Ezekiel 6
The dead will show God is Lord
God is armed and coming
1The LORD sent me another message to deliver. 2He said, “Human, I want you to look westward toward the hills of Israel and deliver the following message:3Hills of Israel, listen because the LORD God has some words for you. Mountains and hills, I’m coming. Steep gorges and gentle valleys, I’m coming. I’m bringing a sword and I’m coming to wipe out those pagan shrines built high on your hilltops. 4I’ll smash your altars, shatter your incense stands, and throw your dead at the feet of your idols. 5I’ll lay the dead people of Israel in front of their idols and scatter their ashes around their pagan altars.
6It doesn’t matter where you live. I’m coming to grind your towns into stones and destroy your hilltop shrines, altars, idols, incense stands, and anything else I can break. 7When your people start falling dead in the dirt, you’ll finally get the message: I am the LORD.
God doesn’t fake his threats
8But I’ll let some of them live. I’ll scatter them among the nations. 9There, carried away as captives, they’ll remember me and take the story with them about what happened. They’ll remember that I crushed them for leaving me and for giving their hearts to idols, instead. There, in exile, they’ll come to their senses and hate the repulsive things they did.10They’ll know that I don’t fake my threats. When I warned them about this disaster, I wasn’t messing around. They’ll know that I am the LORD.”
It’s time to grieve
11Then the LORD God said, “Slap your hands together, stomp your feet, and shout ‘Oh no!’ Grieve over the vile and disgusting things the people of Israel did. They are going to die for it. They’ll die by sword, starvation, and disease.12Those who live far away [1] will die of disease. Those near will fall to the sword. Everyone else will starve in a famine. I’ll unload on them every ounce, every gram of my anger. 13You will know who’s in charge when your people lie dead beside their idols and pagan altars at shrines they built on every high hill and under every leafy green shade tree. There is where they offered their sacrifices to their gods.
14I’m going to hit them hard. I’ll decimate their cities and settlements from the desert wastelands in the south to Riblah, [2] in the far north. Then they’ll remember who I am. I’m the LORD."
Footnotes
Far away from where? Ezekiel doesn’t say. But he’s writing mainly for locals, fellow Jews exiled in what is now Iraq. “Far” could mean far from them. Or maybe they were “far” and Jerusalem was the “near” place where people would die by sword. That is what happened there. Yet maybe Ezekiel was simply trying to say that the suffering would find Jews wherever they went, near and far.
Most ancient Hebrew copies of Ezekiel call the town Diblah, an unknown location. Many scholars say the word was probably miscopied and should have read “Riblah,” a town in Syria, about 200 miles (320 km) north of Jerusalem, as the crow flies. It’s about 75 miles (120 km) north of the Israeli border, beyond the boundary of ancient Israel most of the time (boundaries shift, as they still do around the world).
Discussion Questions
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