“I am the man who has seen affliction under the rod of His wrath.” (Lam 3:1)
“Now there was a wall all around the outside of the temple area. The length of the measuring reed in the man's hand was six long cubits, each being a cubit and a handbreadth in length; so he measured the thickness of the wall.” (Ezek 40:5)
In the biblical vision as epitomized in Ezekiel, the temple was destroyed and the people exiled because of God's rage at the sins and crimes of the house of Israel. Biblical writers such as the author of Lamentations bear witness to the rod of God's wrath. The angry and violent denunciations that permeate much of Ezekiel's book give way to a final vision in a totally different mode, the language of measurement and geometry.Footnote 1
In their geometric and numerical emphasis, chapters 40–48 of Ezekiel stand in striking contrast to the other chapters of the book, which are much more imagistic, poetic, and extravagant in language. These final chapters outline an ordered, systematic picture of God's restoration. The book as a whole—as has been noted by ancient, medieval, and modern readers—is extreme in its language, replete with violent imagery of bloodshed and mutilation, and lurid in its sexual detailing of Israel as a harlot. It is marked by seeming inconsistencies and puzzling passages (e.g., 20:25: “Moreover, I [God] gave them [Israel] statutes that were not good and ordinances by which they could not live”) that have challenged readers and interpreters beginning with Ezekiel's contemporaries (e.g., 33:30–33).
My thesis regarding the role of these final chapters is twofold: First, that geometry bounds and binds both God and humankind, taming the wildness and extravagance of each.Footnote 2 The prophet portrays both the extreme perversity of the people and God's own struggle between intemperateness and the relenting of his wrath.
Second, I suggest that the emphasis on geometry and measurement serves as an attempt to calm the disturbances caused by persistent moral and theological problems that are recalcitrant to definitive solution. Geometry repairs, as it were, “cracks in the wall,” the areas of contradiction and tension that strain belief and faith in the divine order.Footnote 3
What are the areas of wildness, the realms of things out of control, for which this kind of measurement and regulation is needed? I will distinguish among five areas, first discussing the “wildness” in the earlier chapters of the book and then taking up the taming and transformations in chapters 40–48:
1. Extravagance of visions, language, and of symbolic acts in the book of Ezekiel
2. Violence and bloodshed perpetrated by the people
3. Sexual betrayal as an image of the people's betrayal of God: The image of the female in Ezekiel
4. The “Old Self” and the “New Self” of the people: measurement and morality (43:10–11)
5. The wildness of God; “That you may know I am Yahweh” and “for the sake of my name”
Background of the Thesis
A convergence of my professional interests as a clinical psychoanalyst and my activity as a teacher and writer in the borderlands between psychoanalysis and literature led me, a few years ago, to this reading of Ezekiel.Footnote 4
In my clinical work, I have encountered people who use measurement, geometry, and precise structural detail as psychological defenses. Various forms of obsessive-compulsive behaviors—highly ordered, precisely counted, and ritualized—are often employed in the service of warding off painful affects, forbidden aggressive and sexual thoughts, and at times painful memories of traumatic events.Footnote 5
For example, a man struggling to contain his chronic frustration and anger typically dreams of something wildly expanding or exploding, but there is always an accompanying precise measurement. He dreams of a plot to assassinate Hitler in a bunker, with a powerful bomb placed underneath a concrete table almost entirely filling the room. There are exactly six inches between the edges of the table and the walls of the bunker.
