Ezekiel and the Land

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Ezekiel and the Land:

From Harsh Justice to Tentative Hope

Keith Carley

Introduction

The daily newspaper of the city in which I live1 carries a regular

feature: Can this Career be Saved? Its a tongue-in-cheek cameo of people

who have recently been in the news on account of some misdemeanour.

They might be a sportsperson who has failed to score as many goals as they

were expected to. Or they could be a politician, or a businessperson who has

committed afaux pas social or financial.

And yes, youre right. I want to ask in this paper: Can EzekielsCareer be Saved? Has he scored too many own goals? Has his

isolationist tactic left him stranded in an indefensible position? Will his

business plan produce the cashflow to get his dream temple built? And will

anyone be willing to work for a firm that gets persistent advice from its CEO

to loathe yourselves?

More particularly, in a seminar devoted to The Earth Bible, is

Ezekiels environmental awareness sufficient to survive the minimum

standards of political correctness, let alone convey genuine sensitivity toecosystems vital for any kind of ecologically sustainable future?

Last year I wrote a paper entitled Ezekiels Formula of Desolation:

Harsh Justice for the Land/Earth.2 It should be published before the SBL

Seminar takes place in Denver and I dont want to repeat it all here. There

are some points that will need to be stated again, but let it suffice for now to

say that the paper dwelt almost exclusively on the harsh treatment God is

said to have dealt out to the land of Israel, to the land of Israels neighbours,

and to Earth in general, according to the formula of desolation, basically: I

1 Auckland, New Zealand. The newspaper is somewhat grandly titled The New Zealand

Herald.2 The Earth Story in Psalms and Prophets (The Earth Bible 4; eds. Norman C. Habel and

Shirley Wurst; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic / Cleveland: Pilgrim, forthcoming).


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will make the land a desolation,3and they will know that I am the LORD.

For the most part, in the book of Ezekiel Earth is the passive object of

horrifying maltreatment meted out by God in the process of punishing

human misdeeds. There was very little in the paper to lift the spirits of its

readers and Id like here to explore the possibility of remedying that offinding a way from Harsh Justice to Tentative Hope, with integrity.

1 Reading the Book of Ezekiel Today

To begin with the prophecy and the prophet in general: it may have

been acceptable in the days when the books of the latter prophets were

read in historical realist mode, and one could attribute the work in essence to

the named prophets to allow that Ezekiel was understandably overwrought,

his back up against the proverbial wall. He had to convince hiscontemporaries that God was just in condemning the whole of Judaean

society and bringing Babylonian forces to destroy its most treasured

possessions and take their rulers, warriors and craftspeople into exile.

Theodicy, it was assumed, is the basic function of the book of Ezekiel. Only

if the fairness of Judahs harsh treatment was substantiated could God be

justified.

But the hermeneutics of suspicion, the historical revisionism of the

minimalists, not to mention the subtleties of modern literary approaches tobiblical texts, have suggested new questions and radically new ways of

reading books like Ezekiel. We have learned to question the motives of

those who wrote and passed on the traditions. We have found far more than

one possible meaning for any passage of scripture let alone a passage as

complex as the forty-eight chapters of Ezekiel. And we realize that

everyone who picks up the book reads the prophecy in the light of their own

communal and personal ideologies, of which they are often only vaguely

aware.

4

3Variations on the synonymous verbal roots s\mmand h9rbare used to convey the

desolation; see Carley, Ezekiels Formula of Desolation for details.4 See Norman K. Gottwald, Ideology and Ideologies in Israelite Prophecy, Prophets and

Paradigms: Essays in Honour of Gene Tucker (ed. Stephen Breck Reid; JSOT Suppl.

229; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1996), 136-49. Stephen Fowl firmly distinguishes


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Conventional readings continue to commend the book of Ezekiel for

providing a rationale for the exile or for conveying positive perceptions of

God. Block, for example, writes: the people have brought this fate on

themselves by rejecting the One who had called them to life.5 Or Kutsko

focuses on two problems facing the prophet: his vigorous theodicyemphasized the removal of Gods presence from the temple, while the exile

required him to communicate the reality of Gods presence beyond national

borders.6 I do not use the term conventional readings pejoratively. I once

wrote of Ezekiel as an extremely sensitive individual who made it plain

that divine judgment had first to fall in punishment for Israels failure to

observe Gods laws,7 and I dont want to impugn the value of such

readings.

