For Teaching

Ezekiel 36: What the Passage Says

140 claims across 38 verses, in the order the chapter makes them.

Not a sermon outline. What Ezekiel 36 says, and what its hard words meant. The reading of it is yours.

The Chapter in a Sentence

God tells Ezekiel to speak to the mountains of Israel. Because enemy nations mocked the land and seized it, God says those nations will bear shame, while the mountains will grow crops again, the ruined cities will be rebuilt, and the people of Israel will return and multiply. God then explains that he is acting not for Israel's sake but for the sake of his own holy name, which Israel profaned among the nations; he will gather them home, wash them clean, give them a new heart and a new spirit, and put his Spirit in them so they follow his laws. God says the ruined land will be like the garden of Eden and the nations around will know that he did it, and the chapter closes with a promise to increase the people like a flock.

Claim by Claim

36:1
- God addresses the prophet as son of man.
- God commands him to prophesy to the mountains of Israel.
- God commands him to say to the mountains of Israel: hear the word of the LORD.
36:2
- The Lord GOD speaks the following.
- The enemy has said against the mountains of Israel, "Aha!"
- The enemy has said that the ancient heights have become their possession.
36:3
- God commands the prophet to prophesy and speak.
- The Lord GOD speaks the following.
- They have made the mountains desolate.
- They have crushed the mountains from every side.
- The purpose was that the mountains become a possession of the rest of the nations.
- The mountains have been taken up on the lips of talkers.
- The mountains have become the evil gossip of the people.
36:4
- God commands the mountains of Israel to hear the word of the Lord GOD.
- The Lord GOD speaks to the mountains and the hills.
- The Lord GOD speaks to the ravines and the valleys.
- The Lord GOD speaks to the desolate ruins and the abandoned cities.
- These places became plunder and mockery to the rest of the nations round about.
36:5
- The Lord GOD speaks the following.
- God has spoken in the fire of his jealousy against the rest of the nations.
- God has spoken against all Edom.
- They assigned God's land to themselves as their possession.
- They did so with the joy of a whole heart.
- They did so with contempt of soul.
- Their purpose was that its pastureland become plunder.
36:6
- God commands the prophet to prophesy concerning the land of Israel.
- God commands him to speak to the mountains, the hills, the ravines, and the valleys.
- The Lord GOD speaks the following.
- God has spoken in his jealousy and in his fury.
- The reason is that they have borne the reproach of the nations.
36:7
- The Lord GOD speaks the following.
- God has lifted up his hand in an oath.
- The nations round about them will themselves bear their own reproach.
36:8
- The mountains of Israel will put forth their branches.
- The mountains of Israel will bear their fruit for God's people Israel.
- God's people are near to coming.
36:9
- God is for the mountains.
- God will turn toward them.
- They will be tilled and sown.
36:10
- God will multiply people upon the mountains.
- The people multiplied will be all the house of Israel, all of it.
- The cities will be inhabited.
- The ruins will be rebuilt.
36:11
- God will multiply upon the mountains both people and animals.
- They will increase and be fruitful.
- God will settle the mountains as in their former times.
- God will do better for them than at their beginnings.
- They will know that God is the LORD.
36:12
- God will cause people to walk upon the mountains.
- Those people are God's people Israel.
- They will possess the land.
- The land will be their inheritance.
- The land will no longer bereave them of their children.
36:13
- The Lord GOD speaks the following.
- People say to the land that it devours men.
- People say to the land that it has bereaved its nation of children.
36:14
- The land will devour men no more.
- The land will bereave its nation no more.
- The Lord GOD declares this.
36:15
- God will no longer let the reproach of the nations be heard against the land.
- The land will no longer bear the taunt of the peoples.
