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Beginning

Read the Bible from start to finish, from Genesis to Revelation.

Duration: 365 days

Ezekiel 5-8

Chapter 5

¹Now you, son of man, take a sharp sword and use it like a barber’s razor, to shave your head and your beard. Then take a balance scale for weighing and divide the hair.^(A) ²Set a third on fire within the city,^[a] when the days of your siege are completed; place another third around the city and strike it with the sword; the final third scatter to the wind and then unsheathe the sword after it.^(B) ³But take a few of the hairs and tie them in the hem of your garment. ⁴Take some of these and throw them into the fire and burn them in the fire. Because of this, fire will flash out against the whole house of Israel.

⁵Thus says the Lord God: This is Jerusalem! I placed it in the midst of the nations, surrounded by foreign lands. ⁶But it rebelled against my ordinances more wickedly than the nations, and against my statutes more than the foreign lands around it; they rejected my ordinances and did not walk in my statutes.^(C) ⁷Therefore, thus says the Lord God: Because you have caused more uproar than the nations surrounding you, not living by my statutes nor carrying out my judgments, nor even living by the ordinances of the surrounding nations; ⁸therefore, thus says the Lord God: See, I am coming against you!^[b] I will carry out judgments among you while the nations look on.^(D) ⁹Because of all your abominations I will do to you what I have never done before, the like of which I will never do again. ¹⁰Therefore, parents will eat their children in your midst, and children will eat their parents.^[c] I will inflict punishments upon you and scatter all who remain to the winds.^(E)

¹¹Therefore, as I live, says the Lord God, because you have defiled my sanctuary with all your atrocities and all your abominations, I will surely withdraw and not look upon you with pity nor spare you.^(F) ¹²A third of your people shall die of disease or starve to death within you; another third shall fall by the sword all around you; a third I will scatter to the winds and pursue them with the sword.^(G)

¹³Thus my anger will spend itself; I will vent my wrath against them until I am satisfied. Then they will know that I the Lord spoke in my passion when I spend my wrath upon them.^(H) ¹⁴I will make you a desolation and a reproach among the nations around you, in the sight of every passerby.^(I) ¹⁵And you will be a reproach and a taunt, a warning and a horror to the nations around you when I execute judgments against you in angry wrath, with furious chastisements. I, the Lord, have spoken! ¹⁶When I loose against you the deadly arrows of starvation that I am sending to destroy you, I will increase starvation and will break your staff of bread.^(J) ¹⁷I will send against you starvation and wild beasts who will leave you childless, while disease and bloodshed sweep through you. I will bring the sword against you. I, the Lord, have spoken.^(K)

Chapter 6

Against the Mountains of Israel. ¹The word of the Lord came to me: ²Son of man, set your face toward the mountains of Israel and prophesy against them:^(L) ³You shall say: Mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord God. Thus says the Lord God to the mountains and hills, to the ravines and valleys:^(M) Pay attention! I am bringing a sword against you, and I will destroy your high places.^[d] ⁴Your altars shall be laid waste, your incense stands smashed, and I will throw your slain down in front of your idols. ⁵Yes, I will lay the corpses of the Israelites in front of their idols, and scatter your bones around your altars.^[e]^(N) ⁶Wherever you live, cities shall be ruined and high places laid waste, in order that your altars be laid waste and devastated, your idols broken and smashed, your incense altars hacked to pieces, and whatever you have made wiped out.^(O) ⁷The slain shall fall in your midst, and you shall know that I am the Lord.^[f]^(P) ⁸But I will spare some of you from the sword to live as refugees among the nations when you are scattered to foreign lands. ⁹Then your refugees will remember me among the nations to which they have been exiled, after I have broken their lusting hearts that turned away from me and their eyes that lusted after idols. They will loathe themselves for all the evil they have done, for all their abominations.^(Q) ¹⁰Then they shall know that I the Lord did not threaten in vain to inflict this evil on them.

¹¹Thus says the Lord God: Clap your hands, stamp your feet,^[g] and cry “Alas!” for all the evil abominations of the house of Israel! They shall fall by the sword, starvation, and disease.^(R) ¹²Those far off shall die of disease, those nearby shall fall by the sword, and those who survive and are spared shall perish by starvation; thus will I spend my fury upon them. ¹³They shall know that I am the Lord, when their slain lie among their idols, all around their altars, on every high hill and mountaintop, beneath every green tree and leafy oak^[h]—any place they offer sweet-smelling oblations to all their idols.^(S) ¹⁴I will stretch out my hand against them; I will make the land a desolate waste, from the wilderness to Riblah,^[i] wherever they live. Thus they shall know that I am the Lord.^(T)

Chapter 7

The End Has Come. ¹The word of the Lord came to me: ²Son of man, now say: Thus says the Lord God to the land of Israel: An end! The end comes upon the four corners of the land!^(U) ³Now the end is upon you; I will unleash my anger against you, judge you according to your ways, and hold against you all your abominations. ⁴My eye will not spare you, nor will I have pity; but I will hold your conduct against you, since your abominations remain within you; then shall you know that I am the Lord.^(V)