In my studies of modern drama, especially the so-called Theater of the Absurd,Footnote 6 I have noted the juxtaposition of geometric precision and human chaos, the “dramatic” counterpoint between mathematical, geometric precision, and the chaos and absurdity of the dramatic situations.Footnote 7 Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi (1896), considered the first play of this genre, begins with a professor-geometer who has discovered a method for enabling polyhedrons to reproduce, clearly superior to the messy interactions needed for human reproduction. The plays of Samuel Beckett, presenting scenes of death, desolation, despair, and lack of connection, repeatedly introduce measurement and dimension. Endgame (1955), which portrays a kind of post-apocalyptic survival scene, opens with one of the protagonists (Clov) going through the classic arithmetic exercise of doubling the number of grains placed on each successive square of a chessboard, which is soon followed by a statement of the precise dimensions of the kitchen, the room adjacent to the room where the “action” is taking place. Similarly, Beckett's Imagination Dead Imagine has as its stage setting two barely alive bodies, each in a semi-circular space, lying at very precise angles to each other. Measurement and precision in this genre of writing enhance the dramatic absurdity by deflecting the audience and actor away from the underlying pain presented in the plays. From a different era, there is the experience of Albrecht Dürer, who reports his own dream of apocalyptic disaster: A waterfall is flooding the earth while he, the dream observer, is measuring the angle between the waterfall and the vertical wall over which it is descending.Footnote 8
My supposition is that the geometric vision is defensive, adaptive, and, poten-tially, creative—a way of struggling with problems of evil, contamination, and imperfection, including imperfection in the relationship between God and human worshippers. We yearn for some geometric and arithmetic precision because our desires and passions are terribly imprecise, indeed at times verging on the chaotic and the unbounded. The beauty and elegance of mathematics inspire awe in us, contrasting with the persistence of a certain ugliness and lack of grace in our innermost world, let alone in the external social and political world. Geometry cleanses, orders, and puts strict, defined boundaries in place. The geometric dream attempts to resolve intractable human aggression, including the lust for power and the attendant injustices of that lust. It delimits the chaos of sexuality, replacing the messiness of family relations, procreation, and gender differences with clean lines and bodies. Right angle triangles are neater than family triangles. Measurement defends against pained awareness of the flaws and contradictions in our moral universe, but of course cannot definitively repair and reconstitute that universe. At the same time, there is the possibility that the use of geometry and measurement have a “progressive” and not only “regressive” potential; some new idea or ideal is being articulated, and/or a powerful aesthetic is being developed with psychological and spiritual potential of its own.Footnote 9
Measurement and Excess in the Book of Ezekiel: The Order of the Temple and the Disorder of the People
In his final vision, Ezekiel is transported back to a high mountain in the land of Israel where he is shown the structure of the new temple:
In the twenty-fifth year of our exile, at the beginning of the year, on the tenth day of the month, in the fourteenth year after the city was struck down,Footnote 10 on that very day, the hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me there. He brought me, in visions of God, to the land of Israel, and set me down upon a very high mountain, on which was a structure like a city to the south. When he brought me there, a man was there, whose appearance shone like bronze, with a linen cord and a measuring reed in his hand; and he was standing in the gateway. The man said to me, “Mortal, look closely and listen attentively, and set your mind upon all that I shall show you, for you were brought here in order that I might show it to you; declare all that you see to the house of Israel.” Now there was a wall all around the outside of the temple area. The length of the measuring reed in the man's hand was six long cubits, each being a cubit and a handbreadth in length; so he measured the thickness of the wall, one reed; and the height, one reed.” (Ezek 40:1–5)
The contrast between “measurement” and “excess” forcefully confronts the reader in the transition from the two preceding chapters, 38 and 39, to 40–48, the vision of the restored (and improved!) temple and commonwealth. Chapters 38 and 39 recount the final assault on the people of Israel by Gog of Magog and Gog's cataclysmic defeat:
the mountains shall be thrown down, and the cliffs shall fall, and every wall shall tumble to the ground…. With pestilence and bloodshed I will enter into judgment with him; and I will pour down torrential rains and hailstones, fire and sulfur, upon him and his troops. (Ezek 38:20–22)
In contrast, 40–48 contain detailed and precise architectural measurements of space and of land.Footnote 11 Measurement, boundary, geometrical precision, recurrent right angles, squares, rectangles, cubes (but no circles or triangles)—these constitute the main substance of Ezekiel's last prophetic vision. The temple is laid out according to a plan that essentially uses squares as the modal form for the holiest parts. The temple enclosure, a square of 500 cubits, is substantially larger than the temple of Solomon. The entire city of Jerusalem is 4,500 cubits square.
These chapters conclude with new divisions of the land for the priests, the Levites, and the twelve tribes (ten of which had been taken into Assyrian captivity over a century before and were never again to be heard from). That plan is also exceedingly geometric, precise, and symmetric. The allocations for the tribes are rectangular, stacked one on top of the other, from north to south.Footnote 12
God may come down and reside in this temple and city, a place that will be definitively demarcated from the realms of moral and ritual impurity. Rituals are detailed in these chapters, and they are differentiated according to degree of holiness just as the sites of their performance are spatially differentiated. The rituals of the temple are designed to maintain the ongoing process of purging, the purification of inevitable sin and pollution.
