NOTES for Eze 38:1-23
Today's reading returns us once again to the theme of Judgment and the messianic Kingdom, but from a somewhat different perspective, concerned not with the Kingdom's triumph as such, but with the events that precede it. Even the pre-exilic prophets associated the day of Judgment with a succession of disasters befalling God's people, from whom a faithful remnant would emerge, having preserved their faith through the days of trial. Ezekiel was apparently convinced that the day of Judgment and the Messiah's coming would occur immediately, or very soon, after the Jews returned from Babylon to Judea. It had evidently been revealed to him that the Exile was precisely the trial for the people of which Isaiah of Jerusalem and Jeremiah had spoken, and that the community of exiles, if it kept the faith, would become the messianic remnant whom God would bring back to the land of their fathers. But something else had been revealed to Ezekiel too. For him, as for the pre-exilic prophets, Judgment was undoubtedly an event of universal, cosmic proportions, affecting not only God's people but all humanity. Unlike the pre-exilic prophets, however, he understood that the trial also awaited not only God's people but all the other peoples of the earth, and that this trial would precede the day of Judgment. Its purpose was the same as that of the trial God sent His own people: to reveal both the best and the worst qualities of each nation. Since Amos had already said that Judgment would concern God's people first and only then everyone else, it is not surprising that this people also undergoes the test of faithfulness before all the other nations. Thus, when it is already ending for God's people, the rest of the world has yet to confront it face to face. In Ezekiel's visions, this trial takes the form of an invasion by a mighty people from the North, previously unknown to anyone, sweeping away everything in its path and overturning the familiar, established way of life. It is not difficult to recognize the Persians in the northern people mentioned by the prophet. Their empire was only beginning to emerge in Ezekiel's time, but a few decades later it would indeed redraw the political map of the Near East, bringing Babylonia, Egypt and other, smaller and less powerful states of the region under its rule. In time, it would be the ruler of the Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great, who would issue the decree allowing the Jews living in Babylon to return to Judea and rebuild the city and the Temple. Thus events that would bring many peoples the end of the familiar order and a time of severe trials would become for God's people a day of triumph, fulfilling their cherished dream of returning to the land of their fathers.