A more central issue for our purposes here though is the implicationsof the kind of God portrayed in Ezekiel for the land not to say for the

environment and creation as a whole. These days I am drawn more to the

bolder readings of Miles, who considers Ezekiel the psychotic among the

big three latter prophets,8 and of Halperin, not so much for its assumptions

about Ezekiels childhood experiences and the condition of his unconscious

as for its candid acknowledgment of the less pleasant even hateful

characteristics of God portrayed in the prophecy.9 Despite my already-

confessed interest in the Career of Ezekiel, I am aware of the problemsraised by attempts to psychoanalyse prophets, recognizing some truth in

the ideological interests that operated among the early Israelites and the ascription of

ideologies to texts themselves, Texts Dont Have Ideologies, Biblical Interpretation 3

(1995): 15-345 Daniel I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel Chapters 1-24 (NICOT; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,

1997), 51.6 John F. Kutsko, Between Heaven and Earth: Divine Presence and Absence in the Book

of Ezekiel(Biblical and Judaic Studies 7; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 2000), 151.7 Keith W. Carley, The Book of the Prophet Ezekiel (CBC; London: Cambridge

University, 1974), 321, 1.8 Jack Miles, God: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 197; Miles terms

Ezekiels confrres the manic (Isaiah) and the depressive (Jeremiah).9 David J. Halperin, Seeking Ezekiel: Text and Psychology (University Park, Penn.:

Pennsylvania State University, 1993), 170-2.


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what Carroll wrote in relation to Jeremiah: we cannot get back behind the

text to an imagined original (prophet); the prophet is lost to the scribe.10

Smith-Christopher has nonetheless made an interesting case for diagnosing

post-traumatic stress disorder in the behaviour reported of Ezekiel. The

prophets confinement in his home (3:22-27), his enactment of the siege(4:1-3), his flight into exile (ch.12) should not be dismissed as literary

invention but as secondary trauma modelling the fall of Jerusalem.11

And now, when I read the book of Ezekiel in the light of the guiding

principles of an ecojustice hermeneutic,12

which alerts us to the intrinsic

worth of the whole creation, the inter-connectedness of all things, and a

purpose greater than an egoic struggle between God and humankind,13

I

want to ask: Is it responsible to encourage people to read this book? Is

Ezekiels portrayal of God as harshly judgmental and determinedlyretributive more harmful than helpful in an age when many indicators

suggest we are on the brink of irreversible ecological disaster?

Can the Career of Ezekiel be Saved in an age of environmental

awareness, or is the prophecy a biblical Exxon Valdez,14

leaving beaches still

polluted more than a decade after its initial catastrophic impact on seabirds

and fish around the Gulf of Alaska? Or perhaps the prophecy should be

likened to a biblical Chernobyl, leaving a legacy of death by cancer among

the local populace and a trail of radioactive toxicity that may manifest in

10 Robert P. Carroll, 432 in Something Rich and Strange: Imagining a Future for

Jeremiah Studies, Troubling Jeremiah (eds. A.R. Pete Diamond, Kathleen M. OConnor

& Louis Stulman; JSOT Suppl. 260; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1999), 423-43.11 Daniel L. Smith-Christopher, Ezekiel on Fanons Couch: A Postcolonialist Dialogue

with David Halperins Seeking Ezekiel, Peace and Justice Shall Embrace: Power and

Theopolitics in the Bible (eds. Ted Grimsrud and Loren L. Johns; Telford, Penn.: Pandora

/ Scottdale, Penn.: Herald, 1999), 108-44.12

Such as The Earth Bible advocates; see Guiding Ecojustice Principles, by The Earth

Bible Team in Readings from the Perspective of Earth (The Earth Bible 1; ed. Norman C.

