THE OXFORD HANDBOOK OF EZEKIEL
Editedby
CORRINE CARVALHO
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Carvalho, Corrine, editor.
Title: The Oxford handbook of Ezekiel / edited by Corrine Carvalho. Description: New York, NY, United States of America: Oxford University Press, [2023] | Series: Oxford handbooks series | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2022051685 (print) | LCCN 2022051686 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190634513 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190634544 | ISBN 9780190634537 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Bible. Ezekiel.
Classification: LCC BS1545.55.O94 2023 (print) | LCC BS1545.55 (ebook) | DDC 224/.406—dc23/eng/20230130
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022051685
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022051686
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190634513.001.0001
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Contributors
1. Ezekiel Scholarship in the Twenty-first Century
CORRINE CARVALHO
2. Ezekiel in Its Historical Context
MARVIN A. SWEENEY
3. The Mesopotamian Context of Ezekiel
DANIEL BODI
4. Ezekiel and Israel’s Legal Traditions
MICHAEL A. LYONS
5. Ezekiel among the Prophetic Tradition
ANJA KLEIN
6. Ezekiel and Israelite Literary Traditions
DEXTER E. CALLENDER
7. Text-Critical Issues in Ezekiel
TIMOTHY P. MACKIE
8. Rhetorical Strategies in the Book of Ezekiel
DALE LAUNDERVILLE
9. Ezekiel as a Written Text: Archiving Visions, Remembering Futures
IAN D. WILSON
10. Ezekiel among the Exiles
DALIT ROM-SHILONI
11. Ezekiel and Politics
MADHAVI NEVADER
12. Priests, Levites, and the Nasi: New Roles in Ezekiel’s Future Temple
TOVA GANZEL
13. Ezekiel’s Concept of Covenant
JOHN STRONG
14. Ezekiel and the Foreign Nations
C. L. CROUCH
15. Ezekiel and the Priestly Traditions
STEPHEN L. COOK
16. Communications of the Book of Ezekiel: From the Iron Wall to the Voice in the Air
SOO J. KIM SWEENEY
17. Ezekiel in Christian Interpretation: Gog, Magog, and Apocalyptic Politics
ANDREW MEIN
18. Pastoral Appropriations of Ezekiel
STEVEN TUELL
19. Ezekiel in the Jewish Tradition
YEDIDA EISENSTAT
20. Where There’s Fire There’s Smoke: Text and Image in the Ezekiel Painting at Dura-Europos
MARGARET S. ODELL
21. Ezekiel and Gender
AMY KALMANOFSKY
22. Embodiment in Ezekiel
RHIANNON GRAYBILL
23. Ezekiel as Trauma Literature
RUTH POSER
24. Uncertainties in First Contact? Ezekiel’s Struggle Toward a “Comparative Gaze”
DANIEL L. SMITH-CHRISTOPHER
25. Ezekiel’s Map of Future Past
CARLA SULZBACH
26. Ezekiel Imperialized Geographies in the Nation Oracles
STEED VERNYL DAVIDSON
27. Ezekiel’s Tangible Ethics: Physicality in the Moral Rhetoric of Ezekiel
CORRINE CARVALHO
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Much of this volume includes scholars who have worked together at the Society of Biblical Literature in sections dedicated to research on the book of Ezekiel (formerly Theological and Anthropological Approaches to the Book of Ezekiel, now called simply The Book of Ezekiel). I wish to thank the Society of Biblical Literature, the various chairs of this section, and my many colleagues and friends without whom this work would not have been possible.
CONTRIBUTORS
Daniel Bodi, Professor of History of Religions of Antiquity, Sorbonne University
Dexter E. Callender Jr., University of Miami
Corrine Carvalho, Professor, University of St. Thomas
Stephen L. Cook, Catherine N. McBurney Professor of Old Testament Language and Literature, Virginia Theological Seminary
C. L. Crouch, Professor of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and Ancient Judaism; Research Associate, Radboud University; University of Pretoria
Steed Vernyl Davidson, Professor of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament; Vice President of Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty, McCormick Theological Seminary
Yedida Eisenstat, Affiliated Fellow, Center for the Study of Law and Religion, Emory University
Tova Ganzel, Senior Lecturer, Bar-Ilan University
Rhiannon Graybill, Associate Professor, Rhodes College
Amy Kalmanofsky, Blanche and Romie Shapiro Professor of Bible and the Dean of List College and the Kekst Graduate School, Jewish Theological Seminary
Anja Klein, Senior Lecturer in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, University of Edinburgh
Dale Launderville, Professor of Theology, St. John’s University
Michael A. Lyons, Senior Lecturer in Old Testament/Hebrew Bible, University of St. Andrews
Timothy P. Mackie, Research Scholar, BibleProject
Andrew Mein, Senior Lecturer in Biblical Interpretation and Academic Editor, University of St. Andrews
Madhavi Nevader, Lecturer in Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, University of St. Andrews
Margaret S. Odell, Professor Emerita, St. Olaf College
Ruth Poser, Independent Scholar
Dalit Rom-Shiloni, Associate Professor, Tel Aviv University
Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Professor of Old Testament, Loyola
Marymount University
John Strong, Professor of Religious Studies, Missouri State University
Carla Sulzbach, Independent Scholar
Marvin A. Sweeney, Professor of Hebrew Bible, Claremont School of Theology
Soo J. Kim Sweeney, Adjunct Professor, Claremont School of Theology
Steven Tuell, James A. Kelso Professor Emeritus of Hebrew and Old Testament, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary
Ian D. Wilson, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Alberta, Augustana Campus
EZEKIEL SCHOLARSHIP IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
CORRINE CARVALHO
INTRODUCTION
The book of Ezekiel has never had the same cultural or academic influence as Isaiah or Jeremiah. While certain parts of the book have played significant roles in the history of biblical interpretation, as a whole the book’s unique characteristics have garnered what today might be called a fringe following. I doubt that the trend will change significantly in this century. In fact, the past fifty years have seen a rise in objections to the book on ethical grounds, particularly from feminist scholarship. Not only is the main human figure in the book odd enough that his mental health has been questioned, but the characterization of God feeds into a theology of judgment, damnation, and self-righteous violence.
