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Ezekiel 35: What the Passage Says

57 claims across 15 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Ezekiel 35 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

The LORD tells Ezekiel to face Mount Seir, the hill country of Edom, and speak against it. The charges are that Edom held a lasting hatred for Israel, handed Israelites over to the sword when disaster struck them, claimed the two nations and the two countries for itself, and boasted over their ruin. God answers that he will make Seir an empty ruin, leave its cities unlived in, and treat it as it treated Israel. The chapter comes between Ezekiel's words about Israel's shepherds and his message to the mountains of Israel in chapter 36.

Claim by Claim

  1. 35:1
    • The word of the LORD came to Ezekiel.
    • The word of the LORD came with something to say.
  2. 35:2
    • The LORD addressed the prophet as son of man.
    • The LORD commanded him to set his face against Mount Seir.
    • The LORD commanded him to prophesy against Mount Seir.
  3. 35:3
    • The LORD commanded him to say a message to Mount Seir.
    • The message is what the Lord GOD says.
    • The LORD declares that he is against Mount Seir.
    • The LORD will stretch out his hand against Mount Seir.
    • The LORD will make Mount Seir a desolation and a waste.
  4. 35:4
    • The LORD will lay the cities of Mount Seir waste.
    • Mount Seir itself will become a desolation.
    • Mount Seir will know that the speaker is the LORD.
  5. 35:5
    • Mount Seir held a perpetual hostility.
    • Mount Seir handed the children of Israel over to the power of the sword.
    • This happened at the time of Israel's calamity.
    • This happened at the time of the punishment of their guilt at the end.
  6. 35:6
    • Therefore the Lord GOD swears by his own life.
    • This is the declaration of the Lord GOD.
    • The LORD will give Mount Seir over to blood.
    • Blood will pursue Mount Seir.
    • Mount Seir did not hate blood.
    • Because of that, blood will pursue Mount Seir.
  7. 35:7
    • The LORD will make Mount Seir a desolation and a waste.
    • The LORD will cut off from Mount Seir everyone who passes through and everyone who returns.
  8. 35:8
    • The LORD will fill the mountains of Seir with its slain.
    • Those slain by the sword will fall on the hills of Seir.
    • Those slain by the sword will fall in the valleys of Seir.
    • Those slain by the sword will fall in all the ravines of Seir.
  9. 35:9
    • The LORD will make Mount Seir perpetual desolations.
    • The cities of Mount Seir will not be restored; the text can mean either that they will not return or that they will not be inhabited.
    • They will know that the speaker is the LORD.
  10. 35:10
    • Mount Seir said that the two nations and the two countries would belong to it.
    • Mount Seir said that they would take possession of the land.
    • The LORD was there.
  11. 35:11
    • Therefore the Lord GOD swears by his own life.
    • This is the declaration of the Lord GOD.
    • The LORD will act toward Mount Seir according to Mount Seir's anger.
    • The LORD will act toward Mount Seir according to Mount Seir's envy.
    • Mount Seir acted with that anger and envy out of its hatred against Israel.
    • The LORD will make himself known among them.
    • The LORD will do this when he judges Mount Seir.
  12. 35:12
    • Mount Seir will know that the speaker is the LORD.
    • The LORD has heard all the contemptuous words of Mount Seir.
    • Mount Seir spoke those words against the mountains of Israel.
    • Mount Seir said the mountains of Israel are laid desolate.
    • Mount Seir said the mountains of Israel are given to them to devour.
  13. 35:13
    • They spoke boastfully against the LORD with their mouth.
    • They multiplied their words against the LORD.
    • The LORD heard it.
  14. 35:14
    • This is what the Lord GOD says.
    • The LORD will make Mount Seir desolate while the whole earth rejoices.
  15. 35:15
    • Mount Seir rejoiced over the inheritance of the house of Israel because it was desolate.
    • The LORD will do to Mount Seir as Mount Seir did.
    • Mount Seir will become a desolation.
    • All of Edom will become a desolation, all of it.
    • They will know that the speaker is the LORD.