Habel; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic / Cleveland: Pilgrim, 2000), 38-53.13 Norman C. Habel comments on the Divine Ego in his paper The Silence of the Lands,

prepared for this Seminar.14

An oil tanker that sank in 1989 spilling some eleven million gallons of oil on to

Alaskas seas and shores.


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some of those who read it generations later and far from the original

meltdown.

I want to identify three factors which make it difficult to see a future

for Ezekiel:

the domination of vindictiveness; lack of love and the legacy of self-loathing;

care only for the interests of the exiles.

2 The Domination of Vindictiveness

Dempseys study of the latter prophets from a liberation-critical

perspective includes Ezekiel in a group which has as one of their central

concerns justice for those who suffer profound injustice at the hands of

others whose inordinate need for power and control has caused unnecessaryoppression.15 The first in this cluster of prophets is Amos, of whom

Dempsey concludes:

Gods powerful deeds of chastisement were often

themselves violent and destructive. In addition, God is

portrayed as one who dominated the natural world to try to

win back the cherished but wayward Israelites.16

Dempsey anticipates the point in her study when the paradigm (will shift)

fully from power over to empowerment, from violent injustice to peace-filled justice, from oppressive hierarchy to liberating reciprocity.

17

But a feature that distinguishes Amos from Ezekiel is that the former

recognized himself as a voice for victims of injustice and discrimination,

whether they were Israels poor whose heads were trampled into the dust of

the earth (Amos 2:7) or Ethiopians who by implication were as precious

as Israel in Gods sight (9:7). In Ezekiel it is difficult to discern anyone of

the prophets generation representing such victims of injustice other than

God! It is God alone for whom Ezekiel acts as advocate. He is certainly not

15 Carol J. Dempsey, The Prophets: A Liberation-Critical Reading (Minneapolis:

Fortress, 2000), 5.16

Ibid., 21.17

Ibid.


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an advocate for the land of Judah, let alone for Earth. The fate of the land is

to suffer desolation as a result of Gods determination to punish people, or to

flourish when God determines to recreate a community.

In the dramatic vision of chapters 8-11 a cherub is instructed to mark

out those who sigh and groan over all the abominations committed inJerusalem (9:4), but there is no indication of how many were so marked. If

there were any the likes of Noah, Danel and Job they alone would have

been saved by their righteousness (14:14). But the book of Ezekiel did not

record their names that they might be remembered and spared, as is

described in Malachi 3:16-17. On the contrary, another element of the

tradition calls in question even the preservation of the righteous:

Thus says the LORD, I am against you and I will draw my

sword from its scabbard and hew down both righteous andwicked

18within you (Ezekiel 21:8, ET v.3).

It is not only the idolatrous and violent individuals, who commit

abominations, that will suffer when God as conceived by Ezekiel exacts

recompense, but also those who have maintained righteous behaviour!

Zimmerli confirmed the point: YHWH19

himself strikes unmercifully .

The formulation appears to be in flat contradiction to the statements (about

saving ones life by righteous living in Ezek. 18) and also to know nothing

of the preservation of a remnant, as Ezek. 9 leads us to expect.

20

Dempsey is correct when she goes on to say that new social attitudes

will name a reconciling God.21

But those attitudes scarcely come within the

18 Both the Greek Septuagint and the Aramaic Targum adopt alternative readings at this

point. The former renders the equivalent of unrighteous and lawless, the latter I will

exile your righteous from you, in order to destroy your wicked, Block, Ezekiel Chapters

1-24, 665, n.41.19

YHWH is the distinctive Israelite name for God, usually rendered in both Jewish and

Christian literature as the LORD. Harold C. Washington outlines reasons for avoiding

use of the vocalized Hebrew name out of respect for Jewish tradition, 138-9 in The

Lords Mercy Endures Forever: Toward a Post-Shoah Reading of Grace in the Hebrew

Scriptures,Interpretation54 (2000): 135-45.20

Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel (2 vols.; Hermeneia; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979, 1983),

1:424.21

The Prophets, 21.


