Ezekiel 7: What the Passage Says

The Chapter in a Sentence

The word of the LORD comes to Ezekiel with a message for the land of Israel: the end has come, and God will judge the people for the way they have lived. The chapter piles up pictures of that judgment, sword outside the city, hunger and disease inside, survivors moaning in the mountains, silver and gold thrown into the streets as useless, the temple and its treasures handed over to foreigners. Priest, prophet and elders are left with nothing to say, and the king, the prince and the people are left in mourning. Each section ends with the statement that they will know that he is the LORD, and once that he is the LORD who strikes.

Claim by Claim

1. 7:1
   • The word of the LORD came to Ezekiel.
   • The word came with a speech to follow.
2. 7:2
   • The LORD addresses Ezekiel as son of man.
   • The Lord GOD speaks this message to the land of Israel.
   • An end is declared.
   • The end has come upon the four corners of the land.
3. 7:3
   • The end is now upon you.
   • God will send his anger against you.
   • God will judge you according to your ways.
   • God will bring all your abominations back upon you.
4. 7:4
   • God's eye will not spare you.
   • God will not have pity.
   • God will repay your ways upon you.
   • Your abominations will remain in the midst of you.
   • You will know that he is the LORD.
5. 7:5
   • The Lord GOD speaks this message.
   • A disaster is declared.
   • It is a single, unique disaster.
   • It is coming.
6. 7:6
   • An end has come.
   • The end has come.
   • The end has roused itself against you (the King James renders this as the end watching for you).
   • It is coming.
7. 7:7
   • Something has come upon you, the inhabitant of the land; the Hebrew word is obscure and has been read as doom, as a circlet or turn of fate, and as morning.
   • The time has come.
   • The day is near.
   • The day is one of panic or tumult.
   • There is no joyful shouting on the mountains; the phrase is obscure and has also been read as no echo from the mountains.
8. 7:8
   • God will very soon pour out his fury upon you.
   • God will spend his anger fully against you.
   • God will judge you according to your ways.
   • God will bring all your abominations back upon you.
9. 7:9
   • God's eye will not spare.
   • God will not have pity.
   • God will repay you according to your ways.
   • Your abominations are in the midst of you.
   • You will know that he is the LORD who strikes.
10. 7:10
    • The day is here.
    • It has come.
    • The thing named in verse seven has gone out; the Hebrew word is obscure and has been read as doom and as morning.
    • The rod has blossomed.
    • Pride has budded.
11. 7:11
    • Violence has risen up into a rod of wickedness.
    • None of them will remain.
    • None of their multitude will remain.
    • None of their wealth will remain.
    • There will be no eminence among them; the Hebrew is obscure and has also been read as no wailing for them.
12. 7:12
    • The time has come.
    • The day has arrived.
    • The buyer is told not to rejoice.
    • The seller is told not to mourn.
    • Wrath is upon the whole multitude.
13. 7:13
    • The seller will not return to what he sold.
    • This holds even while they are still alive.
    • The vision concerns the whole multitude.
    • The vision will not be revoked.
    • No one will strengthen himself in the iniquity of his life.
14. 7:14
    • They have blown the trumpet.
    • Everything has been made ready.
    • No one goes to the battle.
    • God's wrath is upon the whole multitude.
15. 7:15
    • The sword is outside.
    • Plague and famine are inside.
    • Whoever is in the field will die by the sword.
    • Whoever is in the city will be devoured by famine and plague.
16. 7:16
    • Those who escape among them will escape.
    • They will be on the mountains.
    • They will be like doves of the valleys.
    • All of them will be moaning.
    • Each one moans for his own iniquity.
17. 7:17
    • All hands will go limp.
    • All knees will run with water.
18. 7:18
    • They will gird themselves with sackcloth.
    • Horror will cover them.
    • Shame will be on all faces.
    • Baldness will be on all their heads.
19. 7:19
    • They will throw their silver into the streets.
    • Their gold will become an unclean thing.
    • Their silver and gold will not be able to deliver them on the day of the LORD's wrath.
    • Their silver and gold will not satisfy their appetite.
    • Their silver and gold will not fill their stomachs.
    • Their wealth became the stumbling block of their iniquity.
20. 7:20
    • The beauty of his ornament was set up for pride.
    • They made in it the images of their abominations.
    • They made in it their detestable things.
    • Therefore God made it an unclean thing to them.
21. 7:21
    • God will give it into the hands of strangers as plunder.
    • God will give it to the wicked of the earth as spoil.
    • They will profane it.
22. 7:22
    • God will turn his face away from them.
    • They will profane God's hidden place.
    • Violent intruders will enter it.
    • They will defile it.
23. 7:23
    • A chain is to be made.
    • The land is full of bloody judgments.
    • The city is full of violence.
24. 7:24
    • God will bring the worst of the nations.
    • They will take possession of their houses.
    • God will make the pride of the strong cease.
    • Their holy places will be profaned.
25. 7:25
    • Anguish is coming.
    • They will seek peace.
    • There will be no peace.
26. 7:26
    • Disaster will come upon disaster.
    • Rumor will follow rumor.
    • They will seek a vision from a prophet.
    • Instruction will perish from the priest.
    • Counsel will perish from the elders.
27. 7:27
    • The king will mourn.
    • The prince will be clothed with desolation.
    • The hands of the people of the land will tremble.
    • God will deal with them according to their own way.
    • God will judge them by their own judgments.
    • They will know that he 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.

7:1

Ezekiel was one of the Judeans deported to Babylon in 597 BC, and he speaks from there about events back home in Judah. "The LORD" in small capitals stands for the personal name of Israel's God, four Hebrew letters usually written YHWH, which Jewish readers did not pronounce aloud; English versions substitute "the LORD" in this special type to show the name is underneath.

