Ezekiel 32: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

Two dated messages against Egypt. In the first, Ezekiel sings a funeral song for Pharaoh, who is pictured as a sea creature hauled up in God's net, his flesh left on the mountains, the sky darkened over him, and his people cut down by the sword of the king of Babylon until Egypt's land is emptied. In the second, Ezekiel wails as Egypt is sent down to the world of the dead, where she joins other nations already lying there: Asshur, Elam, Meshech and Tubal, Edom, the rulers of the north, and the Zidonians. The chapter ends with Pharaoh seeing that company and being comforted about his own multitude.

Claim by Claim

1. 32:1
   • In the twelfth year, in the twelfth month, on the first day of the month, the word of the LORD came to Ezekiel.
   • The word came to him saying what follows.
2. 32:2
   • God addresses the prophet as son of man.
   • God tells him to take up a lamentation over Pharaoh king of Egypt.
   • God tells him to say to Pharaoh: you likened yourself to a young lion of the nations.
   • God tells him to say to Pharaoh: you are like a sea monster in the seas.
   • The verb applied to the lion comparison is ambiguous: it can mean you are likened to a lion or you are destroyed.
   • Pharaoh burst forth in his rivers.
   • Pharaoh churned the waters with his feet.
   • Pharaoh fouled their rivers.
3. 32:3
   • The Lord GOD speaks.
   • God will spread his net over Pharaoh.
   • God will do this by means of an assembly of many peoples.
   • They will haul Pharaoh up in God's net.
4. 32:4
   • God will abandon Pharaoh on the land.
   • God will hurl him onto the open field.
   • God will cause all the birds of the sky to settle on him.
   • God will satisfy the beasts of the whole earth with him.
5. 32:5
   • God will put Pharaoh's flesh on the mountains.
   • God will fill the valleys with his remains.
   • The word for what fills the valleys is obscure, meaning either his height or his carcass.
6. 32:6
   • God will drench the land with Pharaoh's blood, as far as the mountains.
   • The ravines will be filled with him.
7. 32:7
   • When God extinguishes Pharaoh, God will cover the heavens.
   • God will darken the stars of the heavens.
   • God will cover the sun with a cloud.
   • The moon will not give its light.
8. 32:8
   • God will darken all the shining lights of the heavens over Pharaoh.
   • God will set darkness upon Pharaoh's land.
   • This is the declaration of the Lord GOD.
9. 32:9
   • God will vex the heart of many peoples.
   • This will happen when God brings Pharaoh's destruction among the nations.
   • The destruction will be brought into countries Pharaoh has not known.
10. 32:10
    • God will make many peoples appalled over Pharaoh.
    • Their kings will shudder in horror over him.
    • This will happen when God brandishes his sword before their faces.
    • They will tremble every moment, each man for his own life.
    • This will happen on the day of Pharaoh's fall.
11. 32:11
    • The Lord GOD speaks.
    • The sword of the king of Babylon will come upon Pharaoh.
12. 32:12
    • God will make Pharaoh's multitude fall by the swords of mighty men.
    • Those mighty men are the ruthless of the nations, all of them.
    • They will despoil the pride of Egypt.
    • All her multitude will be destroyed.
13. 32:13
    • God will destroy all Egypt's cattle from beside the abundant waters.
    • No human foot will churn those waters again.
    • No hoofs of cattle will churn them.
14. 32:14
    • Then God will make their waters settle.
    • God will make their rivers run like oil.
    • This is the declaration of the Lord GOD.
15. 32:15
    • God will make the land of Egypt a desolation and a waste.
    • The land will be emptied of that which filled it.
    • God will strike down all who dwell in it.
    • Then they will know that God is the LORD.
16. 32:16
    • This is a lamentation.
    • They will chant it as a lament.
    • The daughters of the nations will chant it.
    • They will chant it over Egypt and over all her multitude.
    • This is the declaration of the Lord GOD.
17. 32:17
    • In the twelfth year, on the fifteenth day of the month, the word of the LORD came to Ezekiel.
    • The word came to him saying what follows.
18. 32:18
    • God addresses the prophet as son of man.
    • God tells him to wail over the multitude of Egypt.
    • God tells him to bring her down, along with the daughters of majestic nations, to the lowest parts of the earth.
    • They are brought down with those who go down to the pit.
19. 32:19
    • Egypt is asked whom she surpasses in beauty.
    • Egypt is commanded to go down.
    • Egypt is commanded to be laid with the uncircumcised.
20. 32:20
    • They will fall in the midst of those slain by the sword.
    • The sword is appointed.
    • The command is given to drag her away, with all her multitudes.
21. 32:21
    • The strong among the mighty ones will speak to him from the midst of Sheol.
    • They speak concerning him along with those who help him.
    • They have gone down.
    • They lie uncircumcised, slain by the sword.
22. 32:22
    • Asshur is there with all her company.
    • His graves are all around him.
    • All of them are slain, fallen by the sword.
23. 32:23
    • Her graves are set in the remotest parts of the pit.
    • Her company is round about her grave.
    • All of them are slain, fallen by the sword.
    • They had caused terror in the land of the living.
24. 32:24
    • Elam is there with all her multitude around her grave.
    • All of them are slain, fallen by the sword.
    • They went down uncircumcised into the lowest parts of the earth.
    • They had caused their terror in the land of the living.
    • They bear their shame with those who go down to the pit.
25. 32:25
    • They have made her a bed in the midst of the slain, with all her multitude.
    • Her graves are round about him.
    • All of them are uncircumcised, slain by the sword.
    • Their terror had been caused in the land of the living.
    • They bear their shame with those who go down to the pit.
    • He is placed in the midst of the slain.
26. 32:26
    • Meshech and Tubal are there with all her multitude.
    • Her graves are round about him.
    • All of them are uncircumcised, slain by the sword.
    • They had caused their terror in the land of the living.
27. 32:27
    • They will not lie with the mighty who are fallen of the uncircumcised.
    • Those mighty ones went down to Sheol with their weapons of war.
    • Their swords were placed under their heads.
    • Their iniquities are upon their bones.
    • The terror of the mighty had been in the land of the living.
28. 32:28
    • Pharaoh will be broken in the midst of the uncircumcised.
    • Pharaoh will lie with those slain by the sword.
29. 32:29
    • Edom is there, with her kings and all her princes.
    • Despite their might they are laid with those slain by the sword.
    • They will lie with the uncircumcised.
    • They will lie with those who go down to the pit.
30. 32:30
    • The princes of the north are there, all of them.
    • All the Sidonians are there.
    • They went down with the slain.
    • They are ashamed despite the terror of their might.
    • They lie uncircumcised with those slain by the sword.
    • They bear their shame with those who go down to the pit.
31. 32:31
    • Pharaoh will see them.
    • Pharaoh will be comforted over all his multitude.
    • Pharaoh and all his army are slain by the sword.
    • This is the declaration of the Lord GOD.
32. 32:32
    • God caused his terror in the land of the living.
    • Pharaoh will be laid in the midst of the uncircumcised, with those slain by the sword.
    • This applies to Pharaoh and all his multitude.
    • This is the declaration of the Lord GOD.

