NOTES for Eze 37:12-14
The vision opened to Ezekiel of a field strewn with dead bones, which God brings to life by breathing into them the breath of life, is usually connected with faith in the universal resurrection at the end of time, on the view that this is what God shows His prophet. Meanwhile, the matter is clearly not that. Of course, faith in the universal resurrection and in the day of Judgment among the Jews in the time of the Babylonian exile, when Ezekiel was given to see what he saw, must already have existed. But God reveals to the prophet not an image of the last Judgment, but something else: the fate of the people of God. He shows Ezekiel the spiritual path the people had to travel. Dead bones: that is what the Jewish people were spiritually when they found themselves in Babylon. This is understandable: if it had been otherwise, the historical fate of the people would have been different.
In any case, the national catastrophe that the exile became would then perhaps have been avoided. But judging by what God gave His prophet to see, no spiritual life in the people was left. Everything had to begin again. With a small Babylonian community. With the spiritual renewal of this community. And then, after this renewal, the community would grow, in essence, into a new people: that post-exilic Jewry whose history continues to this day, the very people who would have to meet the Messiah promised by God.
Such renewal, of course, cannot be produced by human efforts alone. Direct intervention by God is needed here. A miracle is needed. And the spiritual renewal of the people that occurred in Babylon truly became a miracle. As all subsequent Jewish history was a miracle. A history which, by human reasoning, simply could not have existed. The Babylonian kingdom swallowed and assimilated many small peoples, including the neighbors of the Jews: Ammonites, Moabites, Philistines, Phoenicians.
All the more doomed to assimilation in such a metropolis as Babylon then was, was the small community of Jews deported from Jerusalem. Yet it not only survived, but was spiritually renewed, giving rise to a new Jewry. This is the miracle God gave Ezekiel to see. He gave him to see it when all of it still lay ahead. But what was seen inspired hope: hope that what appeared to be the end of the historical path of the people was only the beginning of its new stage, a stage leading the people straight toward the Messiah and to the threshold of the Kingdom.