7:2

"Son of man" is Hebrew idiom for "human being, mortal" (it is simply how God addresses Ezekiel throughout the book, over ninety times, and carries no title or rank. "The four corners of the land" means the whole territory from edge to edge; the Hebrew literally says "the four wings." "Lord GOD" renders a double name, Adonai YHWH) "Master" plus the divine name.

7:3

"Disgusting things" (KJV "abominations") translates a Hebrew word for what is repellent or taboo. In Ezekiel it usually points to idol worship and the rites that went with it, though it also covers social crimes.

7:4

"Then you will know that I am the LORD" is a stock formula repeated about seventy times in Ezekiel. It marks the point of an event: what happens is meant to be recognized as coming from God and not from chance.

7:5

The Hebrew here is compressed and unusual, literally something like "a disaster, a single disaster." Some ancient copies read it as "disaster after disaster," others as "a disaster unlike any other."

7:7

The word rendered "doom" is rare and its meaning is uncertain; the King James translators guessed "morning," other readings are "crown," "turn of events," or "doom." The second half is also disputed: the mountains were where grape and grain harvests were celebrated with shouting, so the line contrasts joyful harvest cries with cries of panic, the King James "sounding again of the mountains" is an attempt at the same obscure phrase.

7:10

A "rod" is a wooden staff, used both as a ruler's symbol of authority and as an instrument for beating. The image of a dead stick sprouting buds and flowers is being used ironically: what has grown ripe is arrogance, and the stick that has come to full strength is the one about to be used for the beating.

7:11

The Hebrew of the last part of this verse is broken and hard to construe; translations differ over whether the vanished things are people, wealth, or noise, and whether the final word means "wailing," "eminence," or "rest." The word rendered "crowd" here and in verses 12–14 can mean a mass of people, an uproar, or a hoard of riches, and the prophet may be playing on more than one sense.

7:12

Under Israelite land law, land could not be sold permanently: a plot passed to a buyer was supposed to return to the seller's family in the fiftieth, or jubilee, year, and a relative could buy it back sooner. So a seller normally grieved only temporarily and a buyer's gain was only temporary. Verse 13 says that calculation no longer applies, the invasion will sweep away buyer and seller alike, so neither the bargain nor the future return of the land matters.

7:13

This depends on the law of the jubilee year, in which sold land returned to the family that originally held it, so a seller could expect to recover his property in his own lifetime. Ezekiel says that safety net is gone: the deportation will empty the land before any return can happen.

7:14

The trumpet is the shofar, a ram's horn blown to muster fighting men and to sound alarms. The point is that the summons goes out and nobody musters.

7:15

This is the standard picture of a besieged country: an enemy army roams the open countryside, so anyone outside the walls is killed, while inside the walls a packed and cut-off population starves and sickens. "Sword, famine and plague" is a fixed trio in Ezekiel and Jeremiah for the whole disaster.

7:16

The low cooing of doves was heard by ancient writers as a sound of grief, and the phrase is a set comparison for continuous low moaning.

7:17

The Hebrew of the second half reads literally "all knees will run with water," and it is usually understood as loss of bladder control through sheer terror. The verse is a physical description of a body giving way, not a figure of speech about discouragement.

7:18

Sackcloth was a coarse dark cloth of goat hair worn next to the skin as a public sign of grief or dread. Shaving the head bald was another recognized mourning rite in the region, done at funerals and after catastrophes; Israelite law elsewhere restricts the practice, but the point here is simply that everyone is visibly in mourning.

7:19

The Hebrew says their gold becomes an "unclean thing" (the word is the one used for the ritual impurity of menstruation, meaning something you must keep away from and cannot handle. Precious metal is worthless when there is no food to buy with it, and here it is worse than worthless: it is contaminated. "The thing that tripped them into sin" (KJV "stumblingblock") is a term Ezekiel uses for something that lures a person into wrongdoing) the silver and gold had been made into idols.

7:20

This verse is ambiguous in Hebrew and has been read two ways: either the "beautiful ornament" is the Temple, magnificently built but then filled with idols, or it is jewelry and precious metalwork, worn with pride and then melted down to make images. The rendering keeps the ambiguity. "Hateful idols" translates a word Ezekiel uses repeatedly for idols, related to the word for dung.

7:21

"Strangers" in the King James means foreigners, people from outside the nation, with no suggestion of oddness. "Pollute" and "defile" mean to strip something of its holy status by handling it as ordinary, or worse, as unclean.

7:22

"My treasured place" (KJV "my secret place") is the Temple, and probably its innermost room, which only priests could enter. To "defile" it means to make it ritually unusable simply by intruding on it, the offense is entry and plunder by outsiders, not vandalism as such.

7:23

The chain is the shackle used to bind captives who were marched off into exile; conquering armies chained prisoners together for deportation. The word itself is uncertain, some read it as "forge the chain," others as a chain-like tangle of crime.

7:24

"The nations" (KJV "the heathen") simply means the foreign peoples, everyone who is not Israel. "Their holy places" are the sanctuaries and shrines; to defile them is to render them unfit for use.

7:26

Israel had three recognized channels of guidance, and the verse names all three failing at once: the prophet gave visions, the priest gave torah (authoritative rulings on what was permitted, clean, or owed) and the elders, the senior heads of families who settled disputes at the town gate, gave practical counsel.

7:27

"King" and "prince" are different words: the second is Ezekiel's usual term for a ruler of Judah, literally "the one lifted up," and he generally avoids calling the current ruler king. "The people of the land" was a standing term for the landholding citizenry of Judah. "Judge them by their own standards" is ambiguous in Hebrew: it can mean by the legal verdicts they themselves handed down to others, or simply by what they have earned.