Words Worth Explaining

Every language note in this chapter, gathered. These explain what a word meant, never what it means for the reader.

32:1

Ezekiel dates his messages from the deportation of King Jehoiachin of Judah to Babylon in 597 BC. The twelfth year, twelfth month, first day works out to about March 585 BC, roughly a year and a half after Babylon destroyed Jerusalem.

32:2

A funeral song (Hebrew qinah) was a formal lament chanted over a corpse, with its own limping rhythm. Singing one over a king who is still alive and on his throne is a deliberate insult: it treats him as already dead. The "great creature" translates a Hebrew word (tannin) used both for the Nile crocodile and for the sea-monster of old stories. The "rivers" are the Nile and the branches and canals that spread from it; Egypt's whole life depended on them, and a ruler who muddies his own water is fouling what he claims to give.

32:3

Kings in this period boasted of hunting big game with nets, and Assyrian and Babylonian art shows captured enemies dragged in nets. The picture is of a crocodile hauled out of the river by a work-gang.

32:4

To be left unburied for scavenging birds and animals was the worst end an ancient reader could imagine. Proper burial mattered enormously; the corpse thrown into the open field is a body denied all honor.

32:5

The Hebrew word rendered "what is left of your body" is rare and uncertain; it has been read as "your height," "your bulk," "your carcass," or "your rotting remains." The King James "thy height" is a literal guess at the same puzzle.

32:6

"Streambeds" are wadis: dry ravines in the hills that fill with water only when it rains. The image is of gullies running with blood the way they run with flood water.

32:7

Darkening the sun, moon and stars was the standard poetic way of announcing the collapse of a great power; ancient hearers took it as the language of national catastrophe rather than a weather report. For Egypt it also echoes the plague of darkness in the exodus story.

32:9

In 1611 "vex" meant to agitate or deeply trouble, not merely to annoy. The sense is that news of Egypt's fall will shake nations that had never even heard of Egypt.

32:10

To "brandish" a sword is to swing it in plain view as a threat, the way a soldier flourishes a blade before the fight.