Ezekiel scholars, as a result, form a rather unique subset of biblical scholars, drawing in those who appreciate the rhetorical elements of an ancient text that continues to evoke strong reactions from its audience. Some scholars are drawn to the book because it seems to offer steady ground; its redactional seams are either far fewer or better hidden than is found in Isaiah or Jeremiah. The author’(s) adept use of ancient genre, such as theoretical ethics (ch. 18), temple building accounts (chs. 40–48), historical reviews (20), and manipulation of more traditional prophetic genre such as vision reports, dirges, and stock metaphors, to name just a few, reveal a different kind of literary creativity than is evident in other prophetic books. The text’s echoes of Israelite traditions evident in other
biblical books suggests the book might provide a lynchpin for dating other biblical texts. Its ability to undergird traditional theologies of divine transcendence attracts those who eschew a more imminent theology.
The lack of ambiguity in the text also attracts those who are leery of postmodern approaches to biblical texts, including Bakhtinian dialogical reading, suggestions of subversive counter-narratives, or any notion of a theology that deconstructs itself. Even its written literary appearance has tempered discussions of competing voices in the text. All this is to say that the scholarship on the book of Ezekiel has remained rather traditional because of the nature of the book itself.
This essay will outline the major trends in scholarship on Ezekiel before moving on to more recent engagements with trauma theory and postcolonial readings. This survey will reflect my own journey building the contents of this handbook. I have been working on Ezekiel for over thirty years now; it is a field that has benefitted from a very devoted group of scholars who meet regularly and share vibrant discussions, which I have tried to represent in the authors and subjects of this handbook. This introduction will illuminate some of the issues around which the most vigorous debates revolve, but I also hope that both the introduction and the volume exhibit the trust and respect this community has for each other’s academic excellence even in the midst of disagreement. We are all better scholars because of the depth and honesty of approaches that differ from our own. For me, this model of scholarship as a communal dialogical project is one that our guild should more explicitly exhibit.
Even with this community of scholars, however, Ezekiel scholarship is also a field where those who utilize newer approaches to biblical material struggle to break in. As a result, I had difficulty finding people able or willing to address the book from a variety of methods and perspectives that I had hoped to engage, including a trajectory of contextual readings, a more multivalent approach to gender as performance, and a vibrant application of poetics and rhetoric that places the fantastical elements of the book more centrally. These
lacunae also inform this chapter, so I will end with some suggestions about where I hope the field will go in the future.
1. REDACTION OR REDUCTION: THE LEGACIES OF ZIMMERLI AND GREENBERG
The second half of the twentieth century was shaped in large part by two magisterial multivolume commentaries on the book of Ezekiel. First, the detailed historical-critical commentary by Zimmerli (1979 and 1983), marks the best of the German tradition of carefully argued redaction-critical analyses of the book. This was countered by the Greenberg’s incomplete but highly influential commentary (1983 and 1997) that read the book as having a redactional unity stemming primarily from the prophet himself. This scholarly variation marked out the playing field for much of the subsequent scholarship on the book. While Zimmerli’s detailed divisions of the text did not win the day, neither did Greenberg’s simple unified text. The debate laid bare the unique contours of this “major” prophetic book. German scholars such as Pohlmann (1992) have been influenced more by the work of Zimmerli, while Israeli and English-speaking scholars, especially those who are students of Childs and Block such as S. Cook (2018), tend to align with the holistic approaches and early dating of Greenberg. The book does have signs of more conscious structuring across its chapters, through repetitions, Wiederaufnahmen (rhetorical hooks between major sections of the book), and a forty-eight-chapter semi-narrative arc. On the other hand, the book also contains some internal inconsistencies, changes in terminology, and varying political ideals. John Barton infers that redaction can only be discovered when the editorial work is sloppy (1996, esp. 20–26); a well-edited multilayered text can appear to be a unified composition. Is the book of Ezekiel one of these cases?
