NOTES for Eze 37:14
Ezekiel's vision of the spiritual renewal of the people of God, of course, inspired hope in the hearts of those for whom it was intended: the deported inhabitants of Jerusalem. It is not surprising that later it was reinterpreted in the context of New Testament revelation, becoming a symbol of the universal resurrection. Nor is it surprising that several more centuries later a whole theology connected with the teaching about the Holy Spirit grew up around this and similar texts. But it is still important to keep in mind that all such theological concepts belong to an entirely different age and, to a certain degree, to a different tradition. The prophet speaks of the breath of God, which returns life to dead bones, making them not merely a people, but the people of God. Here before us is the prophetic, or more broadly, the general biblical idea of what life is, whether the life of an individual person or of a whole people, which also stood before God as a kind of spiritual whole. Life here proves to be not a natural or biological process, but a spiritual one in the full sense of the word, at least when the issue is the human being. This is not surprising: already at creation God "breathes" into the person's "nostrils," as the Hebrew text says, the breath of life, which gives the person life. In Ezekiel's vision He does the same with a whole people. Apparently the measure of life, or more exactly of "aliveness," both of individual people and of whole peoples, is determined by the measure of the fullness of God's breath. And this measure can vary from that which belongs to the Kingdom, and here the parallel with the universal resurrection is quite appropriate, since resurrection to life presupposes entry into the Kingdom, down to the minimum characteristic of Sheol, where only a pale shadow of life remains. Only on a person's relationship with God does it depend how full and intense his life will be. The same concerns the people of God as a whole: by the beginning of the exile, spiritually it was apparently a heap of bones, and this affected its historical fate accordingly. When the people's spiritual life again acquired fullness, their return to the land of the fathers became possible. But this return was preceded by another: a return to the fullness of communion with God, which happened while the people still lived in Babylon. Without it, the return to Judea would have been meaningless and, most likely, simply impossible.