Background
He was born in 622 B.C. in Jerusalem and belonged to a family of priests from the elite of the kingdom of Judah.
He was born in 622 B.C. in Jerusalem and belonged to a family of priests from the elite of the kingdom of Judah.
Before being carried off by Nebuchadnezzar to Babylonia in 597 BCE or shortly thereafter, he officiated in the Jerusalem Temple. In exile he lived in or near Tel Abib, a settlement of Jews near the Chebar canal. There he experienced his first vision — of the throne-chariot of God — and began his prophetic activities among the exiles.
He prophesied for twenty-two years. Until 586, when Jerusalem and its Temple were destroyed by Nebuchadnezzar, he was a prophet of reproof, castigating the Judeans for their evil ways and foretelling the fall of Jerusalem. After the fall, however, his mood changed completely, becoming one of consolation and hope, anticipating the restoration of his people with a new heart and with the divine guarantee of eternal happiness. This is most dramatically expressed in his vision of the dry bones (Ez. 37), symbolizing the resurrection of the moribund people of Israel.
According to a Jewish tradition, Ezekiel was buried in Babylonia, and his grave is identified between the Euphrates and the Chebar canal.
During the period before the exile, he reproved the people for the sins that warranted the punishment of exile and warned them of even more complete destruction and harsher conditions if they failed to repent. Like Jeremiah, he attacked the popular belief that the Temple would protect the people from harm and he also refuted the false prophets who raised vain hopes. Only repentance and rightful conduct, he insisted, could save the people from certain destruction. He reinforced his message with a series of symbolic acts such as eating a scroll inscribed with lamentations and words of woe, baking loaves of barley on human excrement to represent the unclean food Israel would have to eat in exile, and shaving his head and beard. His oracles of doom also encompassed foreign nations, who were denounced for their anti-Judean policies, especially after 586.
The last part (chap. 33ff.) of the book of Ezekiel contains oracles of consolation and restoration. Ezekiel forecasts the return of the exiles to their land, the rebuilding of the country and the Temple, and a wonderful future for the revived people. In his vision, the exiles of all twelve tribes — both those of the northern kingdom who had been exiled by the Assyrians and those of Judah exiled by the Babylonians — would be reunited in the restored Israel under a ruler of the house of David and would never again be separated or removed from their land. He laid down a plan for the division of the people into tribes, the leadership of the country, and the rebuilding of the Temple, and set out details of the procedure of worship and of the commandments incumbent on the ruler, the priests, and all the people.