- The land will no longer cause its nation to stumble.
- The Lord GOD declares this.
36:16
- The word of the LORD came to the prophet.
- The word of the LORD spoke to him.
36:17
- God addresses the prophet as son of man.
- The house of Israel dwelt on their own land.
- They defiled the land by their way and by their deeds.
- Their way before God was like the uncleanness of a menstruating woman.
36:18
- God poured out his fury upon them.
- The reason was the blood they had shed on the land.
- A further reason was that they had defiled the land with their idols.
36:19
- God scattered them among the nations.
- They were dispersed through the countries.
- God judged them according to their way and their deeds.
36:20
- They came among the nations to which they went.
- They profaned God's holy name there.
- It was said of them that these are the people of the LORD.
- It was said of them that they had gone out of the LORD's land.
36:21
- God had pity on his holy name.
- The house of Israel had profaned that name.
- They profaned it among the nations to which they went.
36:22
- God commands the prophet to speak to the house of Israel.
- The Lord GOD speaks the following.
- God does not act for the sake of the house of Israel.
- God acts for the sake of his holy name.
- They profaned that name among the nations to which they went.
36:23
- God will sanctify his great name.
- That name was profaned among the nations.
- They profaned that name in the midst of the nations.
- The nations will know that God is the LORD.
- The Lord GOD declares this.
- This knowing will occur when God is sanctified in them before the eyes of the nations.
36:24
- God will take them from among the nations.
- God will gather them out of all the countries.
- God will bring them into their own land.
36:25
- God will sprinkle clean water upon them.
- They will be clean.
- God will cleanse them from all their uncleannesses.
- God will cleanse them from all their idols.
36:26
- God will give them a new heart.
- God will put a new spirit within them.
- God will remove the heart of stone from their flesh.
- God will give them a heart of flesh.
36:27
- God will put his spirit within them.
- God will cause them to walk in his statutes.
- They will keep God's judgments and do them.
36:28
- They will dwell in the land that God gave to their fathers.
- They will be God's people.
- God will be their God.
36:29
- God will save them from all their uncleannesses.
- God will call for the grain and multiply it.
- God will lay no famine upon them.
36:30
- God will multiply the fruit of the tree and the produce of the field.
- The purpose is that they will no longer receive the reproach of famine among the nations.
36:31
- They will remember their evil ways.
- They will remember their doings that were not good.
- They will loathe themselves in their own sight for their iniquities and their abominations.
36:32
- God does not act for their sakes.
- The Lord GOD declares this.
- God tells them to know this.
- God commands the house of Israel to be ashamed and humiliated for their ways.
36:33
- The Lord GOD speaks the following.
- There will be a day when God cleanses them from all their iniquities.
- On that day God will cause the cities to be inhabited.
- The ruins will be rebuilt.
36:34
- The desolate land will be tilled.
- Formerly it lay desolate in the sight of everyone who passed by.
36:35
- People will say that this land that was desolate has become like the garden of Eden.
- People will say that the cities that were ruined, desolate, and destroyed are now fortified and inhabited.
36:36
- The nations left round about them will know that God, the LORD, has rebuilt the ruined places.
- They will know that the LORD has planted what was desolate.
- The LORD has spoken it.
- The LORD will do it.
36:37
- The Lord GOD speaks the following.
- God will yet be inquired of by the house of Israel concerning this, to do it for them.
- God will increase them with people like a flock.
36:38
- The comparison is to the holy flock, the flock of Jerusalem at her appointed feasts.
- So the ruined cities will be filled with flocks of people.
- They will know that God 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.

