the "abundance of revelations" given to the former affected his bodily frame, why should similar revelations not have affected Ezekiel's physical constitution? The symptoms did not disappear at once. Though he had recovered the power of walking (xii. 3-7), yet the statement that the elders were accustomed to go to his house to hear his words (viii. 1, xiv. 1, xx. 1), indicates that weakness and physical disability clung to him for a considerable time-perhaps to the tenth month of the ninth year (xxiv. 1). At that date he was confronted with something more than physical ailment. He endured the chastisement whereof all sons are partakers, and learned how "deep calleth unto deep" as they cross the sea of life. The wife whom his eyes liked to rest upon was cast down at his side by a sudden stroke. No open cry of anguish broke from his lips. Every sign of sorrow and mourning was sternly repressed; yet the pathetic reference to what she had been to him suffices to prove how hard it must have been to say "Thy will be done." Under the dark shadow of this sad event his last prophecy concerning the state of undestroyed Jerusalem was uttered. Then for about three years he remained dumb, as if his bereavement had aggravated his previous disordered bodily symptoms. Only when the first part of his commission was fulfilled, when his position, as the sign of troubles impending over the Holy City, was no longer tenable, the turning-point of his affliction was reached. The news of the capture of Jerusalem became the signal for recovery of the free use of his organs of speech (xxxiii. 22), and no mention is made of any bodily infirmities when executing the second part of his commission. Thus he passes from view. Like Moses, like prophets and apostles, "he was buried, and no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day." Is this significant of a principle of the divine government, intimating that true conduct not outward appearances, that life not death, are to be perpetuated in the thoughts of men? Ezekiel was profoundly conscious of the dates when he spoke by the Spirit, and might be said to keep a journal of them. For him "inspiration" was not merely an ecstasy of his own mind. From the fifth to the twenty-seventh year of his residence in Chaldea he knew that he was an organ which the Lord used to sound forth the notes of judgment and mercy. The sphere of his prophetic activity was not only the captives, but also the Jews still remaining in Judea. Between the two portions there was no cordiality, and we might fancy that the property of the exiles had been somewhat dishonestly or forcibly appropriated by the others (xi. 15). The task of Ezekiel was hard. He saw that both divisions were oppressed and depressed, and open to the glitter of flattering prospects presented by unworthy men. He had to dispel vivid illusions, to expose clamant evils, to render patient under the hard facts of punishment, to urge unpalatable truths which were no more agreeable to them than to other people. More than other prophets he was ordered to watch for souls; more than to others the modelling of the future Israel was intrusted to him. The last fortress of Judaism as it had been is to be trodden under the feet of the heathen, but out of its ruins a new one is to be raised, and he has to make a sketch of it. More magnificent and moving symbols of the glory of the Lord than had been given in the Temple of Jerusalem came to the exile by the Chebar, and testified that He could preserve there a people for Himself. His gifts and calling are without repentance, yet he means to bring the people to perceive their unfaithfulness, that they had to do with the living God, that the eternal holiness is unchangeable, and that each soul is responsible for its own sins. Buried seed does not rot though ungenial weather may prevent it sprouting for many a day, and out of this period of banishment were to spring forces for the creation of a new Judaism to which idols and idolworship would be altogether abhorrent. A new theocracy would be constituted, and Ezekiel is the pioneer of this new phase of divine education. He " was to point to an inauguration of divine worship far more solemn than was to be secured by the reconstruction of the city or Temple on its original site in its original form; to point, in fact, to that dispensation which Temple, city, and nation were intended to foreshadow and introduce" (Speaker's Com.). Thus was he given one of the highest places among the men of the Old Testament. It is not absurd to make a comparison between Moses and this prophet. Moses had visions of God and instructed the tribes of Israel to build a sanctuary according to the pattern shown to him; he gave details of the services to be rendered therein; he set before the congregation life and death; "he heard the voice of One speaking unto him from off the mercy-seat, from between the two cherubims." Did not Ezekiel hear a voice from above the cherubim? Did he not stand between the people and the Lord? Did he not prepare them to sanctify God, and so to be fitted for the future position they were to occupy in their own land and before all nations? Did he not appear like a lawgiver, who, in chaps. xl.