Ezekiel is perhaps most famous for his vision of a new Temple and a resurrected Jewish nation organized around the 12 tribes of Israel.
Dream that never came true
Never happened. His dream never came true. At least not yet.
Jews did eventually rebuild a modest Temple. And King Herod the Not-So-Great expanded it. But Romans destroyed it just a few years after workers finished. And Israel’s 12 tribes never came home.
Exiled from their homeland in 586 BC, the tribes to a great extent got lost in the international soup of souls, Jewish and Gentile. The extended family of Levite priests maintained a sense of identity. But many others simply began identifying themselves as “Jews,” shorthand for “people from Judah.”
Priest Ezekiel deported
Ezekiel was a 25-year-old priest in Jerusalem when Babylonian invaders arrived in 597 BC to collect taxes that Judah’s king refused to pay. The small nation of Judah, named after the tribe, was all that was left of Israel. Assyrians had wiped the northern tribes off the map and deported the survivors more than a century before Ezekiel.
In Jerusalem, Babylon got their money and then some. They took more than 10,000 Jewish captives—the royals, the religious leaders, and the leading citizens.
In Babylon, now Iraq, Ezekiel was a thousand-mile walk from the only job he knew: offering sacrifices to God in the one and only location approved by God, the Jerusalem Temple.
Ezekiel’s new job as prophet
Ezekiel said God came to him when he was 30 years old and living by the Chebar Canal, probably an irrigation stream feeding off the Euphrates River.
“I watched a windy storm blow in from the north,” he wrote. “At the center of this storm, I saw four creatures that resembled humans. But they weren’t human. Each creature had four faces and two sets of wings” (Ezekiel 1:4-5).
When God arrived, as Ezekiel reports it, God said, “Human, I’m giving you a job to do, a mission to the people of Israel—that nation of spiritual traitors who have turned against me” (Ezekiel 2:3).
His mission wasn’t to the people still in Israel. His mission was to his fellow exiles. He would describe the coming fall of Jerusalem. But he would assure the people that God would bring them home when their punishing timeout was over. It would take a generation.
Writer
Ezekiel, a priest from Jerusalem, deported to Babylon, in what is now Iraq. This is a story written in the first person. Many Bible scholars say that students of Ezekiel in the decades and centuries that followed may have contributed to the book, attempting to clarify or correct. That’s a common critique of Bible books of prophecy—Jewish scholars who later tweaked the content (perhaps like Bible paraphrasers and translators, trying to clarify).
Timeline
Ezekiel was deported from Jerusalem in the nation of Judah when he was 25 years old, in 597 BC. For five years, he was a priest with nothing to do because his job had been to offer sacrifices at the Jerusalem Temple. People of Israel weren’t allowed to sacrifice animals anywhere but there.
But in the fifth year of his exile, at age 30, he began serving what seems to have been at least 22 years of ministry as a prophet, from 593-571 BC. Year 571 BC became the last time stamp in the book (Ezekiel 29:17). He would have been about 51 years old.
Location
Ezekiel is a story told from Iraq. People in Ezekiel’s day knew the territory as the Babylonian Empire. Ezekiel said he lived by the Chebar Canal, which was likely one of the many irrigation channels farmers dug to nourish their crops near the Euphrates River.