⁵Thus says the Lord God: Evil upon evil! See it coming! ⁶An end is coming, the end is coming; it is ripe for you! See it coming! ⁷The crisis has come for you who dwell in the land! The time has come, near is the day: panic, no rejoicing on the mountains.^(W) ⁸Soon now I will pour out my fury upon you and spend my anger against you; I will judge you according to your ways and hold against you all your abominations.^(X) ⁹My eye will not spare, nor will I take pity; I will hold your conduct against you since your abominations remain within you, then you shall know that it is I, the Lord, who strikes.^(Y)

¹⁰The day is here! Look! it is coming! The crisis has come! Lawlessness is blooming, insolence budding; ¹¹the violent have risen up to wield a scepter of wickedness. But none of them shall remain; none of their crowd, none of their wealth, for none of them are innocent. ¹²^[j]The time has come, the day dawns. The buyer must not rejoice, nor the seller mourn, for wrath is coming upon all the throng.^(Z) ¹³Assuredly, the seller shall not regain what was sold, as long as they all live; for the vision is for the whole crowd: it shall not be revoked! Yes, because of their guilt, they shall not hold on to life. ¹⁴They will sound the trumpet and get everything ready, but no one will go out to battle, for my wrath weighs upon all the crowd.

¹⁵The sword is outside; disease and hunger are within. Whoever is in the fields will die by the sword; whoever is in the city disease and hunger will devour.^(AA) ¹⁶If their survivors flee, they will die on the mountains, moaning like doves of the valley on account of their guilt. ¹⁷All their hands will hang limp, and all their knees^[k] turn to water.^(AB) ¹⁸^(AC)They put on sackcloth, horror clothes them; shame is on all their faces, all their heads are shaved bald.^[l] ¹⁹They fling their silver into the streets, and their gold is considered unclean.^(AD) Their silver and gold cannot save them on the day of the Lord’s wrath. They cannot satisfy their hunger or fill their bellies, for it has been the occasion of their sin. ²⁰^[m]In their beautiful ornaments they took pride; out of them they made their abominable images, their detestable things. For this reason I will make them unclean.^(AE) ²¹I will hand them over as spoils to foreigners, as plunder to the wicked of the earth, so that they may defile them. ²²I will turn my face away from them. My treasure will be defiled; the violent will enter and defile it.^(AF) ²³They will wreak slaughter, for the land is filled with bloodshed and the city with violence.^(AG) ²⁴I will bring in the worst of the nations to take possession of their houses. I will put an end to their proud strength,^[n] and their sanctuaries will be defiled.^(AH) ²⁵When anguish comes, they will seek peace, but there is none.^(AI) ²⁶Disaster after disaster, rumor upon rumor. They keep seeking a vision from the prophet; instruction from the priest is missing, and counsel from the elders.^(AJ) ²⁷The king mourns, the prince is terror-stricken, the hands of the common people tremble. I will deal with them according to their ways, and according to their judgments I will judge them. They shall know that I am the Lord.

Chapter 8

¹In the sixth year, on the fifth day of the sixth month,^[o] as I was sitting in my house, with the elders of Judah sitting before me, the hand of the Lord God fell upon me there.^(AK) ²I looked up and there was a figure that looked like a man.^[p] Downward from what looked like his waist, there was fire; from his waist upward, like the brilliance of polished bronze.^(AL)

Vision of Abominations in the Temple. ³He stretched out the form of a hand and seized me by the hair of my head. The spirit lifted me up^[q] between earth and heaven and brought me in divine vision to Jerusalem^(AM) to the entrance of the inner gate facing north where the statue of jealousy that provokes jealousy stood. ⁴There I saw the glory of the God of Israel, like the vision I had seen in the plain.^(AN) ⁵He said to me: Son of man, lift your eyes to the north! I looked to the north and there in the entry north of the altar gate was this statue of jealousy.^(AO) ⁶He asked, Son of man, do you see what they are doing? Do you see the great abominations that the house of Israel is practicing here, so that I must depart from my sanctuary? You shall see even greater abominations!^(AP)

⁷Then he brought me to the entrance of the courtyard, and there I saw a hole in the wall. ⁸Son of man, he ordered, dig through the wall. I dug through the wall—there was a doorway. ⁹Go in, he said to me, and see the evil abominations they are doing here. ¹⁰I went in and looked—figures of all kinds of creeping things and loathsome beasts,^[r] all the idols of the house of Israel,^(AQ) pictured around the wall. ¹¹Before them stood seventy of the elders of the house of Israel. Among them stood Jaazaniah, son of Shaphan, each with censer in hand; a cloud of incense drifted upward.^(AR) ¹²Then he said to me: Do you see, son of man, what the elders of the house of Israel are doing in the dark, each in his idol chamber? They think: “The Lord cannot see us; the Lord has forsaken the land.”^(AS) ¹³He said: You will see them practicing even greater abominations.