The details in the book suggest that the bulk of the material predates the Persian period. Perhaps the most convincing evidence comes from Ezek 29:17–20, where an earlier oracle about the
downfall of Tyre (26:7) has been revised, but the revision itself contradicts Babylon’s inability to defeat Egypt, a fact that would have been known once Babylon had itself become a vassal of Persia (Greenberg 1986, esp. 134–35). Second, the vision of restoration in chapters 40–48 does not reflect the issues of inclusion and identity that characterize the final chapters of Isaiah and later layers in Jeremiah; nor do they wrestle with the same practicalities of rebuilding found in Haggai-Zechariah 1–8, or the reflection of a failed ideal that lies behind Ezra-Nehemiah. As a result, most Ezekiel scholars view the bulk of the book as reflecting the idealizations of “homeland” circulating among former elites in the Babylonian diaspora.
Scholars do entertain arguments for sporadic secondary additions to the book. Probably the material that is most often viewed as a secondary addition is chapter 44’s view of the priesthood, which does not reflect the priestly terminology of the rest of the book (Tuell 2005). Some scholars would see the references to the restoration of a Davidic king in 33:23–24 as also contrary to the book’s insistence that the human leader is merely a “prince” (nāśȋ’) in relation to God (Duguid 1994; Nihan 2015). The textual variants in Papyrus 967 in chapters 36–40 especially suggest that chapters 38–39 were added later, although in two different spots depending on the textual tradition (Lust 1981; Lilly 2012; Mackie 2015).
While redaction-critical research on Ezekiel was robust in the second half of the twentieth century, the past two decades have witnessed a fascination with the relationship of the legal philosophy in Ezekiel with that found in various strata of the Pentateuch, which raises questions about the relative dates of these bodies of literature. Haran (1979) argues for a pre-exilic P that functioned as the esoteric literature of the priestly group, of which Ezekiel was a part. Cook (2018), following Knohl’s reconstruction of a pre-exilic Holiness School (1995), which extends beyond the Holiness Code, traces connections between the two corpora. Kohn (2002) examined parallels with both D and P, again opting for a pre-exilic date for both traditions, while Lyons (2009) utilizes linguistic analysis to posit Ezekiel’s transformations of pre-exilic legislation in the Holiness Code
into accusations. These studies have become so dominant in Ezekiel scholarship that they now form a dominant trend in current scholarship of the book.
Different approaches to redactional analyses can be found in I. Wilson’s work on Tyre (2013), Nihan on the royal figure (2015), and Guillaume’s discussion of the lack of Ezekiel’s influence in the early Persian period (2015), studies that suggest caution for several reasons. The scholars who connect Ezekiel to premonarchic Pentateuchal traditions admit that, while the book of Ezekiel has many similar categories of H and P, the laws are not exact replications of Pentateuchal material. In fact, this variance is what gave the rabbinic tradition pause over accepting the book as “defiling the hands.” Scholars, including myself, who question a model of a scribal priest who makes deliberate adaptations to semicanonical law codes, critique this model for several reasons. First, the model that the book of Ezekiel uses and adapts written Pentateuchal sources assumes that we have all the legal scrolls that would have been in circulation when the scroll of Ezekiel was written. Second, it presumes that the versions of chapters within the Pentateuch that resemble material in Ezekiel have not changed since the pre-exilic period. Both assumptions are viewed as rather unlikely, utilizing anachronistic models of composition.
While I am in the latter camp, I appreciate the weight of evidence brought by my colleagues about the proximity in language and worldview, even if we disagree about the reasons for those parallels. Although I still am skeptical about the transition models and directions, I am acutely aware of the intellectual milieu within which the language and perspective of the book of Ezekiel plays out. There is undoubtedly a plethora of parallels between H and Ezekiel, along with notable differences, data for which we all provide models. This case demonstrates that the scholarship on Ezekiel often stems from respectful and meaty debates through which all arguments are honed, which is reflected in the various perspectives in this handbook.
2. SCRIBAL PRACTICE AND THE SCROLL OF EZEKIEL
The rise in discussions of scribal practices have also entered into debates about the compositional history of the book. On the one hand, the book’s own rhetorical elements and use of more prose elements than found in other prophetic scrolls suggest that textualization was central to the book’s production; in fact, it seems to have an awareness of its own textuality, symbolized perhaps most poignantly by the prophet’s swallowing of the scroll (Davis 1989).
