Ezekiel

(sixth century b.c.)



Putative author of an Old Testament book foretelling the return of the dispossessed Israelites to the Promised Land.
Supposedly, this author was among the people of the southern Israelite kingdom of Judah who were deported to Babylonia in 597 b.c. That deportation was followed by another, on a much larger scale. Jerusalem was destroyed, and Judah became almost depopulated. Ezekiel, it appears, continued to write prophecies, experience visions, and create some very strange imagery well into the 570s. All this is open to dispute. The book seems to be a composite, and parts may have been composed in Judah rather than Babylonia.
The chief predictive passage, whoever wrote it, occurs in chapters 37 to 39. The prophet sees a valley full of dry bones, symbolizing the uprooted and stateless Israelites—not only those in Babylonia but also the northern ones, who were carried off by the Assyrians long before. God shows the bones coming back to life and covered with flesh and skin: the Chosen People will be reconstituted. They will dwell again as one nation in the Promised Land, and God says, “My servant David shall be king over them.” The reference is to a king of a dynasty founded by the original David, who lives on in his royal descendants.
This prophecy was fulfilled, in part, by the Zionist ingathering of Jews into Palestine after many centuries of dispersal. More problematic is the further prophecy in chapters 38 and 39, which foreshadows the apocalyptic writings of later times. The ultimate peace of the Lord’s resettled people is to come through his destruction of their last enemy, an invader from the remote north, “Gog of the land of Magog, the chief prince of Meshech and Tubal.” Several nations are named that will accompany Gog. Some of them are from as far off as the Caucasus and even the Ukraine, represented by “Gomer.” Thus far, the prophet may not be too implausible, but his inclusion of Persia, Ethiopia, and Libya as allies of Gog is going to extremes. Gog and Magog reappear in apocalyptic fantasy and in Revelation itself, chapter 20.
Exponents of the British-Israel theory used to explain this passage as prophesying an invasion of Palestine by the then Soviet Union, “Meshech” being Moscow and “Tubal” being Tobolsk. Italy, which then ruled both Ethiopia and Libya, could be brought in neatly if improbably. The passage continued to be recalled as long as Soviet Russia was a menacing superpower, and it was sometimes connected with the final battle of Armageddon. Specific as it is, yet not related to any historical situation, it is a loose end in scriptural prophecy.