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purview of Ezekiel. Miles is also right. Reflecting on the passage in which

God claims I even gave them laws that were not good and observances by

which they could not live (Ezek. 20:25), he writes:

the demonic strand in (Gods) character, though never

finally dominant, can never be excised from it.The Book of Ezekiel raises, though it does not

develop, the possibility that the historical sufferings of Israel

are the crime of God. The writer is willing to imagine,

however fleetingly, that God seduced Israel into the very

sins that he then punished all to prove that I am YHWH,

which is to say, to reveal his character, to put himself on

display.22

Andrew Davies comes to a similar conclusion about the doublestandards in the book of Isaiah. Citing such examples as Gods excessive

punishment of the haughty women of Jerusalem (Isa. 3:16-17), the slaughter

of orphans, widows and the young in 9:12-16 (ET vv.13-17), and brutality

and the exaction of vengeance in battle (63:1-6), Davies writes:

The evidence I have adduced so far should compel us to

reject any idea that Isaiah has not noticed the dubious

morality of YHWH if anything, it suggests that the book

willfully intends to present YHWH as a puzzling characterwhose actions are often incomprehensible, foreign to (what

orthodox Christianity and Judaism would present as) his

revealed character and the expectations of his people, and

sometimes even immoral.23

The domination of vindictiveness in the book of Ezekiel assumes God

is justified in desolating Earth in recompense for some of its occupants

misdeeds. But where is justice for Earth in such an assumption?

22 God: A Biography, 333.

23 Double Standards in Isaiah: Re-evaluating Prophetic Ethics and Divine Justice

(Biblical Interpretation Series 46; Leiden: Brill, 2000), 187.


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3 Lack of Love and the Legacy of Self-Loathing

In a chapter entitled Does God love? Miles observes: It is no

exaggeration to say that, to judge from the entire text of the Bible from

Genesis 1 through Isaiah 39, the Lord does not know what love is.24

Moreover, apart from rare exceptions (Gen. 8:21; Deut. 28:63; 1 Kgs 3:10),

God takes no pleasure in anything or anybody. There is an almost total

silence about divine joy, happiness, or pleasure. The Lord is endlessly angry

and displeased,

(like) many a power-hungry warlord who portrayed himself

as without pity, beyond need, and above passion,

intimidating in his unpredictable anger, and imperious for no

discernible motive.25

Miles should not have limited his observation to Genesis 1 through

Isaiah 39, for what he says is certainly also true of the book of Ezekiel.

Gowan comments that Ezekiel never uses )ahab

love, h[esed

steadfast love, or h[anan have mercy, and rah[am have

compassion appears only in 39:25.26

Not until Second Isaiah does Miles

note a change in the face of God which brings him from his condition of

fierce and protracted affective latency to the lyric ardour that bursts upon us

in such passages as Isaiah 54:4, 7-8:Fear not, for you will not be ashamed (bws\);

be not confounded (klm), for you will not be put to shame;

for you will forget the shame of your youth,

24God: A Biography, 238.

25 Ibid., 242. Smith-Christopher, Ezekiel on Fanons Couch, 125, quotes Amelie

Kuhrts description of Assyrian reliefs depicting kings whose royal power to inspire fear

was visualized as a shining radiance fearsome to behold, and it could strike his

enemies down, The Ancient Near East c. 3000-330 BC (London: Routledge, 1995),

2:590-92.26

Donald E. Gowan, Theology of the Prophetic Books: The Death and Resurrection of

Israel(Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 134.


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For a brief moment I forsook you,

but with great compassion I will gather you.

In overflowing wrath for a moment

I hid my face from you,

but with everlasting love I will have compassion on yousays the LORD, your Redeemer.

