ed. Michael D. Coogan; 3d ed.; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001) unless otherwise indicated.

2 Recent work on Ezek 40–48 includes Jacqueline Lapsley, “Doors Thrown Open and Waters Gushing Forth: Mark, Ezekiel, and the Architecture of Hope,” in The Ending of Mark and the Ends of God: Essays in Memory of Donald Harrisville Juel (ed. Beverly Roberts Gaventa and Patrick D. Miller; Louisville: John Knox, 2005) 139–54, who deals explicitly with the role of measurement and architectural precision (see also her references to other authors). Two symposia—The Book of Ezekiel: Theological and Anthropological Perspectives (ed. Margaret Odell and John T. Strong; Atlanta: SBL, 2000) and Ezekiel's Hierarchical World: Wrestling with a Tiered Reality (ed. Stephen Cook and Corinne Patton; Atlanta: SBL, 2004)—are important, and especially in Cook and Patton there is a good deal of discussion of the moral and theological implications of chs. 40–48. Older work includes: Moshe Greenberg, “The Design and Themes of Ezekiel's Program of Restoration,” in Interpreting the Prophets (ed. James Luther Mays and Paul J. Achtmeier; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987) 215–36; Jon D. Levenson, Theology of the Program of Restoration of Ezekiel 40–48 (Harvard Semitic Monographs 10; Missoula, Mont.: Scholars Press, 1976); idem, Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Omnipotence (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988), esp. “Cosmos and Microcosmos,” 78–99; and Susan Niditch, “Ezekiel 40–48 in a Visionary Context,” CBQ 48 (1986) 208–34.

3 The phrase “cracks in the wall” is used to describe problems in the narratives of creation. André Lacoque, “Cracks in the Wall,” in idem and Paul Ricœur, Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermeneutical Studies (trans. David Pellauer; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) 3–29.

4 This essay is the result of this psychoanalyst reading Ezekiel rather than a psychoanalytic reading of Ezekiel, let alone “the psychoanalytic reading,” were such a thing possible. There have been several explicitly psychoanalytic works on Ezekiel in the past few decades, most notably David Halperin, Seeking Ezekiel: Text and Psychology (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993) and essays written at least partly in response to Halperin's (controversial and controvertible) book. See Dereck M. Daschke, “Desolate among Them: Loss, Fantasy and Recovery in the Book of Ezekiel,” American Imago 56 (1999) 105–32; and three essays in From Genesis to Apocalyptic Vision (ed. J. Harold Ellens and Wayne G. Rollins; vol. 2 of Psychology and the Bible: A New Way to Read the Scriptures; Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004); John J. Schmitt, “Psychoanalyzing Ezekiel,” 185–202; David Jobling, “An Adequate Psychological Approach to the Book of Ezekiel,” 203–14; and David G. Garber Jr., “Traumatizing Ezekiel, the Exilic Prophet,” 215–36. See also Daniel Merkur, “Prophetic Initiation in Israel and Judah,” The Psychoanalytic Study of Society 12 (1988) 37–67, esp. 50–63. For a brief discussion of the relationship between the psychoanalytic and philological modes, see, for example, David Halperin on Ezekiel 8–11 in Mortimer Ostow, Ultimate Intimacy: The Psychodynamics of Jewish Mysticism (Madison, Conn.: International Universities Press, 1995) 183–89 and the reply by Ostow, 200–205. My own essay on “How can you, or how can you not, psychoanalyze Ezekiel?” is in preparation.

5 The etiology of the condition known as obsessive-compulsive disorder clearly involves biological factors and may have a hereditary element. What the person may do with the compulsive symptoms does, however, entail individual psychodynamic meanings.

6 The term coined by Martin Esslin in The Theatre of the Absurd (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961).

7 Bennett Simon, “The Imaginary Twins: The Case of Beckett and Bion,” International Review of Psycho-Analysis 15 (1988) 331–52; idem, “The Fragmented Self, the Reproduction of the Self, and Reproduction in Beckett and in the Theater of the Absurd,” in The World of Samuel Beckett (ed. Joseph H. Smith; Psychiatry and the Humanities 12; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990) 157–80.