The book’s self-conscious textualization has supported a reconstruction of the author as a scribal figure. Often, though, discussions of the written context of the book’s production does not address the interplay of orality even within ancient scribal production. For example, in the discussions of the book’s use of other Israelite traditions, both legal and prophetic, models often assume textual copying without any interplay of orality in that reuse. The author of Ezekiel would not so much have copied earlier written traditions as received them along with oral transmissions that the written texts supported. Recent work by Stökl (2015 and 2017) and Bodi (1991 and 2015) have demonstrated the likelihood that this author had formal scribal training in Babylonian settings. As a result, it seems more likely to posit a Judean exile using the techniques of writing to re-interpret oral traditions, which may have also been secondarily available through written texts, that would have informed the identity of this community in creative and innovative ways. There is evidence of this throughout the book, such as the engagement with Isaiah 6’s visionary call narrative, or the echoes of Hosea’s allegories of the adulterous urban wife. In these examples found within the prophetic tradition, the author clearly utilized an artistic freedom to create, not a canonical document, but an aesthetic reflection on the distortion of Israelite traditions through the experience of defeat and shame. It seems to me probable that this author would have taken a similar approach to legal traditions, some of which have been preserved in written form in the Pentateuch.
The growing body of work on orality and textualization especially in the Second Temple period has begun to have its effect on scholarship on Ezekiel. While Ben Zvi’s analyses of the written nature of the prophetic traditions in the canon dealt only minimally with Ezekiel, Ian Wilson (2013) and Guillaume (2015) have tackled this major question. Frankly, it is not just a historical question, but gets to the heart of the genre of written prophetic collections. What is it we are reading when we open these books? Certainly, there is nothing exactly like them extant in the Near Eastern repertoire, as Edelman, for example, points out (2009, 29–54). While twentiethcentury scholarship posited an oral performance by a named prophet whose speech acts were preserved by disciples or a school, there are several explicit reasons why the book of Ezekiel counters such a model. First, the prophet himself is rendered mute at the beginning of the book, although he is allowed to speak only divinely authorized speech; this element, which structures the book, seems more like a rhetorical device to address authenticity than as an historically accurate memory. Second, Ezekiel’s own audience fundamentally does not view him as a prophet, at least in 33:32. To be sure, the elders consult him on two occasions (8:1; 20:1), but they do not heed him. Third, the prophetic speeches in the book would not have functioned well at the oral level, especially the nine-chapter prose vision that closes the book. Fourth, the use of dates and the vision of divine presence in three acts to structure the book function as an editorial roadmap to the final complex anthology.
If the book is a literary creation, as many scholars have maintained, then more fundamental questions arise. Is this a literary fantasy which plays with social memories of priesthood, prophecy, and temple elites with little to no reflection of an historical reality? How would the text have ever been actualized such that it survived to become part of a canonical collection? It could not have been solely esoteric literature, because at some point, by or in the Second Temple period, this body of literature had begun to form the collective identity of Persian Yehud, not as a kind of proto-gnostic secret, but as a publicly accessible, discreet and named tradition. I
wish I knew the mechanism for this, but I suspect it had less to do with orthodoxy than it did with artistry.
The book of Ezekiel fundamentally intertwines oral and visual artistry. If any prophetic book begs for a graphic novel version, it is Ezekiel! While most scholarship on the book has focused on its literary artistry, the book repeatedly paints vivid pictures based on the main character’s rich visionary experiences, thus creating a fundamental irony of a book that begs to be seen. The temple visions certainly structure the book, but in between the triptych of these three main visions (chs. 1, 8–11, 40–48) are various panels replete with visual symbols (e.g., trees, lions, vines, mountains, bloody pots, swords, watchmen, sheep, and bones to name only a few).
These visual elements complicate the oral-written dichotomy of many global approaches to prophetic books, both in the older model of an oral moment that becomes textualized and in the more recent model of written texts actualized through oral performance. Ezekiel as avatar simply does not perform (although at one point the book’s audience claims that he does). He shows. How would this particular kind of speech have been actualized in the ancient context? Would it have added drawing to speech and performance, like Jesus drawing in the dirt in John 8:6? Or did it simply rely on the imagination of a real audience listening to the visual descriptions? Either way, the book presumes the meaning-making and emotional impact of these visual elements.
3. EZEKIEL AND BABYLON: IT’S COMPLICATED
Ezekiel’s relationship with Mesopotamian cultural elements displays the cultural hybridity of a diasporic community. The book of Ezekiel, which does not include Babylon in its “Oracles against the Nation,” for example, clearly views the Babylonian defeat of Jerusalem as the worst punishment God could muster, outside of perhaps Magog, which many read as a cypher for Babylon. This bifurcated stance
toward Babylonian power in the book can be illustrated by the visual elements that dominate the book’s discourse. Scholars have long noted striking usage of Mesopotamian motifs in the book of Ezekiel, especially in terms of the visual elements of the text. One way to interpret the combination of visual and textual elements in the book connects them to the Assyrian and Babylonian monumental iconography where the interplay of iconography and inscription create a rich intertext (Hulster, Strawn, and Bonfiglio 2015).