27

Miles perceptive explanation for the transforming of Gods earlier

stance of separateness and invulnerability28

is that it was only after God

had thrown his wife out that he discovers for the first time, what it means to

love her. He discovers that he had never truly loved her before. He takes

her back; and whether or not she has changed when he does so, he has

unmistakably changed.29

God had never experienced the love of amother

or father. Previously his only friend was Moses. Only with the breaking ofthe initial covenant, the violent termination of the marriage of Israel to God,

is God moved by pity to establish a new relationship on a drastically

different emotional basis. God finds a new sense of himself.30

But such was not yet the case with God as portrayed in Ezekiel. In the

Ezekiel tradition no end to shame is envisaged. On the contrary, in the new

and everlasting covenant anticipated in Ezekiel 16:59-63, Gods wife

Jerusalem will remember her former ways and be ashamed (klmniphal;

v.61), never speaking another word because of her shame (both bws\ andklm are used) when God forgives her (v.63). A parallel outside the

marriage metaphor reinforces the point. The passage in which it occurs is

the one to which Gowan drew attention on account of its single reference to

rah9am in the book of Ezekiel (39:25-29). While God may have mercy

on the house

of Israel, they shall nonetheless bear31

their shame (klm) (39:26).32

27God: A Biography, 242-3.

28Ibid., 241.29

Ibid., 243.30Ibid., 245.31

So with the Masoretic Text. All the comparative material argues against the

emendation of the Masoretic Text to read with the versions forget (their shame),

Zimmerli,Ezekiel, 2:295.


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The reference to remembering and shame in the previous paragraph,

and the allusion to Malachis book of remembrance in 2 above, call to mind

a related theme in Ezekiel. In three passages a link is made between

remembering and self-loathing or disgust (qwt@ niphal). Grisanti locates

the passages temporally: during the experience of exile (6:9), afterdeliverance from exile (20:43), and in the eschaton (36:31).

33 The first

passage involves the people remembering God as the one who brought

destruction upon them,34

but in all three the self-loathing is associated with

the peoples wrongdoing:

then you shall remember your evil ways, and your dealings

that were not good; and you shall loathe yourselves for your

iniquities and your abominable deeds (36:31).

The positive intent of such remembering of genuinely grasping a realitywhich becomes a living and present fact is, as Zimmerli says: any human

boasting is done away with.35

There is no forgetting the past and assuming

that survival has been the result of any merit on ones own part.

Understandable as that motive may be, one cannot help but query the

effect of such persistent self-loathing, which may denote an emotional

reaction so deep as to issue in desire for the destruction of the object.36

There seems to be a basic contradiction between the promise in Ezekiel

34:25-29 of a covenant of peace, establishing Israel as a blessed and securepeople, no longer suffering the calumny of their neighbours, and the

expectation that once restored to their own land the exiles would constantly

recall their shameful past. It scarcely coheres with the vision of a

resurrected people, animated by the spirit, that was to be the answer to the

exile communitys sense of hopelessness (37:11).

32 Johanna Stiebert, Shame and Prophecy: Approaches Past and Present, Biblical

Interpretation 8 (2000): 255-75, notes the prevalence of shame language in the prophetic

literature.33

Michael A. Grisanti, qwt@ #7752,NIDOTTE3:898.34 Reading (they) will remember me, when I have broken their heart , (6:9) with

Zimmerli,Ezekiel,1:180.35

Zimmerli, ibid., 1:189, 469-70.36

Leonard J. Coppes, qu=t@ #1996, TWOT2:792.


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We must, of course, be wary of assuming that we understand what

self-loathing meant in the Ezekiel traditions. Nathanson, in his major study

of human emotion, Shame and Pride, reminds us that

the very word shame has represented quite different inner

experiencesover time. If it is difficult to know exactly whatone of our contemporaries means when using emotion (sic)

labels, it is even more difficult to know what those labels

meant in an era characterized by a vastly different realm of

daily experience and accumulated history.37

Moreover, shame is by no means a wholly negative affect. Stiebert

notes that self-judgment based on internalized ideals and standards has much

in common with conscience;38

Smedes describes healthy shame as

awareness of our failure to be the integrated and caring people we have thepotential to be;

