NOTES for Eze 25:1-17

The history of Israel and its relationship with God occupies a central place in the Bible as a whole and in the Old Testament in particular. Addressing His people, the Lord constantly says that He is the only Lord, and that the fate of each person and of the people as a whole is determined solely by their relationship with Him, by faithfulness to His covenant. But this does not mean that there are no participants in world history other than God and Israel. Beginning with chapter 25, the prophet Ezekiel includes in his book stern words about a number of surrounding peoples, thus drawing them into the one history of humanity before God.

Israel’s relations with its neighbours were always strained, to put it mildly. Closely related to Israel in many ways, these tribes were a source of temptation for the Israelites over the centuries—sometimes cultural, but mainly religious. It was precisely the danger of being drawn into idolatry that gave rise to numerous religious prohibitions on contact with other peoples. For understandable psychological reasons, this led the Israelites to become accustomed to looking on people of other nations as unclean, as somehow bad. It is not hard to guess that those peoples responded to Israel in kind, because human beings generally slip readily into mutual grievances and mutual contempt. In the course of history, the peoples of Canaan were at times subject to Israelite kings, at times independent, and sometimes entered military and political alliances with the Israelites. Yet these relations always developed against a background of religious separation and were never sincere.

When Israel, having broken its covenant with its Creator, suffered attacks first from Assyria and then from Babylon, the neighbouring tribes reacted with considerable gloating. This was expressed by no means only in contemptuous words about Israel and its God: many tribes and petty kings of Palestine sought to join the Babylonians in plundering Palestine. The Israelites’ half-ruined and defenceless settlements were often subjected to devastating attacks by neighbouring peoples, who destroyed what the Babylonians had left behind. Like jackals, they consumed the remains of the lion’s bloody feast. For Israel this was almost an even greater calamity, because after these blows it was no longer possible to rise again: the neighbouring peoples were turning Judah into a desert.

What made this especially painful was that these tribes were related to Israel and had lived with it in one country for a long time. To some extent we can try to imagine this through the example of relations between the post-Soviet countries, which treat one another, and especially Russia, as complete strangers with no shared history.

The actions of the neighbouring peoples could meet with no resistance from devastated Israel, but neither could they escape moral judgement. Already at the beginning of his preaching, the prophet Amos had said that God requires basic humanity of all peoples without exception. Less than half a century before Jerusalem’s destruction, the prophet Nahum spoke about Assyria’s fate, subjecting it to precisely such a moral judgement. In the second half of the sixth century, the short book of the prophet Obadiah would be devoted to the Edomites’ raids on ravaged Judah. The prophet Ezekiel does not pass over this subject either.

The essence of his prophecies about the surrounding peoples is, above all, that they are accountable to God for their actions, even if they themselves do not realise it. The Lord tells the prophet that these peoples, seeking to kick fallen Jerusalem, will not escape the same fate, because the golden rule, ‘Do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself’, applies to them too. In the context of the prophet’s book, this is very important. God says that the Babylonian invasion is the sword of God, serving not to destroy Israel but to purify it. And so all who seek to profit at the expense of God’s suffering people will not go unpunished. Their lawless cruelty towards Israel will fall upon them, and they themselves will suffer the same fate. In a certain sense, in this historical situation the prophet likens the surrounding peoples to those Jews who mocked the Crucified Christ without understanding what was taking place before their eyes.