-xlviii., was authorised to prescribe Temple and worship for future times, and so place the crown upon his prophetic service? The manner in which he carried out his service is instructive and stimulating. All his faculties are put at the call of the Lord--his eyes, ears, feet, tongue. He sets forth plainly and amply that which he has been inspired to do and teach. He goes on to the appointed duty, unheeding what its consequences to himself may be. He will bear any burden, expose himself to any risks, confront any fear or the dislike and hatred of his own people, if thus he may promote their welfare or be exculpated from their woe. If his forehead is " as an adamant, harder than flint," it is not from indifference to the moral conduct and disastrous fate of his countrymen, it is from a burning wish that the divine word should find a faithful and adequate representation (iii. 9, 10). He is "a spiritual Samson," "of undaunted and audacious courage," one of "The dead, but sceptered sovereigns, who still rule There is another side of his service. He is the most practical of prophets; he can cook, draw, dig, calculate, and measure. He is not a recluse; he sits among his captive countrymen for days and freely receives them into his house. He is informed as to the history and state of his own nation, and as to the religions, the politics, the trade of other nations too. Had he watched the sea and its sailors; looked upon the many articles of commerce that were found in the busy marts of ancient Tyre? Each of his features assures us that he was fitted to point the way into a new position in which men should be required to reconsider and rearrange the practice of their forefathers. The style of Ezekiel is clear enough on the whole. At times "a sublimity, tenderness, beauty, melody wholly his own" distinguish it. "Strange combinations and grotesque forms are resorted to, when by means of them he can add to the graphic power and moral force of his delineations, and invest his imagery with such specific and minute details as are naturally connected with a felt and present reality" (Fairbairn). The stir and pomp of Babylonian life are within his scope, and some of its colossal symbolic figures, which have been unearthed to the wonder of our generation, show how his thoughts had been coloured. His parables, proverbs, pictures are all used to present and impress the truths he had to deliver, and in this view he freely repeats himself, so as to produce sometimes the feeling that he is too prolix. (Comp. chap. i. with viii.-xi.; iii. 16-21 with xxxiii. 1–9; vi. with xxxvi. ; xvi. with xxii, and xxiii. ; xviii. with xxxiii. 10-20.) He has favourite and peculiar expressions: "The word of the Lord came," "The hand of the Lord was upon me," "Thou son of man," "Thus saith the Lord God;" and a tendency to sum up with, "So shall ye, or they, know that I am the Lord." Individuality and unity mark his whole work, and help us to perceive what he was whom the Lord moulded into a vessel fit for that juncture of affairs in which he lived and acted as a spiritual force. A considerable likeness of phraseology is to be noticed between Ezekiel and Jeremiah, and is an indication, not that one borrowed from the other, but that a similar mission had made for itself a similar verbal garment. A much more remarkable parallelism, however, is found between Lev. xvii.-xxvi. and the early portion of Ezekiel's prophecies. To account for this by saying that Ezekiel wrote both, or that some scamp interpolated Ezekiel's words into the book of the law in order to give the former or the latter a factitious authority, is an explanation quite worthy of those who can tell to a line what Isaiah wrote or did not write; or who can clear out of the Four Gospels the many words which Jesus of Nazareth did not speak, and actions which He did not do! I have no skill for such legerdemain. I can do no more than suppose that Ezekiel had so closely studied the condition of affairs described in Leviticus that he, perhaps unconsciously, adopted its expressions in reference to a rebellious and gainsaying people. Scanty justice has been meted out to Ezekiel and his work. Not only was he treated harshly at the outset of his prophesying, but the Jews of later times, we are told, at the last revision of the Hebrew canon, disputed as to whether the Book of Ezekiel should be included therein, and in after-days forbad that it should be read until thirty years of age had been passed. If it has not fared quite so badly among Christians, yet Jerome, 1500 years ago, applied epithets to it which are re-echoed by unnumbered commentators, and do not encourage its study-Scripturarum oceanus et mysteriorum Dei labyrinthus. A certain class of moderns are still less respectful, and therefore less likely than Jerome to find the spiritual power of the prophet. Preachers of our day say that they have never taken a text out of it, or but three or four times during the course of a lengthened ministry. Reuss suggests, as a ground for this neglect, that "Christian commentators have found less in him than in others of what they sought for, viz., Hebrew texts, direct relations, true or pretended, with the facts and ideas of the gospel." Still there are testimonies of another kind. Hengstenberg writes, "Whoever penetrates into Ezekiel will be deeply stirred by his earnestness, and . . . if it please God to bring great sifting judgments upon us, to pull down what He has built up, and to root out what He has planted, we may gain from him an immovable confidence in the final victory of the kingdom of God, who kills and makes alive, who wounds and heals, and who, after He has sent the darkest cloud, at length remembers His covenant and displays His shining bow." "What things were written aforetime were written for our learning, that we through comfort and patience of the Scriptures might have hope." The book is divided into two halves, which have striking parallelisms with one another. In the first the carnal confidence of Israel in Jerusalem is buried, in the second a new Temple is built up. The first part embraces chaps. i.-xxiv., and treats of the obstinate wickedness of the people and the approaching overthrow of Jerusalem. The second part embraces chaps. xxxiii.—xlviii., and treats of the new life to the people and the future modified Temple and its worship. Between these two parts stand chaps. xxv.