8 See Raymond Klibanksy, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy (New York: Basic Books, 1964) 363 for Dürer's engraving, Melancholia II, and 360–65 for Dürer's struggles with the limits of mathematics. See Phyllis Greenacre's speculation on Piet Mondrian's precise geometric productions, “The Primal Scene and the Sense of Reality,” Psychoanalytic Quarterly 42 (1973) 10–41.

9 See Paul Ricœur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (trans. Dennis Savage; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970) esp. 494–98. See also Anthony Thistleton, “Biblical Studies and Theoretical Hermeneutics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Biblical Interpretation (ed. John Barton; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 95–113.

10 Ezekiel was part of the first wave of exiles to Babylon in 597 b.c.e. The book opens in Babylon with Ezekiel's celestial vision in 593; the temple is destroyed in 586. This final vision is April 28, 573. (I follow the dating scheme used in the nrsv in the New Oxford Annotated Bible notes on Ezekiel. Another scheme of dating would make this date the Day of Atonement in that year.)

11 I count fifty-three instances in chs. 40–48 of the verb or noun of the root , “to measure,” an extraordinary density of these words, especially considering their infrequent use in descriptions of the desert tabernacle or Solomon's temple. On numbers and measurement in the Hebrew Bible see Solomon Gandz, Studies in Hebrew Astronomy and Mathematics (New York: Ktav, 1970).

12 E.g., according to the map in Torah, Neveem, K'tooveem (Koren: Jerusalem, 1995) 83 of the appendix.

13 Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Vision of Transformation: The Territorial Rhetoric of Ezekiel 40–48 (SBL Dissertation Series 154; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996).

14 Ibid., 41.

15 Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20 (Anchor Bible; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1983) and Ezekiel 21–37 (Anchor Bible Series; New York: Doubleday, 1997).

16 Jacob Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (Anchor Bible; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1991).

17 For corpse pollution see 39:11–16 (Gog), 43:6–9 (kings), and 44:25–27 (priests). On corpse pollution as the major form of uncleanness in the ancient Mediterranean world and its importance in maintaining a clear boundary between life and death, see Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 124.

18 See Kalinda Rose Stevenson, “The Land is Yours: Ezekiel's Outrageous Land Claim” (GAIR Conference Papers, 2001: www.cwru.edu/affil/GAIR/papers/2001papers/stevensonEzk.html), which elaborates on the rhetorical import of the land claims in the post-exilic period (whether the final composition of the book was done before or after the return from Babylon in 539 b.c.e.).

19 See Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) esp. 47–73 and endnotes. Smith, analyzing the role of hierarchy in these chapters of Ezekiel, argues for several “maps” of the arrangement of purity and of power; these different “maps” constitute a dialectic with a potential for creative transformation in Judaism after there was no longer a temple.

20 Cook and Patton, Ezekiel's Hierarchical World, 13–14.

21 See esp. Greenberg, “Design and Themes of Ezekiel's Program of Restoration.”

22 For a summary of the arguments in the Talmud about the problem posed for the rabbis by the differences between Ezekiel's vision and the instructions on tabernacle and sacrifice in the Torah, see David Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel's Vision (Tübingen: Mohr, 1988) 25–26.

23 Cook and Patton, Ezekiel's Hierarchical World, 13–14.

24 Greenberg, “Design and Themes of Ezekiel's Program of Restoration.” As a number of authors have noted, the “blueprint” is skimpy on heights, and there is no mention of a roof.

25 Suggested by Susan Niditch, “Ezekiel 40–48 in a Visionary Context,” CBQ 48 (1986) 208–34.

26 See Abraham J. Heschel's discussion of ecstatic prophecy in The Prophets (New York: Harper, 2001) 414–57 and Joseph Blenkinsopp, A History of Prophecy in Israel (Louisville, Ky.: John Knox, 1996). For a detailed discussion of symbolic visions from Amos to Daniel (but not taking up in detail Ezekiel and Isaiah), see Susan Niditch, The Symbolic Vision in Biblical Tradition (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1983).

27 Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20, 219.

28 See below for discussion of the gender of the river.

29 Julie Galambush, “God's Land and Mine: Creation as Property in the Book of Ezekiel,” in Ezekiel's Hierarchical World, 91–108, esp. 92–98.

30 For Greek hubris, “overweening pride,” and related verbs as metaphors from the realm of untamed, unpruned plants, see Ann Michelini, “Hubris and Plants,” Harvard Review of Classical Philology 82 (1978) 35–44.