39 and shaming serves as an important form of social control

in many societies.40

But Bechtel draws from the psalms examples of how shaming was

often used by the upper class to dominate the middle class and to keep them

37 Donald L. Nathanson, Shame and Pride: Affect, Sex, and the Birth of the Self(New

York: W.W. Norton, 1992), 433. For that reason it seems unwise to make suchcategorical distinctions as shame has little to do with an internal experience of

unworthiness. Rather, shame is associated with a loss of status, Margaret S. Odell, 103

in The Inversion of Shame and Forgiveness in Ezekiel 16:59-63, JSOT 56 (1992): 101-

12. Stiebert sagely observes: In practice, however, shame-guilt distinctions are

difficult to maintain. Sanctions are seldom either purely internal or external. Shame, we

have seen, is an emotion determined by negative self-evaluation: when the disapproval of

significant others effects shame, there is an attendant self-judgment based on internalized

ideals and standards, which has much in common with conscience, 257 in Shame and

Prophecy: Approaches Past and Present,Biblical Interpretation8 (2000): 255-75.38Shame and Prophecy, 257.39

Lewis B. Smedes, Shame and Grace: Healing the Shame we Dont Deserve (New

York: Harper Collins, 1993), 31-6.40

Thus Norbert Elias civilizing process, referred to in Nathanson, Shame and Pride,

437-42; and see Lyn M. Bechtel, Shame as a Sanction of Social Control in Biblical

Israel: Judicial, Political, and Social Shaming,JSOT49 (1991): 47-76.


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in their place.41

And if we may assume somemerging of horizons, some

justification for analogies between shame and self-loathing in Ezekiels

context and our own, then we do have some awareness of the impact of such

experiences. Shaming may have very harmful effects which far from

controlling social disorder lead to the very opposite, civil disobedience,crime, vandalism, an elaborate disregard for the simple rules that allow all of

us to share an increasingly cramped space.42 Attempts on the part of the

sufferer to resolve chronic pain may involve attacking others, seeking to

destroy the self-esteem of anyone who seems to have some personal

competence or sense of self-confidence.43 Horney termed such behaviour

counter-shaming.44

Nathanson describes how shame-based personality manifests in

people whose hopes are constantly dashed. By vandalism and graffiti,public structures are defaced, buildings crumble, and the shoulders of the

people slump into chronic helplessness.45

It seems fair to ask how likely it

would be for self-loathing people to work and protect (the land) (Gen.

2:15)46

in an appropriate way. Even were they dwelling again on their own

land (Ezek. 37:14), self-loathing people are unlikely to be the best, most

confident, thoughtful and concerned servants of it.47

41

Lyn M. Bechtel, The Perception of Shame within the Divine-Human Relationship inBiblical Israel, 85 in Uncovering Ancient Stones: Essays in Memory of H. Neil

Richardson(ed. Lewis M. Hopfe; Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1994), 79-92.42Nathanson, Shame and Pride, 472.43

Ibid., 457-60.44 Karen Horney, Neurosis and Human Growth, referred to by Bechtel, The Perception

of Shame, 86.45

Nathanson, Shame and Pride, 457-8.46

Or to till and keep it le (ob{d{a3h u=le s\omra3h.47

The plain meaning of (bd to work or serve (the earth) in Gen. 2:15 need not be

construed as demeaning humankind in any respect. Ruth Page argues that

companionship is the fundamental model of relationship between humans and the rest

of creation. Steward, priest, co-creator are other models that might well be used, but

used concurrently so that none should become dominant and lead to a one-sided way of

human relating to the natural world, God and the Web of Creation (London: SCM, 1996),

152-66. The same might be said of the model of guardianship advocated among the


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It seems appropriate to conclude that in Ezekiel 16:63, with its

conjunction of shame and forgiveness,48

and in the several passages

anticipating self-loathing on the part of the survivors (6:9; 20:43; 36:31), we

have examples of cognitive dissonance. It arises on the one hand from the

difficulty of ever satisfying the ethical and ritual demands of God and on theother from the promise of restoration solely at Gods initiative. In these

passages atonement49 brings not joyful release from impurity but remorse.

Restoration to the land prompts not gratitude but self-hatred. Such

responses may have satisfied the demands of justice and restored honour to

the shamed name of the LORD (Ezek. 36:21 et al.), but they imposed severe

restraints on the hope that a new beginning might have been expected to

evoke.