In the late twentieth century, scholars focused on the textual parallels to Mesopotamian literature, especially the Erra Epic (Bodi 1991) and other narratives featuring divine abandonment (Kutsko 2000). Odell’s 2005 commentary on Ezekiel explores parallels with neo-Assyrian inscriptions and iconography. In the past decade, there have been three significant contributions to the ANE background of the book: evidence of the author’s scribal education in Babylon (Stökl 2015 and 2017), the iconographic influences springing from the foundational work by Keel (Uehlinger and Trufaut 2001; Bodi 2015; Aster 2015), and the study of Babylonian influence in the temple vision (Ganzel 2021). In addition, Marzouk (2015) has examined the depiction of Egypt in the book (see also Carvalho 2015).
The author(s) of the book utilize(s) the same artistic license with Near Eastern traditions that they do with Israelite ones. In the oracles against Egypt, for example, the author turns Egyptian royal iconography on its head (a serpent that can fished out of its beloved Nile, a powerful arm broken, a landscape of the living dead). Together these studies of the Near Eastern context of the material in the book not only project the ideal author as a former elite with cosmopolitan knowledge now living in Babylon, but also presumes an audience for whom these images have some meaning potential. Such an assumption fits the diasporic setting of the book, where hybridity and mimicry become part of the colonized repertoire. To be sure, not all of the images would have been meaningful for every “reader,” and some may be aimed at Zvi’s “literati,” but enough must have been impactful beyond an esoteric inner cabal.
For me the combination of text and visual imagery parallels the ways that Mesopotamian (and perhaps Egyptian) monumental works reached out to multiple audiences through its combination of iconography and inscription. The simple dichotomy of visual for the illiterate and textual for the literate no longer holds. The inscriptions that were meant to be actualized orally would have been accessible to the illiterate, while inscriptions in hidden or inaccessible places (such as foundation stones or inaccessible cliffs) functioned on a different plane of meaning than a viewer’s personal experience. Even copies of hidden iconography had a function derivative and different from the original hidden art.
This complexity of visual and textual informs the combination of similar elements in the book of Ezekiel. It should not be surprising, then, that parts of the book were composed with the possibility of public actualization in mind, others as artistry most appreciated by an educated elite while other texts derived their meaning from their mere physical existence rather than a text that actualizes meaning through the act of reading/reception. Ezekiel combines text as story, text as archive, text as artifact, and text as totem.
4. PLAY THAT TUNE: THEMATIC STUDIES OF THE BOOK OF EZEKIEL
While many scholars have examined the world behind the text, including its production, historical context, and redaction, others have focused more on the contents of the book, including some of its major themes and concerns. In addition to studies on priesthood (MacDonald, 2015), kingship (Crouch 2011; Nevader 2015a and 2015b), land (Pikor 2018), and the law (Kemp, 2020), which have often sprung from a strong interest in the world behind the text, scholars have also highlighted the prominence of the spirit, the temple, and ethical discourse in the book.
The frequency of the word rȗ’aḥ throughout the book with its various nuances has led to studies of the role of the spirit in the
book. The two most prominent among these are Robson’s discussion (2006) of spirit and the prophetic office, and Launderville’s monograph (2007) that reads the lexeme through the lens of both Mesopotamian and Hellenistic concepts of a similar spirit, which grounds Ezekiel’s spirit as an animating force for all human activities, especially rational thinking. Both of these highly nuanced studies uncover the complexity and nuance of the book’s use of the term.
The unifying rhetorical function of the temple in the book has also elicited many vibrant studies. The final nine chapters of the book has been a repeated site of scholarly discussion over the past several decades from Gese (1957) and Levenson (1976) to Tuell (1992), Rudnig (2000), Konkel (2001), and Ganzel (2021). Very few connect the final vision with the rest of the book. Notable exceptions include the studies of the trope of divine abandonment in Bodi (1991) and Kutsko (2000).
The discussion of intergenerational guilt in Ezekiel 18 has elicited a number of studies of the ethical worldview of the book. While the use of singular nouns, father and child, in the long discussion of moral responsibility suggest an early attempt of fleshing out a concept of individual moral responsibility, Joyce (1989) and Mein (2001), building on the work of Kaminsky (1995), have cogently argued for these figures’ function as symbols of corporate identity. Lapsley (2000) approaches the ethical question from a different angle, pointing to the tension between agency and determinism in the book’s moral horizon.
For the most part, studies of the reception history of Ezekiel have been episodic, focused primarily on individual passages, rather than on the book as a whole. For example, New Testament studies have noted the influence of Ezekiel on the Gospel of John (Peterson 2015) and the book of Revelation (Bøe 2001). The vision of God in Ezekiel has elicited both the Merkabahmystical tradition in Judaism with its focus on the chariot while simultaneously the description of the four faces of the cherubim has provided the standard iconography of the four evangelists in the Christian tradition. The vision of the resurrection of the dry bones has provided hope for contemporary diasporic and minoritized communities, while the highly symbolic
language of Gog from Magog has fueled the imagination of millenarianism from the New Testament to Cold War America (Joyce, 2011; Joyce and Mein, 2014).