This vision dramatically contrasts with the earlier temple vision in Ezekiel 8. On September 17, 592 b.c.e., Ezekiel is divinely transported back to Jerusalem to see the still-standing temple and witness the abominations being perpetrated there by the house of Israel. God then removes his presence (chapters 10–11) and foretells the destruction of the temple and the exile of the remaining people to Babylonia. In the vision of restoration, the divine presence—the 
or “glory”—returns to the rebuilt temple in Jerusalem, with the city renamed “The Lord is There” (Ezek 48:35).
The Plan of the TempleFootnote 13
The basic temple plan consists of a series of squares and rectangles and the solids composed of these. Following Stevenson's analysis of 40–48, we can see how the square (and the cube) is the more holy shape, the shape of the holy of holies, the altar, the spaces of the inner court, the house, and the (“building”). The pressing need is to provide spaces and structures for purging the impurities of the people that led God to drive them into exile. “The relationship between the Holy of Holies and the Altar is at the heart of the ideology of Ezekiel, and is expressed in the architectural layout of the House. The Holy of Holies is the symbolic dwelling place [of God's “glory”] and the Altar is the place of purgation.”Footnote 14
The priestly theology to which Ezekiel is heir focuses on the role of the temple and of temple ritual for dealing with the sins and impurities of the house of Israel. Greenberg on EzekielFootnote 15 and Milgrom on LeviticusFootnote 16 have demonstrated that the temple is a place of purgation, continuous and periodic, of the impurities of the people. There are impurities of ordinary living (genital discharges, menstruation, sexual intercourse, certain illnesses, touching impure objects, and corpse contact) that render a person unable to enter sacred spaces, as well as the impurities of idolatry and violations of social-justice commandments.Footnote 17 The land of Israel also requires periodic purgation, and therefore when the cumulative sins of the house of Israel exceeded the capacity of the temple to achieve purgation, they were expelled from their land.
The temple—the place where the redemptive, purifying rituals can take place and the glory of God can dwell—has gradations of space that range from holy to profane (or “common” as some translations have it). In the rebuilt and renamed Jerusalem, there is still a high priest, but there is no longer a king. The previous royal civil order was contaminating, generating corpse pollution, debauchery, and idol-worship. Instead, there is to be a new office, the , “prince,” with delimited sacrificial duties. The imminent historical context is the community of the exiles, purified by their experience of sin and redemption, reclaiming residence in the land that belongs to God but is in fact still inhabited by compatriots who did not go into exile.Footnote 18 The political structure is perfectly balanced, symmetrical, and hierarchical, literally and figuratively. The previous hierarchy of kings, priests, and (false) prophets has not fulfilled its role-specific obligations, yet hierarchy is needed to control the disorder and violations denounced throughout the book.Footnote 19
Cook and Patton elaborate further on the spatial organization of holiness, including very complex structures regulating entrances and exits.Footnote 20 They emphasize, as have others,Footnote 21 the profound differences between Ezekiel's temple vision and Solomon's temple and the desert tabernacle in terms of differentiation, separation, and segregation:Footnote 22
Ezekiel's temple complex contains six or seven core zones of graded holiness, whereas the priestly tabernacle and the temple of Solomon have only three…. The courtyard of Ezekiel's temple contains multiple new zones with defined entry restrictions. Its walled inner court and altar area is restricted to priestly use, barred to Levites and laity alike (Ezek 42:1; 44:19; 46:3). Intermediate zones between the temple's inner and outer courtyards are constituted by three gates. (Ezek 40:28–37)
The outer court has its own new, unique zones (Ezek 44:1–3) and a new series of three gatehouses…. Levites and laity have use of the temple's outer court, but no one uncircumcised, profane, or foreign has access (Ezek 42:20; 44:9). The temple's outer gates lead forth into a newly conceived “holy district” of land (45:1–8) with two distinct parts. This district surrounds and protects the temple complex, and its two parts provide dwelling space for the priests, the Levites, and their families.Footnote 23
The authors also summarize gradations of height and holiness and the progressively narrower entrances to the holiest places (e.g., Ezek 40:48; 41:2, 3). They cite Greenberg on the gatehouses of the complex: “The massive size of the gatehouses verges on caricature.”Footnote 24
