Ezekiel 33


Ezekiel 33 is the thirty-third chapter of the Book of Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible or the Old Testament of the Christian Bible. This book contains the prophecies attributed to the prophet/priest Ezekiel, and is one of the Books of the Prophets. This chapter opens the third and final section of the book, in which God's future blessings on Israel are proclaimed. A "complex interweaving of themes imported from the first twenty-four chapters of the book" is concerned with the concept of responsibility, including Ezekiel's own responsibility as a "watchman", and "the people's responsibility for their own moral and religious choices".

Text

The original text was written in the Hebrew language. This chapter is divided into 33 verses.

Textual witnesses

Some early manuscripts containing the text of this chapter in Hebrew are of the Masoretic Text tradition, which includes the Codex Cairensis, the Petersburg Codex of the Prophets, Aleppo Codex, Codex Leningradensis.
There is also a translation into Koine Greek known as the Septuagint, made in the last few centuries BC. Extant ancient manuscripts of the Septuagint version include Codex Vaticanus, Codex Alexandrinus and Codex Marchalianus.

Verse 7

  • "Son of man" : this phrase is used 93 times to address Ezekiel, six times in this chapter.
  • "Watchman" or "sentinel": the noun is derived from the Hebrew verb meaning to "look out or about, spy, keep watch"; properly "to lean forward", i.e. "to peer into the distance"; by implication, "to observe, await:—behold, espy, look up, wait for, watch". Ezekiel was first commissioned as a "watchman" in and so biblical commentator Susan Galambush refers to this as "a new commission"; "ironically", she notes, "Ezekiel commissioned to watch over a city that has already been destroyed".

    Verse 21

  • "The city has been captured" from the Hebrew sentence הכתה העיר huk-kə-ṯāh hā-'îr. The first word is derived from the verb נָכָה, meaning "to smite", "to strike" mostly "in the sense of hurting." The second word means "the city"
The date corresponds to January 8, 585 BCE, based on an analysis by German theologian Bernhard Lang. Methodist commentator Joseph Benson notes that according to this reading, the news of the fall of Jerusalem reached Ezekiel, in Babylon, "one year, five months, and twenty-six days after the calamity happened", whereas the alternative reading in some ancient manuscripts, "in the eleventh year..." is preferable, leaving only about six months as an interval.

Verse 24

Cross reference: Isaiah 51:2; Matthew 3:9;

Jewish

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