Scripture Daily

Context No. 705 of 4322 · Ezekiel

Context · Reflection

Ezekiel 21:13-17: in context

13“For there is a trial. What if even the rod that condemns will be no more?” says the Lord GOD. 14“You therefore, son of man, prophesy, and strike your hands together. Let the sword be doubled the third time, the sword of the fatally wounded. It is the sword of the great one who is fatally wounded, which enters into their rooms. 15I have set the threatening sword against all their gates, that their heart may melt, and their stumblings be multiplied. Ah! It is made as lightning. It is pointed for slaughter. 16Gather yourselves together. Go to the right. Set yourselves in array. Go to the left, wherever your face is set. 17I will also strike my hands together, and I will cause my wrath to rest. I, the LORD, have spoken it.”

Ezekiel 21 is the song of the sword, one of the rawest poems in the prophets. Babylon is coming against Jerusalem, and Ezekiel is told to picture the invader as a blade: sharpened, polished, drawn from its sheath, made ready for slaughter. Earlier in the chapter the prophet is ordered to groan aloud with a breaking heart and strike his thigh in grief. These verses are the sword itself in motion, and they are meant to be hard to hear.

The Hebrew here is broken and fierce, and the images come in flashes. A testing, and then the sword doubled and tripled, whirling; it flashes like lightning and is honed for the kill and set against every gate so that hearts melt. Gather, it says, go to the right, go to the left, wherever the edge is turned, cutting whichever way it faces. And at the end God does not stand back from it. I too will strike my hands together, he says, and satisfy my fury. I the LORD have spoken. The clapping hands are his. This is the wrath of God in scripture at its most unsettling, a page most readers would rather turn past, and it does not ask to be softened.

The sword song is the page I would rather skip, God's wrath with nothing taken off. What in scripture do I hurry past because I have already decided what God is allowed to be?

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