Ezekiel 9

Invaders from Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Syria, Greece, and Rome all came to Israel from the north, on caravan routes along the Mediterranean seacoast.

The text doesn’t say the men walked through the outer courtyard and into the inner courtyard, but that’s where the Jerusalem Temple altar was kept, just outside the entrance into the Temple sanctuary building. Ezekiel may have intended some metaphor because the altar is where people of Israel slaughtered their sacrificial animals. These six men seem to represent the Babylonian army that would level Jerusalem about six years after this vision (see notes for Ezekiel 8:1).

Scribes in Babylon usually wrote on clay or wax tablets by using a stylus made from a reed. They pressed into the surface wedge-shaped marks known as cuneiform writing. Some may have used reeds and brushes to write with ink. But it’s the clay that hardened and survived the centuries.

Better known as the Ark of the Covenant, a sacred, gold-plated chest that held the Ten Commandments. It was Israel’s most revered object, and it was kept in the most sacred room inside the worship center, a room sometimes known as the Holy of Holies or the Most Holy Place. Jews taught that God’s footrest was the lid on the chest (1 Chronicles 28:2). A pair of winged beings called cherubim rested at each end of the lid. The chest disappeared by the time the Jews returned from exile in the mid-500s BC. It may have been confiscated by invading Assyrians during Isaiah’s day (700s BC) or by Babylonians who destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple in 586 BC. See Isaiah 60:3.

To desecrate the sanctuary, all they had to do was step inside. Only Jewish priests were allowed inside the building. But Babylonian invaders did worse than go inside. They stripped the valuables and leveled the building.