-xxxii., which treat of seven neighbouring heathen peoples. They are warned of the righteous judg ment of God against them, and their number, seven, probably conveys the intimation that the principles applied to them are applicable to all the ungodly nations. THE PROPHECIES OF EZEKIEL. FIRST MAIN DIVISION. CHAPTERS I.-XXIV. I. THE DIVINE CALL OF EZEKIEL. CHAPS I.-III. 15. 1. THE DESIGNATION OF THE PROPHET TO HIS WORK (Chap. i. 1-3). EXEGETICAL NOTES.-Ver. 1. "Now," the usual Hebrew connective particle, united to a tense which signifies an action associated with something which has already transpired. It seems to have place here, neither because the Book of Ezekiel is a continuation of that of Jeremiah, nor because a preceding portion of Ezekiel's prophecies has been lost, but rather because of thoughts which were in the mind of the writer, and in succession to which his call came. "In the thirtieth year." No note is given to define the point from which this date takes its origin. It was the thirtieth from the last jubilee year, or from the finding of the Book of the Law in the reign of King Josiah (2 Kings xxii. 8), or from the era fixed by the father of Nebuchadnezzar as the commencement of the Chaldean dominion, or from the birth of the prophetsuch are the suggestions made by various expositors. The first and the last are the most improbable; still, it would be misapplied labour to discuss whether the third or the fourth is the more likely. There is no part of the prophecies depending for illustration upon a settlement of the point from which Ezekiel reckons. No doubt it had some bearing upon him and his contemporaries; it seems to have none upon us. 'In the fourth"-month is omitted in the Hebrew, as frequently with Ezekiel. The fourth month of the ecclesiastical year corresponds to our June-July, when nature is prolific with storms. "In the fifth day of the month"-was this a Sabbath? So it has been affirmed because seven days after he received a further commission (iii. 16). This is too precarious a footing from which to trace a parallel to the case of the banished John (Rev. i. 10). "As I was among the captives"-literally, "and I in the midst of the captivity." He has not yet mentioned who he is, so by this silence he calls special attention to his environment. He sets forth that he was amongst, and was one of those Jews who had been carried away from their ancestral land, and subjected to the shame and pain of captivity. He was a troubled man along with other troubled men. Not that he was under enforced servile labour, as the Israelites were in Egypt, "the house of bondage;" he had a considerable amount of personal liberty; but he was far from the land of promise, and oppressed with a sense of his exile. "By the river of Chebar." It is not at all certain to-day where this river was. It is not necessary to sup pose that Ezekiel was beside it, because the murmur of the water might dispose to quietude, and prepare his mind for openness to God. Something less sentimental than that took him thither. He had been located in the district, through which the water flowed, by the paramount power as a district which could be easily superintended, and in which there was need of population. Such wars as Nebuchadnezzar carried on, like the wars which modern Turks have waged, could not but have been the occasion for large parts of his dominions to fall out of cultivation. It would be politic to settle an industrial people like the Jews in such places, and grant them full permission "to build houses and dwell in them, and plant gardens, and eat the fruit of them." Abundance of water was needed for such operations. So the captive Jews were by a river. All was not pleasant there. Just as the later Jews were confined to the slums of Rome on the right bank of the Tiber, and satirised as Transtiberini, so was scorn heaped upon the earlier captives by "the rivers of Babylon." There they were teased and tormented. They that carried us away captive required of us a song, saying, Sing us one of the songs of Zion." A somewhat truculent temper was engendered; but God did not forsake them, and even there did exceeding abundantly above what they thought. "The heavens were opened." The exile perceived the sky cleft open. Perhaps it was not materially so, but only to the eye of faith. Yet as he speaks of it as an actual fact, it is preferable to consider the appearance to have been shown to "eyes open," as was that to John the Baptist, to Stephen, to Peter. "I saw visions of God"-phenomena produced by God and relating to His Godhead; He was at once the author and the object of them. They were somewhat differently presented from those which Ezekiel received afterwards, which were "in visions" (chaps. viii. 3, xi. 24, xl. 2). Ver. 2. "The fifth year of King Jehoiachin's captivity." Jehoiachin had been placed on the throne of Judea b Nebuchadnezzar; but, following advice from the partisans of an Egyptian alliance, and in defiance of the protestations and threatenings of Jeremiah, he had pursued a procedure at variance with the interests of the Babylonian empire. Nebuchadnezzar soon trampled down the feeble revolt, and, in little more than three months of kingship, Jehoiachin was made captive and carried away to Babylon with the prophetic de nunciation ringing in his ears that he would "die childless"-the last of the line of David which was traced through Solomon. His captivity was rigorous for years. He was kept in confinement and clothed in prison garments, and that, with their own troubles, must have made the thousands of Jews who had been transported with him to regard the date of their exile as deeply significant. So Ezekiel says to them-his contemporaries and hearers-that four years of their captivity had gone by, and then he was made cognisant of manifestations of God. This mode of dating he adheres to in his succeeding prophecies, never again referring to the thirtieth year of verse 1. Ver. 3. "The word of the Lord." Appearances were fortified, as so often |