Capps identifies shame as one of the basic threats to hope. Shamingothers reduces the possibility that we will be the objects of shame. It may

also promote perfectionism that is bound in the end to fail. And shame, if it

becomes chronic, is a threat to hope because it undermines what we believe

it is possible for us to achieve.50

The survivors of Judahs demise under

Babylon needed a drastically different emotional basis51

than the

rehearsing of shame and perpetual self-loathing if their restoration was going

to achieve anything at all positive.

Rather than meeting that need, Ezekiels loveless overlord imposedongoing remorse on the new occupants of the land, a measure unlikely to

make them considerate of Earth and the environment.

principles of The Earth Bible. Among many indigenous communities of the Pacific, it

conveys a sense of human responsibility for the creation, but like stewardship it may

imply distance and superiority between human beings and all the rest, Page, ibid., 158.48

Odell appeals to Psalm 22 for an example of shame in the absence of guilt. She

concludes that shame is tied to the experience of divine abandonment, The Inversion of

Shame and Forgiveness, 105. However, Ezekiel explicitly assured the exiles that God

would be with them in future (Ezek. 34:30; 37:27-28; cf. 48:35).49

forgive, in the NRSV of 16:63, is the only occurrence of kpr piel in Ezekiel chs. 1-

39.50

Donald Capps, Agents of Hope: A Pastoral Psychology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1995),

129-31.51

Miles, God: A Biography,244.


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4 Care Only for the Interests of the Exiles

Carroll wrote that he would have put very near the top of the issues

for the study of Jeremiah in the twenty-first century that of ideological

criticism, including questions along the lines of whose interests are servedby this book in the form(s) it has come down to us and whose interests have

been served by the predominant interpretations of Jeremiah through time,

specifically in relation to quest for land, entitlement, diasporic interests, etc.,

about which he had already stated his own convictions.52

One article in which he expressed some of those convictions was The

Myth of the Empty Land.53

Noting the Chroniclers description of the land

left uninhabited for seventy years by the depredations of the Babylonians (2

Chron. 36:17-21) and the wholesale removal of all but the poorest people ofthe land in the Deuteronomistic History and Jeremiah (2 Kgs 24:14; 25:12;

Jer. 39:10; 52:15), Carroll argued that the myth of the empty land reads as

an ideological story controlling membership in the (restored) community.54

Although Carroll didnt specifically comment on the matter, the

statement in Jeremiah 36:29 that Nebuchadrezzar would remove55

humans

and animals from the land in the days of king Jehoiakim uses the verbal root

s\bt from which Sabbath derives. Whether or not the passage is

intentionally ironic, it implies a rather savage imposition of Sabbath rest,such as is sometimes seen in conservative Christian as well as Jewish

communities. Chronicles specifically refers to Jeremiah when it refers to the

land lying desolate,56

keeping Sabbath (s\bt) for seventy years (2 Chron.

36:21). The period of desolation without its former inhabitants even

deserted by them would nonetheless be a time of rest (again s\bt) and

enjoyment of its Sabbaths (Lev. 26:34, 43).

Carroll went on to observe the links between the pollution of land by the

wickedness of its original inhabitants in the parallel myth of the promised land52

Something Rich and Strange, 431.53The Myth of the Empty Land, Semeia59 (1992): 79-93.54

The Myth of the Empty Land, 79.55

Or even annihilate them, since the hiphil of s\btcan mean that.56

The verbal root s\mmhophal is used.


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in Deuteronomy (7:1-5; 9:4-5). Similarly, polluted land deportation

restoration purification of land seem to be the main elements in the myth of

the empty land a construct derived from the ideology of pollution-purity

values in the second temple community.57

The holiness restored to the land by

its Sabbath rest and the rebuilding of the temple (Zech. 2:16, ET v.12) had to bemaintained by strategies of purification such as are found in Leviticus, and of

non-assimilation with other people such as are found in Deuteronomy and Ezra-

Nehemiah.