Thus, the vision of precisely laid-out geometry and architecture involves extreme restriction, constriction, and control of areas and of openings. The schema is one, as a number of commentators have proposed, of holiness delimiting itself from the profane, as encoded in worship, in societal structure, in body, and in psyche. Ezekiel's vision forms a kind of map of the territories of the moral cosmos and entails a re-creation story if not a literal creation story.Footnote 25
We now turn to the five areas of “wildness” which need to be “tamed” or transformed in the final temple vision:
Extravagance of Visions, Language, and Symbolic Acts in the Book of Ezekiel
Ezekiel's visionary experiences and visionary imagination are elaborate by comparison with earlier prophets as well as with his contemporary Jeremiah, especially the visions of the deity. The opening vision of God and the angelic beings in chapters 1 and 3 is far more elaborate than the visions of Isaiah (chapter 6) or Habakkuk (chapter 3). In his other visions throughout the book, Ezekiel recalls that “the hand of God was upon me” and he is “transported” (e.g., from Babylon to Jerusalem). He lives in ecstatic or visionary space to a far greater extent than the other prophets.Footnote 26
Consider the symbolic acts that Ezekiel is enjoined to perform: “eat this scroll”; “lie on your left side” (three hundred ninety days) and then “on your right side” (forty days); eat the food of siege and starvation, baked on human dung (Ezek 2:9–3:3 and 4:1–16). He is to be tied down; he is to remain mute for years. The efforts of commentators to decipher the significance of these acts and to place them in the context of other symbolic acts in the Hebrew Bible (especially in the Prophets) highlight the remarkable concatenation and concentration of these acts in Ezekiel. Greenberg summarizes:
As his visions outdo those of other prophets in their intricacy, so his symbolic actions are not to be tailored and trimmed along the simple lines of theirs. The possibility must be allowed that Ezekiel, the authentic Ezekiel, was baroque.Footnote 27
The language and imagery of much of the book are extravagant, mocking, obscene, and brutal. Ezekiel's violent imagery includes mutilation, dismemberment, and rotting bodies. Poetic metaphors and images are intricate and condensed, appealing to multiple psychic levels and multiple sensory registers of the audiences and requiring considerable effort on the part of interpreters.
What happens, then, overall, in chapters 40–48? The visionary experience is composed of Ezekiel's transport in visions to the land of Israel and a tour of the to-be-restored and new temple and of the divisions of the land, all marked by details of dimensions and measurement. There are two visions of God entering the temple, in 43 and in 44. Both are potentially as rich and awesome as the vision of chapter 1—the vision in 43 is explicitly compared to earlier visions, including the vision at the canal of Chebar. While awesome sound and light are mentioned, however, they are not detailed; the glory of God is not accompanied by the cherubim or other winged creatures. The descriptions are quite brief and quickly circumscribed by details of measurement (43:11–17), of ritual (43:18–27), and of prescribed rules and ordinances (44). The winged angels of chapters 1 and 10 are replaced, as it were, by a repeated ornamental pattern (flat, or bas-relief): a cherub on either side of a palm tree, each cherub with two faces, one of a human and one of a lion (41:7–20).
There are no symbolic acts enjoined upon Ezekiel in these chapters—everything is quite clear and explicit. Similarly, the language and poetry of these chapters are much less complex and multi-layered, the images straightforward. There is the one very detailed image of the fertilizing stream emanating from the temple, but even that is marked by a progression of precise measurements (47:1–6).Footnote 28
Two other sets of images of wildness are transformed in the new temple, those of wild animals and of unpruned plants. Galambush has elaborated on how the land will be given over to wild animals as punishment for the sins of its inhabitants (e.g., 14:15); enemies and persecutors may also be depicted as wild animals (e.g., 34:5, 8); and the corrupt leaders of the people of Israel are likewise described using animal imagery (22:25; 13:4; 22:27).Footnote 29 Pervasive too are images of trees or vines that have grown wild, untended, too big and invasive, and therefore must be cut down or pruned (e.g., 17; 19:10–14 for Israel; 31 for Assyria and Egypt as haughty trees).Footnote 30 In the new temple, both images are tamed by making them two-dimensional, incorporated into the repetitive pattern, which includes a palm tree and a face of a lion on a cherub.