31 I draw heavily on John Kutsko, Between Heaven and Earth: Divine Presence and Absence in the Book of Ezekiel (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2000) 135–39 for a list of passages in Ezekiel referring to blood and bloodshed (about fifty instances) and the comparison of Ezekiel to the flood story.

32 Greenberg emphasizes the revulsion associated here with menstrual impurity, citing Ezek 7:19 and 2 Chr 29:5. See his Ezekiel 21–37, 727–29: “The ndh-state of a given population (incurred by evildoing) is communicated to their land; e.g., Canaan prior to its takeover by Israel was ‘a ndh-land because of the ndh of the peoples of the land' (Ez 9:11)” (728). Traditional Jewish interpretations differ on the implications of this image: Yechiel Tzvi Moskovitz, Sefer Yechezkayl (Jerusalem: Kook Foundation, 1985) talks of , “measure for measure”—because their sins were like “menstrual uncleanness” they were punished by being regarded as a —isolated, discarded, and mocked—in Lam 1:8. Following Rashi and some midrashim, other commentators are more positive on the comparison to because that state is one of temporary impurity and can be removed! See Moshe Eisenman, Ezekiel: A New Translation with a Commentary Anthologized from Talmudic, Midrashic, and Rabbinic Sources (3 vols.; ArtScroll Tanach Series; Brooklyn, N.Y.: Masorah Publications, 1980) 2:554. See also Andrew Mein, Ezekiel and the Ethics of Exile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) 160–76 on the symbolism of blood, especially menstrual blood.

33 As translated by the Jewish Publication Society (hereafter JPS).

34 This “Passover” is one of the differences between Ezekiel's vision of the temple ritual and that prescribed in the Priestly portions of the Pentateuch.

35 Kutsko, along with other commentators, argues in regard to bloodshed in Ezekiel and bloodshed in the Genesis flood story that the prescribed sacrifice of animals is a way of containing the wanton shedding of human and animal blood. Also common to these two texts of catastrophe, Ezekiel and Genesis, is the use of measurement and precision to contain the anxiety provoked by the possibility of obliteration. The P portions of the flood story present precise dates and measurements as the narrator needs to specify the exact dimensions of the ark, the precise dates of beginning of the flood, the stages of abatement, the end of the flood, and the depth of water covering the mountains (Gen 6:11–8:14).

36 This topic has been extremely controversial in the biblical interpretive literature of the last decades, including on Ezekiel. Authors who view the book of Ezekiel as misogynistic and pornographic include: Julie Galambush, Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel: The City as Yahweh's Wife (SBL Dissertation Series 130; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992); Fokkleien van Dijk–Hemmes and Athalya Brenner, “The Metaphorization of Woman in Prophetic Speech: An Analysis of Ezekiel 23,” in On Gendering Texts: Female and Male Voices in the Hebrew Bible (Leiden: Brill, 1993) 167–76; Cheryl Exum, “Prophetic Pornography,” in Plotted, Shot, and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women (JSOTSupp. 215: Gender, Culture, Theory 3; Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996) 101–28. For critiques of these views, see Robert Carroll, “Desire under the Terebinths: On Pornographic Representation in the Prophets: A Response,” in A Feminist Companion to the Latter Prophets (ed. Athalya Brenner; The Feminist Companion to the Bible 8; Sheffield, U.K.: JSOT Press, 1995) and “ ‘Whorusalamin': A Tale of Three Cities as Three Sisters,” in On Reading Prophetic Texts: Gender Specific and Related Studies in Memory of Fokkleien van Dijk-Hemmes (ed. Bob Becking and Meindert Dijkstra; Leiden: Brill, 1996); Corrine Patton, “ ‘Should Our Sister Be Treated Like a Whore?': A Response to Feminist Critiques of Ezekiel 23,” in The Book of Ezekiel: Theological and Anthropological Perspectives, 221–38; Daniel Smith-Christopher, “Ezekiel in Abu Ghraib,” in Ezekiel's Hierarchical World, 141–57; and Greenberg's Ezekiel 21–37, 493–94, in which he offers criticism of van Dijk–Hemmes, “The Metaphorization of Woman,” and Galambush, Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel. I originally thought Galambush's characterization of 16 and 23 as pornography (etymologically, the “portrayal of a prostitute”) was overdrawn, but now I am more inclined to see the texts as having some underlying theme of rousing male sexual excitement.