Without going as far as Thompson in querying any connection

between those who were taken into exile in Babylon and those who returned

after it,58

Carroll, in typically forthright language, concluded that the rebuilt

temple community looks

like a Leninist seizure of power without adequaterepresentation of other interests and without due allowance

for diversity of affiliations in the community. What

about the people who lived in the empty land and who

were denied their share in the temple cult?59

Barstad, in his monograph The Myth of the Empty Land, argues that

far from being a tabula rasa where no activity to speak of took place60

there was substantial cultural continuity in Judah through the Babylonian

57The Myth of the Empty Land, 84, 90.

58 Whatever people were being transported or returned to Palestine, they certainly were

not Israelites, Thomas L. Thompson, Early History of the Israelite People: From the

Written and Archaeological Sources (Studies in the History of the Ancient Near East IV;

Leiden: Brill, 1992), 418, Thompsons emphasis. In a subsequent article, however,

Carroll wrote: One must also ask, what was the relation of those who returned to those

who were deported some 70 years previously? Were they the same people or their

descendants or even different people?, Exile! What Exile?, 66 in Leading Captivity

Captive: The Exile as History and Ideology (European Seminar in Historical

Methodology 2; ed. Lester L. Grabbe; JSOT Suppl. 278; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic,

1998), 62-79.59The Myth of the Empty Land, 89, 88.60

Hans M. Barstad, The Myth of the Empty Land: A Study in the History and

Archaeology of Judah During the Exilic Period (Symbolae Osloenses Fasc. Suppl. 28;

Oslo: Scandinavian University, 1996), 13.


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period. However, as Williamson states, the interesting question to be posed

is why it was the exilic view which came to predominate in the biblical

texts. If there was continuity, we need to know what it was continuous with,

and why ultimately it did not prevail.61

Williamson goes on to

acknowledge that ideological tensions between the Judaean and Babyloniancommunities are attested already in the Book of Ezekiel,

62and it is to those

we should now return.

It seems clear from a number of passages in Ezekiel that those who

remained in the land after the exile were not to be favoured in the event of

the lands liberation and restoration. Those who prided themselves as being

the valuable meat, protected by the pot in Ezekiel 11:1-13, were to be

cast out and judged at the border of the land. The death of Pelatiah in the

vision seems to imply the end of hope for those who believed God woulddeliver a remnant.

63 Those who did survive the four deadly acts of

judgment against Jerusalem, however, were to be brought out and put on

view in some way, their deeds demonstrating that they deserved the

judgment they had suffered (14:21-23). In another place it is prophesied that

those who inhabit the waste places64

in the land of Israel (33:24) will be

slain by the sword, devoured by wild animals, or perish from pestilence, so

that the land will be truly desolate65

without anyone even passing through it

(33:27-28).This last passage seems strategically placed. It precedes the shepherd

prophecies, which conclude with the return of the exiles to the land

(ha4)a4res

) from which it is envisaged that the wild animals will be

banished or annihilated.66 It will be a fruitful land (ha4)a4res9), with

soil ()a da4ma


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Well consider the wider ramifications of Ezekiel 34:25-31 shortly. In

the meantime, the question of whose interests the book of Ezekiel serves

seems clear. It certainly does not serve the interests of those who had tended

the vineyards and fields of Judah during the exile of the sixth century BCE

(Jer. 39:10; 2 Kgs 25:12). Rather, the book establishes the interests of theexiles with its expectation of a homeland occupied by nothing more than the

wild animals that had helped execute Gods justice on those who had

remained in it. Apart from them nothing stood in the way of what Carroll

described as the establishment of the hegemony of the deportees over the

people of the land.67 One might venture to suggest the expectation was

intended and was likely to have encouraged that very development.68

The interests of the exiles expressed in the book of Ezekiel basically

obscure the interdependent living communities vegetative, animal andhuman that Earth sustained in Judah throughout the exile. Again Earth is

devalued so that Gods power to eradicate or renew might be seen to be

absolute.

5 Where then lies hope?

Of the considerable range of specific expressions for hope in biblical

Hebrew, the substantive tiqwa

Ezekiel and the Land

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Transcript of Ezekiel and the Land