36:1: "Son of man" is how God addresses Ezekiel throughout the book (about ninety times. The Hebrew phrase simply means "human being," "mortal," and it marks the distance between the speaker and the man being spoken to. The "mountains of Israel" are the central hill country, the high spine of land running north–south that was the heartland of Israelite settlement. Prophets sometimes addressed a land, a city or a hillside directly, as if it could hear) a standard rhetorical form, not a claim that the hills were alive.
36:2: "High places" (Hebrew *bamot*) usually means hilltop shrines, and the KJV wording will suggest that. In the mouth of the enemy here it more likely means just the ancient heights, the old high ground of the hill country, now claimed as spoils. Both senses of the word were live, and the line trades on that. The "enemy" are Israel's neighboring peoples, who moved into the emptied land after Babylon destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BC.
36:3: "The heathen" in the KJV translates *goyim*, which means simply "the nations", foreign peoples, everyone who is not Israel. It carries no sense of the modern English word "heathen" as ignorant or savage. "The residue of the heathen" means the nations that were left, the ones that survived the same wars Israel lost. The Hebrew behind "swallowed you up" is uncertain; it has been read as "trampled," "crushed," and "panted after you greedily."
36:4: The KJV's "rivers" translates a word for ravines and watercourses, steep gullies that run with water in the rainy season and are dry the rest of the year. Israel had almost no permanent rivers. The four terms together (mountains, hills, ravines, valleys) are a standard way of naming a whole landscape, high ground to low.
36:5: Edom lay south-east of Judah, around the Dead Sea's southern end; the people were traditionally reckoned as descendants of Esau, Jacob's brother, which made them Israel's nearest kin among the nations. Several biblical writers accuse Edom of gloating over Jerusalem's fall and grabbing land afterwards. "Idumea" is the later Greek and Roman name for the same territory, which the KJV translators used here. "The fire of my jealousy" uses "jealousy" in an older, stronger sense: the Hebrew *qin'ah* is fierce protectiveness over what is one's own, closer to "burning zeal" than to petty envy.
36:7: Raising the hand was the physical gesture that accompanied a sworn oath, the way a raised hand accompanies swearing in a court today. "I have lifted up mine hand" therefore means "I have sworn."
36:8: Hillsides in this country were farmed in stone terraces planted with vines, olives and figs, so telling the mountains to grow branches and bear fruit is a promise that ordinary farming life will come back to ground that has gone wild.
36:9: Farmers dug up the hard dirt to get it ready for seeds. Nobody had farmed this land while the people were gone.
36:10: "The house of Israel" means the nation as an extended family, everyone descended from Jacob, who was also called Israel. "House" here is household or lineage, not a building.
36:11: "Estate" in 1611 English means condition or situation, not property, so "after your old estates" means "back to the way you used to be."
36:12: "Inheritance" translates *nachalah*, the allotted portion of land held by a family and passed down through generations. It was not property that could simply be sold off, and losing it meant losing a family's place in the nation. The charge that the land "bereaves them of men" is that it kills off its own inhabitants, leaving families childless.
36:13: The accusation that the land "devours men" echoes the report the scouts brought back in Numbers 13:32, that Canaan was a land that ate up those who lived in it. After invasion, famine and deportation had emptied the country, the old slander had fresh currency among the neighboring peoples.
36:15: The last clause is disputed. The Hebrew as it stands reads "cause your nation to stumble"; some ancient copies and versions read "bereave your nation of its children," matching verses 13–14. Translations divide between the two.
36:17: This compares the nation's conduct to ritual uncleanness, a state, under Israelite law, that temporarily barred a person from the sanctuary and from contact with holy things. Menstruation was the standard example of a routine, blameless impurity that nevertheless had to run its course before a person could approach worship again. The point of the comparison is contamination and exclusion, not moral judgment on women.
36:18: The word translated "idols" here is a contemptuous coinage Ezekiel uses constantly, *gillulim*, probably built on a root for dung or for shapeless lumps. "Blood shed upon the land" refers both to murder and to the belief that unavenged bloodshed physically polluted the ground it fell on.
36:19: The scattering is the exile. Babylon deported Judeans in stages between 597 and 582 BC; Ezekiel was among those taken in the first wave and wrote from a settlement of exiles in Babylonia. Others fled to Egypt and elsewhere. His audience are people already living out this dispersal.
36:20: In Hebrew usage a name stands for the reputation and public standing of its bearer. To "profane" a name is to drag it down into contempt, here, the nations conclude from Israel's defeat that Israel's God was too weak to keep his own people in his own land. The complaint is about what outsiders now say, not about swearing.
36:23: "Sanctify" in older English means to treat or show as holy, to set apart. The Hebrew here is about God demonstrating, publicly and visibly, that his name is not the discredited thing the nations take it for.
36:25: Sprinkling water was a purification rite: under Israelite law, water mixed with the ashes of a red heifer was sprinkled on a person who had been made unclean, for instance by contact with a corpse, to restore them to a state where they could take part in worship (Numbers 19). The image is of a specific ritual, not of an ordinary wash.
36:26: In Hebrew the "heart" is the seat of thought, will and decision, closer to what English calls the mind than to the emotions. A heart of stone is one that cannot be moved or changed; a heart of flesh is one that responds. "Spirit" here translates *ruach*, a word that also means breath and wind, and covers the animating disposition of a person.
36:27: "My spirit" is the same word, *ruach*, used for the "new spirit" in the previous verse. "Statutes" and "judgments" are two standard categories of Israelite law: fixed decrees, and rulings of the kind a judge would hand down. Together they mean the whole body of law.
36:28: "You will be my people, and I will be your God" is a set formula, the standard wording for the covenant bond between God and Israel, used in the same fixed shape throughout the Hebrew Bible. It is phrased like the mutual declarations that sealed a treaty or a marriage.
36:29: The KJV's "corn" means grain of any kind, wheat and barley here. It does not mean maize, which was unknown in Europe or the Near East in biblical times and only entered English as "corn" much later in America.
36:31: "Abominations" translates a word for things that provoke revulsion; in Ezekiel it points most often at the worship of other gods and the practices that went with it. "Lothe" is just the older spelling of loathe.
36:32: "Confounded" in the KJV means publicly disgraced or humiliated, not confused or puzzled. The older English sense is close to "put to shame."
36:35: The garden of Eden is the garden of Genesis 2–3, and by Ezekiel's day it had become shorthand for perfect fertility, the standard against which any lush landscape was measured. The KJV's "fenced" cities means fortified ones, walled and defensible, nothing to do with fences.
36:37: Earlier in the book (Ezekiel 14:3 and 20:3) God tells Ezekiel he will not let the elders of Israel consult him at all. This verse reverses that: he will again allow himself to be asked. "Enquire of" is the technical term for formally seeking a word or ruling from God, usually through a prophet.
36:38: Israelites traveled to Jerusalem for three annual festivals, bringing animals for sacrifice; at those times the city was packed with flocks. "Solemn feasts" in the KJV means appointed or fixed festivals, days set in the calendar, not gloomy ones. The image is of density and sheer numbers: the ruined cities as crowded with people as the festival city was with sheep.

Read Ezekiel 36