37 JPS.

38 JPS. Meanings disputed, but one plausible explanation is Ohalah=“her tent” and Oholibah=“My tent is in her,” i.e., Jerusalem is where I, God, have pitched my tent. Is there an allusion to the two sisters, daughters of Lot, who slept with their father in Gen 19:30–38?

39 See 16:36 and Greenberg's translation (Ezekiel 1–20, 271) and commentary (ibid., 225–26) as referring to the “juice” of female sexual arousal. S. Tamar Kamionkowski, Gender Reversal and Cosmic Chaos: A Study on the Book of Ezekiel (JSOTSupp. 368; London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003) expands upon Greenberg's interpretation of the differences between chs. 16 and 23. Kaminkowski emphasizes the activity of the woman in 16: she is an active, initiating woman, arousing and aroused, and hence, behaving more like a man, thus compounding the awfulness of her behavior and upsetting binary categories of male and female. She emphasizes that in Ezekiel “[a] weak man is a woman”; males degraded by defeat and exile need to ward off any implications of being like women.

40 JPS.

41 JPS.

42 JPS. Ezekiel's rage against perfidious/promiscuous women might also have been fueled by some captive Israelite women “cooperating” sexually with their conquerors in the forced marches and exile.

43 Ezekiel, qua priest, combines the ritual prescriptions of P with the social and ethical prescriptions of H.

44 The women (13:17–23) who prophesy falsely and practice witchcraft and divination are less dangerous than the false male prophets who mislead the people into destructive political ventures.

45 See Sigmund Freud's three essays, “Contributions to the Psychology of Love,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (24 vols.; London: Hogarth, 1957) 11:163–208 on the psychological splitting of the woman into good woman/nurturing mother and bad woman/sexual creature. The “complexity” of the Oedipus complex entails the little boy confronting the evidence of his mother's intimacy and sexuality with the father. Further conflicted by his love for the father, the child can experience anger, frustration, betrayal, and rivalry with the father and severe disappointment with the mother. Defensively, the little boy divides the world of women into good women and bad women and thereby tries to preserve his relationship with the mother as a “good woman.” A corollary of this split is the little boy's “rescue fantasy,” imagining himself as a kind of knight rescuing the damsel in distress from a dragon or a wicked man—covertly the father. The history of changes in the concept of the Oedipus complex is summarized in Jean Laplanche and Jean Baptiste Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith; London: Hogarth, 1973); Bennett Simon and Rachel Blass, “The Oedipus Complex,” in The Cambridge Companion to Freud (ed. Jerome Neu; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 161–74; and Bennett Simon, “Is the Oedipus Complex Still Central in Psychoanalysis: Three Obstacles to Answering the Question,” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 39 (1991) 641–68.

46 See Johanna Stiebert's imaginative portrait of Ezekiel's wife in The Exile and the Prophet's Wife: Historic Events and Marginal Perspectives (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2005).

47 JPS.

48 Orthodox Jewish commentaries struggle with the question of whether God is cruel here either to cause or to utilize this death as a way of making a symbolic statement, and/or whether he is cruel to forbid Ezekiel open expression of grief. See Greenberg, Ezekiel 21–37, 507–16 and Odell, Ezekiel, 315–22 for more extensive discussion.

49 See Galambush, Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel, 140, and Song of Songs 5:16 for as sexual pleasure. is not only used in relation to sensuality and sexuality, but also in relation to the “delight” that a parent might take in a child.

50 See Jacob Milgrom on the root , meaning primarily to purge and purify and only secondarily to atone: “Atonement,” in The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible (ed. Keith Crim et al.; Nashville: Abingdon, 1976) and his commentaries on Leviticus, especially Leviticus 1–16, 1079–84. See also Baruch Schwartz, “Ezekiel's Dim View of Israel's Restoration,” in The Book of Ezekiel, 43–68, esp. 49.