¹⁴Then he brought me to the entrance of the north gate of the house of the Lord. There women sat and wept for Tammuz.^[s]^(AT) ¹⁵He said to me: Do you see this, son of man? You will see other abominations, greater than these!

¹⁶Then he brought me into the inner court of the house of the Lord. There at the door of the Lord’s temple, between the porch and the altar, were about twenty-five men with their backs to the Lord’s temple and their faces toward the east; they were bowing eastward^[t] to the sun.^(AU) ¹⁷He said: Do you see, son of man? Are the abominable things the house of Judah has done here so slight that they should also fill the land with violence, provoking me again and again? Now they are putting the branch to my nose!^[u] ¹⁸Therefore I in turn will act furiously: my eye will not spare, nor will I take pity. Even if they cry out in a loud voice for me to hear, I shall not listen to them.

Footnotes

5:2 The city: the one drawn on the tablet (4:1).
5:8 I am coming against you: an expression borrowed from the language of warfare in which an enemy attacked another with the sword. “You” in vv. 8–17 is Jerusalem.
5:10 Parents will eat their children…parents: the prophet describes the consequences of the prolonged Babylonian siege of Jerusalem in 587/586 B.C. See note on Lam 2:20.
6:3 High places: raised platforms usually built on hills outside towns for making sacrifices to the Lord or to Canaanite deities. They became synonymous with places of idolatry after the centralization of worship in the Jerusalem Temple.
6:5 Scatter your bones…altars: the bones of the dead defiled a place; cf. 2 Kgs 23:14.
6:7 You shall know that I am the Lord: this formula is repeated after most of Ezekiel’s oracles from this point on. Whatever happens to Israel happens at the Lord’s command; because the Lord uses the nations to punish or reward Israel for its behavior, Israel will learn that its God has sole rule over the nations and the universe, and will acknowledge that rule in obedience.
6:11 Clap your hands, stamp your feet: these gestures may express grief, even horror, at Israel’s infidelities; in 25:6, they are signs of gloating.
6:13 Every green tree and leafy oak: trees often identified with fertility deities and the “tree of life”; sacred groves had a long history in Palestine and throughout the Mediterranean basin as places of worship; cf. Dt 12:2.
6:14 From the wilderness to Riblah: the whole land, from the far south to the far north.
7:12–13 Normal affairs will cease to have any meaning in view of the disaster that is to come.
7:17 Hands…knees: image of profound terror; loss of control of body movement and functions.
7:18 Shaved bald: shaving the head was a sign of mourning.
7:20 Assyrian wall paintings show that statues of deities were often cast in precious metals and then decorated with jewelry. Cf. Is 40:19–20; 41:6–7; 44:9–20.
7:24 Proud strength: misplaced trust in the might and power of their kings and army. Cf. v. 22; 33:28 and related ideas in Is 2:12; 10:12; 13:11; Jer 48:29; Ez 24:21; 30:18.
8:1 In the sixth year, on the fifth day of the sixth month: September, 592 B.C.
8:2 Looked like a man: the divine presence which accompanies Ezekiel in these visions. Cf. 40:3–4.
8:3 The spirit lifted me up: the prophet is transported in vision from Babylon to Jerusalem. Ezekiel may be drawing on his memory of the Temple from before his exile in 598 B.C. The statue of jealousy: the statue which provokes the Lord’s outrage against the insults of his own people; perhaps the statue of the goddess Asherah set up by Manasseh, king of Judah (cf. 2 Kgs 21:7; 2 Chr 33:7, 15). Although his successor, Josiah, had removed it (2 Kgs 23:6), the statue may have been set up again after his death.
8:10 Creeping things and loathsome beasts: perhaps images of Egyptian deities, often represented in animal form. During the last days of Jerusalem Zedekiah, king of Judah, was allied with Egypt, hoping for protection against the Babylonians.
8:14 Wept for Tammuz: the withering of trees and plants that began in late spring was attributed to the descent of Tammuz, the Mesopotamian god of fertility, to the world of the dead beneath the earth. During the fourth month of the year, female worshipers of Tammuz would wail and mourn the god’s disappearance.
8:16 Bowing eastward: sun worship was perhaps introduced as a condition of alliance with other nations. While Josiah removed some elements of this worship (2 Kgs 23:11), Manasseh, for example, built altars to all the “hosts of heaven” in two Temple courtyards (2 Kgs 21:5).
8:17 Putting the branch to my nose: the meaning is uncertain. It may be connected with the social injustice mentioned in v. 17b and in 9:9, e.g., “with their violence they tweak my nose,” i.e., “goad my fury.” The Masoretic text reads “their noses” as a euphemism for “my nose,” thus avoiding the impropriety of these idolaters coming into contact with God even figuratively.

New American Bible (Revised Edition) (NABRE)

Scripture texts, prefaces, introductions, footnotes and cross references used in this work are taken from the New American Bible, revised edition © 2010, 1991, 1986, 1970 Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, Inc., Washington, DC All Rights Reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.