Ezekiel

Book Written:  About 550 B.C. (by Ezekiel's disciples?).

Time Period/Setting:  The Babylonian exile, specifically the years 593-571 B.C. when Ezekiel was prophesying.  Ezekiel prophesies from Babylon to the exiled community there with him as well as to Jerusalem.

Title:  The prophet's name.

Ezekiel is prophet, priest and contemporary of Jeremiah.  Garrison cautions against applying Ezekiel's prophesies to current events as a modern-day "fire-breathing evangelist" might do.  Could he mean someone like this?  Garrison says such interpretations miss the point of the book by focusing on doomsday predictions about modern times, rather than Ezekiel's universal message about God's unmatchable power, personal conversion and the suffering caused by sin. See below on apocalyptic literature.

Garrison advises skimming this book, but it was near impossible to skim the first three chapters describing Ezekiel's call to prophesy and his vision of the four-faced, winged and wheeled creatures.  Fantastical and bizarre images!  The song hardly does the Biblical text justice.

Equally unskimmable was Chapter 16 where Israel is depicted with unrelenting insistence as the "whoring" bride of the Lord.  It was also hard to skim Chapter 37, 'dem dry bones.  Do you not remember the song?   The image of Ezekiel prophesying to some bones in a Mesopotamian valley as the bones rattle, join together, take on sinew, flesh, skin and finally life when Ezekiel breathes on 'dem--the toe bone connected to the foot bone, the foot bone connected to the---well, take a look and listen here  .   Who wouldn't squirm and sweat?  It is, in a word, unbelievable.   Isn't it a prefiguring, albeit a crude one, of the resurrection that will follow once the Messiah has come into the world?  Collins doesn't make much of it in his notes. 

The excruciating details concerning Ezekiel's vision of the new temple in Chapter 40 compel one to read every word rather than skim.  Just the circumstances of the vision  preclude skimming the final chapters 40 to 48.  Ezekiel is carried to a high mountain by the Lord and is then ushered through the new temple by a man whose "appearance shone like bronze."  And, the man measures every nook and cranny with his measuring reed as he takes Ezekiel around!  Why, I don't know.   These few examples, plus simply the length of the book make Ezekiel a text to be reckoned with.

Lastly there's the matter of apocalyptic literature, a genre of writing particular to Judaism between 250 BC and 250 AD, but having its roots in Near East mythology.  Baker says that its origins are to be found in Ezekiel, but there is also evidence of it in the OT books of Haggai, Zechariah, Joel and Malachi.  Eerdmans says the only "true" example of apocalyptic writing is in the book of Daniel, Ch 7-12.  The word itself is from the Greek and means revelation or disclosure.  Eerdmans:  

"Apocalypses are characterized by the presence of vision, symbolism, a human seer and an other-worldly mediator, an otherworldly journey, an emphasis on events in the cosmic rather than human realm, an increased interest in angels and demons, the notion of transcendence of God, and pseudonymity." p. 72  

Eerdmans gives three characteristics of the apocalyptic genre:

1) it is a first person narrative. .. "with revelatory visions often mediated to the author by a supernatural being"  2)   the content communicated is eschatological in nature  and achieved through a variety of devices, both literary and visual such that  3) those hearing the message will behave in "conformity with the transcendent perspectives."  p. 1124-1125 

There is much more of course, but time to move on to the Book of Daniel.