51 JPS.

52 See Patton, “ ‘Should Our Sister Be Treated Like a Whore?',” 232 and Odell, Ezekiel, 184, who argue this point also in relation to Ezekiel. See also Cook and Patton, “Introduction: Hierarchical Thinking and Theology in Ezekiel's Book,” in Ezekiel's Hierarchical World, 1–23. Daniel Smith-Christopher, “Ezekiel in Abu Ghraib,” in Ezekiel's Hierarchical World, 141–57, sees the imagery of the harlot Israel stripped naked (Ezek 16) as deriving from male prisoners being stripped naked and humiliated, scenes depicted in Babylonian and Assyrian accounts of their conquests. Patton adds rape of male prisoners to the list of humiliations. See Kamionkowski, Gender Reversal, especially 58–91. On “feminization” as a sign of humiliating defeat in battle, see Herodotus, Hist. 2.102, for king Sesotris who would erect a stela portraying female genitalia commemorating his defeat of a cowardly enemy. The History: Herodotus (trans. David Grene; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) 172–73.

53 Galambush, Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel, 125. Other women include the mother of the kings of Judah (Ezekiel 19) whose sons did badly for the kingdom (see the discussion in Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20, 354–56).

54 A convenient summary is Leslie C. Allen, Ezekiel 20–48 (Word Biblical Commentary; Dallas: World, 1990) 263–65 with references.

55 See, e.g., Joseph Dan, “Shekhinah,” in Encyclopedia Judaica (New York: MacMillan, 1971–1972) 14:1349–54, especially 1354.

56 Moshe Greenberg, “Ezekiel 16: A Panorama of Passions,” in Love and Death in the Ancient Near East: Essays in Honor of Marvin Pope (ed. John H. Marks and Richard M. Good; Guilford, Conn.: Four Quarters, 1987) 143–51, at 147.

57 However, at least one translation assumes that , pillar, is cylindrical (Eisenman, Ezekiel, 615, 627).

58 Margaret S. Odell, Ezekiel (Macon, Ga.: Smyth and Helwys, 2005) xiv and 484, by contrast, sees a domestic, feminine note in the presence of temple kitchens, an interpretation consonant with her view of chapters 40–48 as inclusive rather than primarily segregating.

59 See Lawrence Stager, “Jerusalem and the Garden of Eden,” in Eretz–Israel 26 (1999) 183–94 (Frank Moore Cross volume); Jon Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006) 82–107. In Ezekiel, both Eden and the temple are atop a mountain (28:11–14), “God's mountain.” See Michael Fishbane, “Tehom and Temple,” in idem, Biblical Myth and Rabbinic Mythmaking (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) 126–29, for the tabernacle and temple imagined on a mountain that capped and contained the primordial raging waters and primordial monsters.

60 The salt is both an impurity, or at the very least, anti-life and anti-reproduction in the Dead Sea, but also a permanent, unalterable substance that is necessary for the sacrifices that in fact purge sin and impurity.

61 In chapter 34, where God restores the fertility of the land, there is no feminine image of fertility. I believe that a Midrashic interpretation of the stream as connected with Miriam's well actually highlights the absence of a feminine aspect in the text itself. See Eisenman, Ezekiel, 737 n. 1. I speculate that the word , “source,” elsewhere used in the Bible as “source of living waters,” is not used here because it is also a word for the female genitalia. For the possibility that the stream is male, symbolizing semen, see the Talmudic elaboration (b. Sotah 10a) of Samson's life and size, commenting on Judg 13:24 “and the lad grew and God blessed him”: “His penis is like that of an ordinary man, but his emission (seed) is like an overflowing river” () echoing Isa 66:12, an image of overflowing wealth and prosperity (pointed out by David Grossman, Lion's Honey: The Myth of Samson [trans. Stuart Schoffman; Edinburgh: Schoffman, 2006]). Compare the seminal emissions of the lovers of Oholibah in Ezek 23.

62 Relevant is the equation of Ezekiel's wife with the temple (24:15–17). See Galambush, Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel, 147–57, and Lapsley, “Doors Thrown Open,” 141–45. On the New Testament overlap between temple and body see, e.g., 1 Cor 6:12–19; 3:16–17; Eph 2:17–22; Mk 7:14–23; Jn 2:14–22, esp. 2:21 (Keith Stone, personal communication).

63 See Moskovitz's commentary on 16:25, “opening wide your legs,” from the root , (only twice used in the Hebrew Bible), in which he compares it to Proverbs 13:3 on the destructive opening of the mouth.