Words Worth Explaining

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

35:1
In the King James Version, "LORD" printed in capitals stands for the personal name of Israel's God, four Hebrew letters usually written YHWH, which Jewish readers did not pronounce aloud. "Lord GOD" in verse 3 and elsewhere renders a double phrase, Adonai YHWH, roughly "my Master, YHWH".
35:2
"Son of man" translates a Hebrew phrase meaning simply "human being" or "mortal". It is how God addresses Ezekiel throughout the book, over ninety times, and marks him out as a man being spoken to rather than as a title of rank. "Set thy face against" describes a physical action: the prophet turns his body to face a place and delivers his message towards it. It was a recognized sign-gesture signaling hostile intent, and Ezekiel is told to do it several times in the book. Mount Seir is the range of red sandstone highlands running south-east of the Dead Sea, in what is now southern Jordan. It was the homeland of Edom, and the two names are used for the same nation. Edom's people were traced back to Esau, the twin brother of Jacob (Israel), which makes Israel and Edom brother nations in the older narratives.
35:3
"Stretch out mine hand against" is a standard Hebrew idiom for taking direct hostile action against someone; it does not mean a gesture or a reaching towards. Where the King James has "most desolate", the Hebrew pairs two similar-sounding words for waste and ruin, a doubling used for emphasis rather than a comparison with anything else.
35:4
"You will know that I am the LORD" is a set formula that recurs about seventy times in Ezekiel, closing off announcements of what God will do. In Hebrew it states the intended result of the action just described.
35:5
"A perpetual hatred" translates a phrase meaning a hostility of long standing, reaching far back; the enmity between Edom and Israel is presented in the Hebrew Bible as running back generations. "In the time that their iniquity had an end" is obscure in the King James. The Hebrew means something like "at the time of the punishment of the end", that is, the final stage of the disaster that fell on Judah. The event in view is the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BC, when Edom is elsewhere accused of helping the attackers or of picking off survivors.
35:6
There is a wordplay in the Hebrew that English cannot carry: the words for Edom, for red, and for blood (dam) all sound alike, so the sentence about blood pursuing Edom repeatedly echoes the nation's own name. "Sith" in the King James is simply an old spelling of "since".
35:7
"Him that passeth out and him that returneth" is an idiom for all coming and going, that is, every traveler and all traffic. Edom controlled trade routes, so cutting off movement means emptying the country of anyone using it.
35:8
Where the King James says "rivers", the Hebrew word means watercourses or ravines cut by seasonal streams. In this dry country they hold water only after rain and are dry channels most of the year.
35:10
"These two nations and these two countries" means Israel and Judah, the northern and southern kingdoms into which the land had divided after Solomon. By Ezekiel's time both had fallen, the north to Assyria and the south to Babylon, so Edom is pictured claiming the vacated territory of both. "Whereas the LORD was there" is compressed in the Hebrew and can be read either as a statement that the land belonged to the LORD, or that the LORD was present in it; either way it marks the claim as an intrusion. The wording anticipates the last line of the book of Ezekiel, where the restored city is named "the LORD is there".
35:11
"Envy" in 1611 English covered jealousy and hostile rivalry generally. The Hebrew word here, qin'ah, is the heat of jealous passion, and is used both of human resentment and of God's own zeal.
35:12
"Blasphemies" in the King James is broader than the modern religious sense of the word. The Hebrew means contemptuous or abusive speech, the sort of jeering aimed here at the land of Israel rather than at God by name. "The mountains of Israel" is Ezekiel's regular way of naming the hill country that formed the heartland of the Israelite territory, and by extension the land itself. "To consume" here has the older sense of to eat up or devour, the image being of Edom swallowing the land as food.
35:13
"Have multiplied your words against me" is an idiom for talking on and on, piling up boast after boast. The complaint is about the volume and persistence of the gloating, not one stray remark.
35:14
The Hebrew of this verse is disputed. "When the whole earth rejoiceth" may mean that Edom's ruin will come at a time of general rejoicing elsewhere, or that the earth rejoices at the fall of Edom itself; some ancient versions read the line differently again. The English preserves the ambiguity rather than settling it.
35:15
"Inheritance" translates a Hebrew term for the land allotted to the tribes and families of Israel as a permanent holding, passed down within a family and not meant to be sold off for good. Calling the land Israel's inheritance frames Edom's claim on it as seizing what belonged to another household. "Idumea" is the Greek form of the name Edom, which the King James translators took over from the Greek and Latin Bibles; it refers to the same territory as Mount Seir earlier in the chapter.

Read Ezekiel 35