Guillaume (2015) wrestles with the book’s failure to become a site of memory, suggesting that the book’s interpretation of the fall of Jerusalem represents a minority view and that the book is only preserved for its supply of visionary material that is read through the lens of hope. For me the most interesting aspect of the history of the book’s interpretation is how it tends to bracket out texts that do not fit the interpreting communities’ dominant theological paradigms, a trend that continues into the use of the book in the modern lectionary traditions. Ezekiel’s son of man predicts Jesus, the dry bones pre-figure resurrection, and the good shepherd underlies Christian messianic models. No wonder most contemporary readers experience cognitive dissonance when faced with the book’s thorough-going pessimistic view of human nature.
5. IRREDEEMABLE EZEKIEL: THE BOOK AS UNHOLY
SCRIPTURE
Feminist interpretation of Ezekiel 16 and 23 has become a prominent vehicle for discussions of the reception of the book. Although most of these studies again focus only on these discreet chapters, some scholars have used that as a basis for exploring the impact of Ezekiel on other aspects of Christian hegemonic hierarchies. The second half of the twentieth century witnessed widespread denouncement of the ideologies, images, and idioms of the book of Ezekiel, especially in the extensive gendered metaphors in chapters 16 and 23. Arising primarily from feminist critiques of the ways in which biblical rhetoric reinforced sexism and contributed to a Christian tolerance of domestic violence, these chapters became a classic case study of whether some biblical passages should be excised either in practice (by not reading them in liturgical settings, for example) or in reality. Interpretation of the passage also became a litmus test for whether
a scholar was adequately grounded in second wave feminist methodology.
The fact that God is the agent of the gender violence in these chapters broadens the critique to other scholarly critiques of certain scriptural images of God as being “unholy,” to use my own term. Many scholars connected divine violence to an overly simplistic and sometimes anachronistic model of patriarchy, and often projected a unidirectional path of influence from text to reader. The discussion of the status of these chapters, as well as other similar passages, addresses interconnected elements of the book, including the relationship between the book’s ancient meaning and its subsequent reception history.
The history of research on chapter 16 in particular is too long to rehearse, but some general trends bear mentioning. Weems (1995) and Shields (1998) have examined how the book contributes to Christian tolerance of domestic abuse and the persistence of a rape culture, respectively. These approaches are concerned with the reallife effects of texts that have the elevated social function as sacred scripture, which intensifies the impact of this particular material. These and similar studies, then, can be read as examining the hidden transcript of the book’s reception history. As a guild, the intense scrutiny of chapters 16 and 23 has affected overall assessments of the book. Boer (2013), for example, presents a phallic-centric reading of the book’s production. Galambush (1992) studies the gyno-centric spatiality of the city that permeates the book. As a result, many other influential texts in the history of the interpretation of the book of Ezekiel have taken a back seat, some for good and some for ill.
Many feminist studies of the chapters 16 and 23 also posit an historical horizon that was itself thoroughly patriarchal, a conclusion that has been challenged by Yee (2003) and Meyers (2014) as anachronistic, especially for an agrarian society where elite women had more agency than some of these models suggest. Yee (2003) provides a more complex analysis of the gender categories in this material, adding especially the lens of race, class, and colonial economics (materialist reading) to provide a more thorough-going
intersectional reading of the material, grounding her analysis in the literature’s ancient social context. Her study uncovers the hegemonic concerns that the extended metaphor in chapter 23 addresses.
6. READING EZEKIEL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
The past two decades have seen a growing number of scholars applying newer lenses to the interpretation to the book, especially trauma and postcolonial theories. While neither of these consist of a specific method, they both represent attempts to bring the sociological and psychological background of the text to the fore. Because these are newer approaches to the ancient text, the models created by the theories vary. For example, trauma readings of prophetic books generally fall into two camps: those that explore the trauma of the writer and those that focus on the text as a product of and for traumatized communities.
Focus on Ezekiel as a traumatized individual author continues the trajectory of psychological readings of the book from the twentieth century. One could argue that Halperin’s model of an author who had experienced childhood sexual trauma was a kind of trauma reading (1993), although it is more properly Freudian. Poser’s magisterial analysis of Ezekiel as trauma literature (2012; see also 2016) reads the book as providing a narrative that gives voice to the unspeakable. One of the challenges for these readings, however, is that they presume a date for the production of the text within the generation of the traumatized individual. Odell’s work (2016) adds the concept of collective fragmented memory broadening the perspective of analysis from the individual to the communal, a move within sociological analyses of the text. More work needs to be done on trauma literature as a reflection of communal intergenerational sites of traumatic memory in order to move the discussion beyond the book’s production to a discussion of its preservation within Persian period scribal literati.