64 Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel (ed. Paul Hanson with Leonard J. Greenspoon; trans. James D. Martin; 2 vols.; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983) 2:410.

65 Joseph Breuer, The Book of Yechzkel: Translation and Commentary (trans. Gertrude Hirschler; New York: Feldheim, 1993) 251. See also Ezek 18:25 for the use of the root in the sense that the moral judgments are, as it were, “out of proportion” to the rewards and punishment.

66 Jacob Milgrom (personal communication, 2006) and Paul Joyce, Ezekiel: A Commentary (New York: T&T Clark, 2005) 227–28.

67 Lapsley, “Shame and Self-Knowledge,” in The Book of Ezekiel: Theological and Anthropological Perspectives, 143–73, and L. Allen, Ezekiel 20–48, 257.

68 Ezekiel 39:25 is a seeming exception (), but the coupling of mercy and jealousy for his name dilutes the role of mercy.

69 The present discussion has profited much from Paul M. Joyce, Divine Initiative and Human Response in Ezekiel (Sheffield, U.K.: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989) and his Ezekiel: A Commentary. On “for the sake of my name,” the fundamental work is Walther Zimmerli, I Am Yahweh (ed. Walter Brueggemann; trans. Douglas W. Stott; Atlanta: John Knox, 1982).

70 Ezekiel 43:7–9 does mention God's wrath and how his holy name was defiled (but will no longer be defiled), but this is singular in these chapters and is in the past tense.

71 A literal break in the wall is described in 8:7–8, the hole in the temple wall, which Ezekiel is commanded to dig out and enlarge to see, or to enter a courtyard and see the abominations there being performed.

72 See The New Oxford Annotated Bible, 1238 (Hebrew Bible) and Zimmerli, Ezekiel 2, 349 for the length of the cubit. No thickness is given for the walls of Solomon's temple. The desert tabernacle had only skins and curtains for walls. For the dimensions of the temple of the Temple Scroll (11QT), see Johann Maier, “The Architectural History of the Temple in Jerusalem in the Light of the Temple Scroll,” in Temple Scroll Studies: Papers Presented at the International Symposium on the Temple Scroll, Manchester, December 1987 (ed. George J. Brooke; Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Supplement Series 7; Sheffield, U.K.; JSOT, 1989) 23–61.

73 Ch. 18, with its declaration that each person suffers only for his own behavior, has been the focus of most of the discussion of the connection between behavior and punishment. It is problematic in its apparent contradiction to much of what is elsewhere in the book. Along with the commentaries listed above, see Michael Fishbane, “Sin and Judgment in the Prophecies of Ezekiel,” Int 38 (1984) 131–50; Gordon H. Matties, Ezekiel 18 and the Rhetoric of Moral Discourse (SBL Dissertation Series 126; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990); Katherine Pfisterer Darr, “Proverb Performance and Transgenerational Retribution,” in Ezekiel's Hierarchical World, 199–223. Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel, 176–79 discusses Ezekiel 18 in its collective and individual implications, and the unresolved tensions therein (179). See Joyce, Ezekiel: A Commentary, 19–20 and 23–26 and his Divine Initiative and Human Response, 79–87 on the complex admixture of individual and collective responsibility in the Hebrew Bible as a whole, and in particular in Ezekiel.

74 See Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20, 737, “but there is no question that for him [Ezekiel] the change of human nature was not an act of grace.” For the strongest statement of this point, see Schwartz, “Ezekiel's Dim View of Restoration.”

75 See 43:10, bringing together the measurement of the house and the shaming of the house of Israel. On shame in its varieties and moral implications in Ezekiel, see now Jacquline Lapsley, Can These Bones Live? The Problem of the Moral Self in the Book of Ezekiel (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2000) and “Shame and Self-Knowledge: The Positive Role of Shame in Ezekiel's View of the Moral Self,” in The Book of Ezekiel: Theological and Anthropological Perspectives, 143–73.