32:11

Nebuchadnezzar II, who ruled Babylon from 605 to 562 BC and had destroyed Jerusalem a few years before this message.

32:12

The King James word "terrible" here means terrifying, inspiring dread, not "of poor quality" as it does in modern speech. It describes the Babylonian army as the most fearsome soldiers alive.

32:13

Egypt's cattle grazed and watered along the Nile, and herds standing in the shallows stirred the mud. The point of killing them is that afterwards nothing at all disturbs the water, because nothing is left alive.

32:14

Oil pours in an unbroken, glassy stream. The image is beautiful and grim at once: the Nile at last running perfectly smooth because no person or animal is there to trouble it.

32:15

Oil pours slowly and smoothly. The picture is a river with nobody left alive to stir up the mud.

32:16

Public mourning was a trade, and the professional mourners were women. "The daughters of the nations" are the women of each country hired or expected to chant the lament, so Egypt's funeral song gets sung across the whole known world.

32:17

The Hebrew here gives the day but no month, which is unusual for Ezekiel; the ancient Greek translation supplies "the first month." If the month of verse 1 is meant, this comes a fortnight after the previous message.

32:18

"The pit" and "the world below" both name Sheol, the underworld where the Hebrew Bible pictures all the dead lying together, kings and commoners alike. It is not a place of punishment but simply the realm of the dead, deep under the earth. The prophet is told to send Egypt down there by pronouncing the words, on the principle that a prophet's announcement sets the event in motion.

32:19

Circumcision was practiced by Israel and by several of its neighbors, Egypt included, so "the uncircumcised" here works as a slur rather than a literal description: it means the dishonored dead, the foreigners and barbarians, the crowd a proud nation would be ashamed to be buried beside. Where you were buried, and with whom, was a matter of lasting honor or disgrace.

32:20

Circumcision was a small cut made on Israelite baby boys as a sign that they belonged to God's people. Egyptians called nations that did not do it rough and uncivilized, so being buried among them was a deep insult.

32:21

The King James "hell" translates Sheol, the shadowy underworld of the dead, and does not carry its later English sense of a place of fiery punishment. The dead warriors greet a newcomer the way established residents greet an arrival, a scene also found in Isaiah 14.

32:22

Asshur is the Hebrew name for Assyria, the empire that dominated the Near East for centuries and terrorised Israel and Judah, until Babylon and its allies destroyed it between 612 and 609 BC, within living memory of Ezekiel's hearers. It heads the list as the most recent example of an unbeatable power now in the grave.

32:23

"The land of the living" is the ordinary world above ground, where living people are, as opposed to the underworld. The phrase is the standing opposite of "the pit."

32:24

Elam was a kingdom east of Babylonia, in what is now south-western Iran, with its chief city at Susa. It was an old and feared military power, broken by Assyria in the seventh century BC.

32:25

"A bed" here means a resting place in the grave; graves and burial chambers were spoken of as beds and the dead as lying down. The pronouns switch between "her" and "him" through these verses because Hebrew treats a nation as feminine while its ruler or its army is masculine; the switching is in the original and translators generally leave it.

32:26

Meshech and Tubal were peoples of eastern Asia Minor, in what is now central and eastern Turkey. Assyrian records know them as troublesome mountain kingdoms; the Bible elsewhere lists them among traders in slaves and bronze.

32:27

Warriors of rank were buried in full kit, sword laid under the head and shield over the body, so that they went down to the underworld armed and honored. This verse is one of the hardest in the chapter: the Hebrew says these men do *not* lie with those honored warriors, while the ancient Greek version reads "the fallen warriors of old" (an allusion to the legendary giants), and the phrase "their sins rest on their bones" appears in some manuscripts as "their shields rest on their bones." Translations differ accordingly.

32:28

Great warriors were buried with their swords under their heads and their shields on their chests. It was the honorable soldier's funeral, and Ezekiel says these dead do not get it.

32:29

Edom lay south-east of Judah, around the highlands of what is now southern Jordan. Its people were reckoned kin to Israel, descended from Esau, and were bitterly resented for taking advantage of Jerusalem's fall.

32:30

"The rulers of the north" are most likely the petty kings of Syria and the Aramean states. The Zidonians are the people of Sidon, a wealthy Phoenician port on the coast of modern Lebanon, famous as seafarers and traders.

32:31

"Comforted" translates a Hebrew word meaning consoled or eased. The consolation offered is simply that of company: Pharaoh finds every other great empire already lying there.

32:32

The Hebrew verb form here can be read as past or future, so translations vary between "I spread my terror" and "I will spread my terror." The ambiguity is in the original.