Colonial occupation by the Persians continued the systemic and sustained intergenerational trauma, as postcolonial theory notes. The application of postcolonial theory to Ezekiel has only just begun. While there have been monographs on Judahite identity formation in the book of Ezekiel, most of these do it in the context of the forced migration of exile (Strine 2013; Rom-Shiloni 2013; Pikor 2018), rather than the enduring colonialization into the post-exilic period. Often focusing on the Persian period as the setting that combines both systemic colonial imposition as well as a native/Jerusalemite means of scribal production, postcolonial approaches tend to presume a post-exilic date for the book’s production. These analyses, however, have not yet addressed the lack of “typical” Persian-period concerns, such as authorized builders of the Second Temple, the definition of “foreignness” (except for chapter 44), or economic stagnation. Joo’s use of Rushdie’s narrative techniques (2014) reveals a fertile field for further exploration of the intergenerational colonized contexts for the book’s unique features. These methods, represented in many of the essays in this volume, have begun to move the discussion of Ezekiel away from an analysis of a presumed historical person to the text as a literary production, within which Ezekiel functions as a character or persona. This move has taken much longer in Ezekiel studies than it has with scholarship on either Isaiah or Jeremiah, books that have clear multiple authorship. Although there was a time when scholars searched for the historical Jeremiah because of the evocative nature of his firstperson poems and laments especially in chapters 11–20, more recent analyses have given up thinking that such a person can be recovered.
Because of the more unified nature of the book of Ezekiel and because the book’s content more consistently reflects an exilic setting, scholars of the book regularly refer to the author of the book as “Ezekiel,” not just as a shorthand for an unrecoverable anonymous author, but as the physical author of most of the original scroll. For example, both S. Cook and Rom-Shiloni work from the presumption that the book reflects the work of an historical Ezekiel.
Even analyses of Ezekiel in Babylon often build on the assumption of a historical Ezekiel.
Some scholars have begun to challenge these assumptions as oversimplified and inconsistent with the literary nature of the material at hand. For these scholars, which include myself, even if someone named Ezekiel produced the text as an exile living in Babylon, which clearly is a viable option for the book’s production, his use of himself within the scroll is not done in the service of historical accuracy, record, or annal. He presents himself as a literary character who has a particular rhetorical function.
Reading Ezekiel as a literary device, however, has the potential of unhinging the date of the book from its content. Such a character could be an individual turning themself into an avatar, but it could also be the product of an author a century or more later who had particular skill in maintaining consistency in creating an historical setting of a traditional persona, either as a reflex of the oral traditions attached to an historical prophet or a complete literary creation. These debates about the historical prophet are not new; they are found in the work of Torrey to site the most influential early proponent of a late date for the book (1930). I do not think that the debate can be settled. It is not surprising then that the predilections and assumptions of scholars about date and historical reliability play a role in models of the function of the character of Ezekiel within the text.
7. EZEKIEL AD FUTURUM
As noted above, the interpretation of the book of Ezekiel has become increasingly robust in the past five decades. Scholars have engaged in substantive and respectful debate about many aspects of the book, creating a solid foundation for advancing the field. Where the field goes next, I am not sure; I study prophets but do not claim to be one. What follows are three areas that I hope blossom over the next fifty years. My interpretations and hopes stem from my own
predilections and assumptions about the text, some of which stem from my personal historical and cultural context, a granddaughter of poor, uneducated emigrants to America, first-generation college student, raised Catholic, educated in Catholic settings until entering doctoral work, educator in an American Catholic university although now a practicing Lutheran. My own legacy of intergenerational family trauma (including sexual trauma), the social teaching traditions of Catholic ethics, and early childhood formation in the midst of the civil rights movement, anti-war protests, the women’s movement, and Vatican II reforms shape what would be my vision of a perfect “temple”: one of radical hospitality and foundational conversion of our collective culture. These convictions are displayed in my hopes for the field going forward.
First, I have often yearned for more robust, sustained diverse voices in the field of Ezekiel studies. As someone who has witnessed and been part of the ways in which the standpoint of gender has transformed not just work on this book, but also feminist analysis in general, I want to know how the context of the post-traumatic slave experience in the United States or the post-colonial reality of scholars with roots in Latin America, for example, provides a needed lens for wrestling with the book’s language and images. If Ezekiel has not been an important text in Black churches or in Latin@ communities, why is that so? Does the book contribute to systemic racism in the same ways it contributes to sexism? Does the violent deity of the book provide voice for the anger of communities whose lives continue to be shaped by systemic racism, marginalization, and minoritization? Frankly, I think that the guilds’ discomfort with a violent God stems with the dominant culture’s discomfort with anger in general, which becomes a tool for sustaining colonial power. As someone from a culture where vigorous debate is quite normal, I empathize with those whose anger over unjust treatment has been censored both explicitly and implicitly, even within the scholarly community.
