The Shepherd, the Bones, and the River

Ezekiel had been saying for years that Jerusalem was going to fall. He had said it in words, and when the words did not get through he had said it with a brick and a bag and months of lying on his side, and everybody had watched him do it and gone home. Then, in the twelfth year of the exile, a man walked into the camp by the canal who had come the whole way from Judah. And he said five words. “The city has been taken.” The Lord’s hand had come on Ezekiel the evening before; and when the man came in the morning, God opened his mouth, and he was not silent any more. He had words against Tyre and Egypt and the other nations round about, one after another, and they were hard words. But what he was given after that morning was a different kind of thing. It was almost all about coming home. People came to hear it, too. They sat down in front of him in crowds and listened to every word, and went away and did none of it. God told him what they were doing: you are to them like a man with a good voice who sings well and plays well, and they hear your words and will not do them.

The first of it was about shepherds. Kings and leaders were called shepherds then, because the people were the flock. “Son of man, speak against the shepherds of Israel. Shepherds — do shepherds feed themselves? Do shepherds not feed the sheep? You drink the milk, you wear the wool, you kill the fat ones, and you do not feed my sheep. You have not made the weak strong, or looked after the sick, or bound up the broken, or brought back the ones that wandered, or looked for the lost. And my sheep were scattered over every mountain and every high hill, because there was no shepherd and nobody went looking. So I am against the shepherds. I will have my sheep back out of their hands, and they will not feed them any more. Look — I myself will search for my sheep. As a shepherd goes out after his flock on a dark and cloudy day when they have got scattered, so I will go out after mine, and bring them back from every place they were driven to on the day of cloud and darkness. I will feed them on good grass on the mountains of Israel, and there they will lie down and rest. I will look for the lost one. I will bring back the one that wandered. I will bind up the broken one. I will make the weak one strong.” And then he turned round and spoke to the sheep, because it was not only the shepherds. “Was it not enough for you to feed on the good grass? Did you have to trample the rest of it with your feet? Was it not enough to drink the clear water? Did you have to churn up the rest of it? My sheep have had to eat what you trampled and drink what your feet stirred up. You shoved with your sides and your shoulders and butted the weak ones with your horns until you had driven them all out. So I will save my flock, and they will not be food for anybody, and I will judge between one sheep and another. And I will put one shepherd over them, my servant David, and I will be their God. I will make a covenant of peace with them; I will send the rain down in its season; the trees of the field will give their fruit and the ground will give its increase, and they will live on their own land and nobody will frighten them. You are my sheep, the sheep of my flock, says the Lord God.”

That was said to people living in mud-brick houses a thousand miles from any mountain of Israel.

Then the Lord’s hand came on him again, and he was brought out by the Spirit and set down in the middle of a wide flat plain. It was full of bones. God led him round them: a very great many, lying out in the open, and very dry. And God asked him a question. “Son of man — will these bones live?” “Lord, you know.” So God told him what to say. “Prophesy over these bones. Say to them: dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Look — I am going to bring the breath of life into you. I will put sinews on you, and flesh, and skin, and my Spirit inside you; and you will live, and know that I am the Lord.” So he said it. And while he was still saying it there was a noise, and a shaking, and all across the plain the bones came together, each to its own joint. He watched sinews come onto them, and flesh, and skin close over. But there was no breath in them. A whole valley of bodies, lying still, with no breath in them. “Prophesy to the wind. Say to the wind: this is what the Lord says. Come from the four winds, breath, and breathe on these dead people, so that they live.” So he said it. And the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up on their feet: an enormous crowd of them. Then God told him what the bones were. “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say: our bones are dried up, our hope is gone, we are finished. So tell them: I am going to open your graves and bring you up out of them, my people, and lead you home into the land of Israel. I will put my Spirit in you, and you will live. I have said it, and I will do it.”

Then God told him to take two sticks, and write Judah on one and Joseph on the other, and hold them together in his hand until they were one stick. People asked him what he meant by it, and he told them: the two kingdoms which had been split apart ever since Solomon’s son were going to be one nation again on the mountains of Israel, with one shepherd over them. “My tent will be among them. I will be their God, and they will be my people.”

Last of all there was a building. Ezekiel was a priest, and by now there was no house of the Lord left standing anywhere for a priest to serve in. He was shown every measurement of this one anyway. A man whose look was like bronze, with a line and a measuring rod in his hand, walks Ezekiel round a house of the Lord that does not exist yet, and measures it. The gates, the steps, the doorposts, the side rooms, the thickness of the walls, the height of the altar and the steps up to it: every bit of it, measured to the last handbreadth, for a house nobody had built. Then the man brought him back to the door of the house. And Ezekiel saw water. It was coming out from under the doorway, running east past the south side of the altar. The man took him round to the east gate, and there it was again, trickling out on the right-hand side. Then the man went east along the water with his line. He measured a third of a mile and led Ezekiel through, and it came to his ankles. Another third, and it was at his knees. Another third, at his waist. Another third, and he could not get through at all. It had turned into a river nobody could cross. “Have you seen this, son of man?” Then he brought him back along the bank; and coming back, Ezekiel saw trees, a great many, on both sides of the river. “This water runs down east and comes out into the sea, and it will heal that water. Everything that lives and moves, wherever the river goes, will live. There will be a great many fish, because that water gets there and heals it. Fishermen will stand along the shore from En-gedi to En-eglaim, spreading their nets, and the fish will be as many as the fish of the great sea. And on both banks every kind of fruit tree will grow. Their leaves will not wither and their fruit will not fail. They will bear a new crop every month, because their water comes out of the holy place. Their fruit will be food, and their leaves will be for healing.”

And when the land was divided among the tribes, God said one more thing. The foreigners living among them, who had had their children there, were to be counted as if they had been born in Israel, and were to have a share of the land with the tribe they had settled in, like anybody else.