NOTES for Eze 39:1-29
At first sight, today's passage once again reflects a blending of two different perspectives: the strictly historical one, connected with the age of Cyrus the Great and the end of the Babylonian exile, and the messianic one, which already reaches beyond history. In the events described here it is not hard to see the first flashes of the coming great battles of Cyrus and his army, whose victories not only brought glory to their commander but also made his empire the most powerful state in the Middle East of its day.
Yet it is equally easy to discern echoes of events from quite a different age, connected with the military campaigns into Judah by the armies of another great empire, Assyria. It was then, in the days of King Hezekiah and the prophet Isaiah of Jerusalem, that the soldiers of an Assyrian expeditionary force met their death at the walls of Jerusalem. Sennacherib had sent them to conquer Egypt, and on the way they lingered in Judah in order to capture Jerusalem, whose ruler the Assyrians had long suspected of disloyalty and secret dealings with Egypt, their principal military and political adversary at the time. For contemporaries and for many later generations, those events became an example of how the God of Israel intervenes in events on the side of His people.
It is not surprising that for Ezekiel, too, they became a prefiguration of that last great war which, on the eve of the Day of Judgment, will become a trial for all the nations of the earth—all except the people of God. For they have already passed through their trial, the remnant has been formed, and God has restored it to the land of the fathers. For them the Judgment lies behind, and the Kingdom promised by the prophets has become a reality.
And the war that has engulfed humanity and become its trial and Judgment comes to a halt in the land of Judah, at the walls of the holy city. It stops just as another war stopped here nearly two centuries earlier, a war brought to a halt by God Himself. The chastening sword of God's judgment stops at the borders of the land belonging to His people. Humanity is saved from destruction on the day of Judgment—saved through the very people whose neighbors all believed that its history was over and its fate sealed. Thus human judgment retreats before God's judgment, and only because of that retreat does humanity receive a chance of salvation.