Second, I would like to see gender analyses of the book of Ezekiel move beyond feminist critique, which often reinforces models of binary gender and engage gender as both a more fluid and non-
binary category. Kamionkowski began this work (2003), but innovations in gender theory have not often been re-applied to Ezekiel to build on her work. There has been some work done on Ezekiel and masculinity, but there is far more to be done. For example, the theme of shame in the book does not just reflect a binary trope of “women = shame,” but the book can be read as a community’s attempt to carve out a colonized gender identity in which the categories of traditional masculine and feminine performance have ceased to function. One way this book communicates the impact that gender-based violence had on the social memory of Jerusalem’s fall is through the hyperbolic character of Ezekiel’s gendered metaphors. Recent sociological work on the impact of gender-based violence has demonstrated that sexual violence knows no gender preference, and that the effects, no matter what the gender of the survivor, spread out to all members of the community, especially intergenerationally within families (Carvalho, forthcoming ). Analyses of Ezekiel, especially 16 and 23, should support all of those who yearn to be seen and heard from variously gendered survivors to their families and communities. Third, affect theory and discussions of disgust, in particular, have much to contribute to appreciation of the book. The expansion of prophetic tropes to the point of disgust, including not just the gendered metaphors of city-deity, but more especially, the reality of attributing their experiences to the agency of a God angered by the disgusting, putrefying, and impure behavior of the people challenged, and continues to challenge readers of the book to examine their own nonchalant use of categories of concepts like divine retribution, divine perfection, and election. Fourth, and for me most importantly, I am tired of scholarship that fails to recognize this text as literary art and instead mines it for historical information. Perhaps this is because I come from a cultural background whose art tends toward the macabre. While Renz (1999) published a thorough discussion of rhetorical techniques employed in the book, there have not been further development of other aesthetic elements in the book. Renz defines rhetorical features as those elements that make a text “persuasive” (pp. 1–26), so his
work still stays within the confines of the historical assumptions of the book’s origin. The motivation for many Ezekiel scholars to keep the book wedded to an historical Ezekiel living in exile often masks theological and ideological agendae. It is not surprising to me that Ezekiel scholars, both Jewish and Christian, tend to be more conservative with their biblical theology: Ezekiel is placed in service of arguing for a monarchic Pentateuch, historical reliability of the Bible, and a counter-reading of anti-Jewish readings of biblical legal material. But reading Ezekiel with such linear models is, to me, like using Rembrandt’s painting of Jeremiah as a photograph of the prophet.
I would love to see scholars of Ezekiel take seriously the artistic character of the material, applying aesthetic analyses to the book. By this I do not just mean rigid models of metaphors or discussions of poetic genre; these are the “how” of art, but not the why. I mean entering into the book as an act of participating in a virtual reality that not only transforms what the text means, but also transforms the reader as an active participant in that engagement. Recently a colleague of mine from the English department asked me why I was so devoted to Ezekiel; I told her that reading the Deuteronomistic History is like going to the museum to see Renaissance paintings (in all their complexity), but reading Ezekiel is more like going to a museum of modern art, where one expects to be challenged, disgusted, offended, and unexpectedly delighted. For me, this model of engagement suits the text’s character better. It is, what I call, a hermeneutics of listening, a hermeneutics I think all of our guilds need to adopt more consistently not just in our engagements with the text, but also with each other. Only then will we recognize that biblical scholarship has never been a competitive sport, but a teambuilding activity, as this brief review of scholarship has demonstrated.
Scholars have often created Ezekiel in their own image. Models of a researcher copying other material, making careful emendations to earlier written texts, and working as a solitary individual are all projections of our guild on the character of Ezekiel. The reality was probably as messy as our own real lives outside our ivory white
towers. In fact, the whole point of the book is the recognition of the universal messiness of humanity, including this supposed hegemonic prophet. The book of Ezekiel critiques us as much as it critiques its original audience, and as much as we want to either pacify the message or renounce it, reality creeps in again and again. Death is ugly. Humans fail. Communal tragedy is normal. And God exists in and through it all.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the members of the Old Testament Colloquium for their very helpful comments and revisions. All remaining mistakes and infelicities remain my own.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aster, Shawn Zelig. “Ezekiel’s Adaptation of Mesopotamian Melammu.” Die Welt des Orients 45 (2015): 10–21.
Barton, John. Reading the Old Testament: Method in Biblical Study. Revised and Enlarged edition. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996.
Bodi, Daniel. The Book of Ezekiel and the Poem of Erra. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 104. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991.
Bodi, Daniel. “The Double Current and the Tree of Healing in Ezekiel 47:1-12 in Light of Babylonian Iconography Texts.” Die Weltdes Orients 45 (2015): 22–37. Bøe, Sverre. Gog and Magog: Ezekiel 38-39 as Pre-text for Revelation 19,17-21 and 20,7-10. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 2/135. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001.
Boer, Roland. “Spermatic Spluttering Pens: Concerning the Construction and Breakdown of Prophetic Masculinity.” In Prophets Male and Female: Gender and Prophecy in the Hebrew Bible, the Eastern Mediterranean, and the Ancient Near East, edited by Jonathan Stökl and Corrine L. Carvalho, 215–36. Ancient Israel and Its Literature 15. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2013.
Carvalho, Corrine. “A Serpent in the Nile: Egypt in the Book of Ezekiel.” In Concerning the Nations: Essays on the Oracles against the Nations in Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel, edited by Else K. Holt, Hyun Chul Paul Kim, and Andrew Mein, 195–220. Library of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 612. New York and Bloomsbury: T&T Clark, 2015.
