Ezekiel

Ezekiel is a prophet of the sixth-century Babylonian exile, a priest by birth, identified in the book that bears his name as "Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi," to whom "Yahweh's word came... in the land of the Chaldeans by the river Chebar" (Ezekiel 1:3). His Hebrew name, Yehezqel, means "God strengthens" or "God makes strong" — a matter of language rather than of interpretation. The text presents him as living among the deported community in Babylonia rather than in Jerusalem, and it dates his visions and oracles to specific years of that exile; the book also groups him with Noah, Daniel, and Job as a byword for righteousness (Ezekiel 14:14).

Scripture presents him overwhelmingly as a recipient and speaker of Yahweh's word. God addresses him repeatedly as "son of man" (Ezekiel 8:6), a phrase used in the book for a human being over against the divine speaker, and the prophet is shown visions, given symbolic actions, and commissioned to speak whether or not his hearers obey. His message moves between indictment and restoration: he announces that Yahweh will not relent from judgment on persistent unfaithfulness (Ezekiel 24:13–14), including the profaning of the sanctuary that was "the pride of your power" (Ezekiel 24:21), and he also reports that the people listen to him as they would to a performer, hearing his words without doing them (Ezekiel 33:31). The book's best-known sequence places him in a valley of bones, told to prophesy over them (Ezekiel 37:1, 4), where the bones are identified as "the whole house of Israel" saying "Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost" (Ezekiel 37:11), and where God promises, "I will put my Spirit in you, and you will live" (Ezekiel 37:14). A final temple vision shows water flowing east from under the threshold of the temple and trees whose "leaf [is] for healing" (Ezekiel 47:1, 12).

Historically, the book is set in the period of Babylonian dominance over Judah, and Ezekiel is presented as a contemporary of the exilic community rather than of the Jerusalem establishment; the river Chebar is named as the place of his calling (Ezekiel 1:3). Jewish and Christian tradition alike have transmitted the book as Scripture, though its temple legislation and visionary material have been handled differently in different communities, and its imagery has been influential far beyond its own pages.

Christian traditions read Ezekiel along different lines. The vision of the dry bones is taken by many Jewish and Christian readers as a picture of national restoration, and by many Christian readers also as a text about bodily resurrection, with the promised Spirit read in light of later teaching on the Holy Spirit; the temple and river visions are read by some as a literal expectation for a future restored temple, by others as symbolic of God's presence and healing, and by others as fulfilled in Christ. The title "son of man," which in Ezekiel simply marks the prophet as a human being addressed by God, is also the phrase the Gospels most often put on Jesus' own lips, and Christian readers have long connected the two — a connection the book of Ezekiel itself does not make.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.