76 See the trenchant comments of David Noel Freedman, The Nine Commandments: Uncovering a Hidden Pattern of Crime and Punishment in the Hebrew Bible (with Jeffrey Geoghegan and Michael Homan; ed. Astrid Beck; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 2000) 161–64, citing 2 Kgs 7:5–17. Ezekiel needs to be affirmed as a credible prophet and the exiles in Babylon believe in him much more after his prophecy of the destruction of the temple has been borne out. However, his earlier prophecy that Tyre will be destroyed by the Babylonians was a failed prophecy, corrected by God promising Nebuchadnezzar the spoils of Egypt as recompense for his not being able to capture and despoil Tyre. This prediction also turned out not to be true. See Greenberg, Ezekiel 21–37, 614–18.

77 In contrast to the book of Jeremiah, in which Babylon is mostly not condemned, Nebuchadnezzar even being declared “my servant” by God; but in several places prophecies of doom against Babylon are pronounced, e.g., Jer 25:12–14; 50, throughout. See also Ps 137, “By the Rivers of Babylon,” vv. 8–9.

78 Classic Jewish sources have posited a relation between the golden calf and the giving of instructions on building the tabernacle, e.g., Rashi on Exodus 31:18. See also Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil, 78–99. Note the precise quantities of the booty taken and distributed after the massive slaughter by the Israelites of the Midianites, including Moses' rebuke of the leaders for not having killed all the married women and all the male children in Numbers 31.

79 Eisemann, Ezekiel, 671–73, citing Rashi and Radak, in N'vee-em u-K'too-veem, Mikra'ot Gedolot, Yechezkayl (Jerusalem: M'kor ha-sfareem, 1998).

80 See Levenson, Resurrection and Restoration, especially 82–107, for a complex argument on the tight linkage between some precursor of resurrection in the Hebrew Bible and the theme of national restoration. Thus, the sequence of Ezek 37, the vision of the resurrection of the dry bones, the reuniting of Israel and Judah, and the subsequent chapters on national restoration are of a piece, constituting a matrix out of which later second temple and rabbinic ideas on resurrection can arise.

81 Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place, has argued that the formal and structural features of Ezekiel's temple and the relationships of difference that are encoded in those features were suitable for transformation as replacements for “place” (i.e., the literal temple) by the Mishnaic system of organizing “differences”: “The place could be replicated in a system of differences transferred from one realm or locale (for example, Mishnah). For it is not the terms but the relations that mattered” (85). See also n. 19 above.

82 This distinction in the book of Ezekiel is especially problematic when compared to the other prophetic books, e.g., Jer 31:20, where God's personal distress is part of the abundant mercy () he will show to Ephraim. “Mercy”() is not found in Ezekiel; showing mercy () is found only once (39:25), “and I shall be merciful to the whole House of Israel and be jealous for my holy name” [translation mine].

83 Rashi on 43:10–11 in N'vee-em u-K'too-veem, Mikra'ot Gedolot, Yechezkayl.

84 Lapsley, “Shame and Self–Knowledge,” 158, citing Daniel I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel: Chapters 1–24 (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997) 658: “the experience of divine mercy drives true covenant people to their knees.” See Joyce, Ezekiel: A Commentary, 26–27, for the argument that it is not anachronistic to read “grace” back into Ezekiel, but rather, “it is Christianity that is the borrower here. Exilic theological developments are fundamental to New Testament and especially Pauline theology.”

85 See Jonathan Z. Smith, Drudgery Divine, 121–22, especially 121 n. 14, and references to his earlier works on the distinction between “locative” (having a space/place) and “utopian” (utopia=“no place”) forms of salvation. “Locative” precisely describes the temple in Ezekiel—it emphasizes keeping one's proper place and reinforcing boundaries: “emplacement is the norm, rectification, cleaning or healing is undertaken if the norm is breached.” The vision in Revelation of a celestial Jerusalem with no physical temple is thus “utopian.” For a different view, see Paul Joyce, “Ezekiel 40–42: The Earliest ‘Heavenly Ascent' Narrative?” in The Book of Ezekiel and Its Influence (ed. Henk Jan de Jonge and Johannes Tromp; Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) 17–41 and Ian K. Boxall, “Exile, Prophet, Visions: Ezekiel's Influence on the Book of Revelation,” in The Book of Ezekiel and its Influence, 147–64.

86 See Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2:420–21: “But the priestly/prophetic witness of Ezekiel 43 still knows nothing of that terrifying act of God in which he gives himself in his servant, in order to crown his love, to the unclean world as a pure sin offering (Is 53:10).”