Violence and Bloodshed Perpetrated by the PeopleFootnote 31
Our focus here is on the bloodshed of murder, and child-sacrifice as murder. Blood is the stuff of life, and, in much of the Hebrew Bible, it may neither be eaten nor shed (Gen 9:4–6). Violence (), as in the story of the flood, is rife in the land, and appears to refer, inter alia, to the shedding of blood.
The attack on Israel as harlot not only overlaps with the imagery of blood and murder, but also uses idolatry as a linking concept:
You took your sons and your daughters, whom you had borne to me, and these you sacrificed to them [i.e., idols] to be devoured. As if your whorings were not enough! You slaughtered my children and delivered them up as an offering to them. And in all your abominations and your whorings you did not remember the days of your youth, when you were naked and bare, flailing about in your blood. (Ezek 16:20–22)
The blood of murder and child-sacrifice overlaps with the blood of childbirth, and in turn with menstrual blood. Menstrual blood is ritually impure, and there is a strict prohibition on intercourse with the menstruating woman (Lev 18:19)Footnote 32:
Mortal, when the House of Israel dwelt on their own soil, they defiled it with their ways and their deeds; their conduct in my sight was like the uncleanness of a woman in her menstrual period. So I poured out my wrath upon them for the blood that they had shed upon their land, and for the idols with which they had defiled it. (Ezek 36:17–18; see also Ezek 22:6–13)
The restored temple is the place where the violence and lawlessness of the rulers are redressed and reworked with the framework of careful measurement and just measures. The shedding of blood and associated violence () is also to be mitigated and controlled by careful measurement:
Thus says the Lord GOD: Enough, O princes of Israel! Put away violence () and oppression, and do what is just and right. Cease your evictions of my people, says the Lord GOD. You shall have honest balances, an honest ephah, and an honest bath. The ephah and the bath shall be of the same measure, the bath containing one-tenth of a homer, and the ephah one-tenth of a homer; the homer shall be the standard measure. The shekel shall be twenty gerahs. Twenty shekels, twenty-five shekels, and fifteen shekels shall make a mina for you. (Ezek 45:9–12)Footnote 33
Honest measurement is an important element in achieving this containment. The next verses go on to detail the exact measurements of the grain, barley, and oil that shall be part of the offerings. The temple in this new commonwealth, with its measured political order, is to be a place of controlling bloodshed.
Blood is ritually sprinkled as part of a sacrifice (e.g., in dedicating the altar, Ezek 43:18–20). Further, on the “Passover” of the restoration—the first day of the first month—the blood of the or “sin-offering” is to be sprinkled on various doorposts of the temple and on the ledges of the altar.Footnote 34 Blood (and fat, by inference), remain part of what is offered up to God (e.g., Ezek 44:7). But the shedding of blood and associated violence () is also to be mitigated and controlled by careful measurement.Footnote 35 Dismemberment and bodily mutilation (e.g., in chapter 23, cutting off of ears, noses, and breasts) is transmuted into the careful, ritualized cutting up of sacrificial animals. Strikingly, there is only limited detail of the sacrificial procedure and no references to the butchering and disposal of different parts of the sacrificial animals (other than the mention that there is a kitchen for boiling the meat).
Sexual Betrayal as Image of the People's Betrayal of God: The Image of the Female in EzekielFootnote 36
The most striking female images throughout the book are the personifications of Jerusalem and of Israel and Judah as women who are sexually depraved. In chapter 16 Jerusalem is a female infant abandoned at birth by her foreign parents, unwashed, unattended, and covered with blood, who is rescued, adopted, and reared to glorious womanhood by God, who later marries her. She subsequently betrays God, her rescuer-parent-spouse, and acts as a harlot:
You lavished your favors on every passerby … you even took some of your cloths and made yourself tapestried platforms and fornicated on them…. You took your beautiful things, made of the gold and silver that I had given you, and you made yourself phallic images () and fornicated with them…. You even took the sons and daughters that you bore to Me and sacrificed them to those [images] as food—as if your harlotries were not enough, you slaughtered My children and presented them as offerings to them! … You played the whore with your neighbors, the lustful Egyptians—you multiplied your harlotries to anger Me…. I will surrender you to the will of your enemies, the Philistine women, who are shocked by your lewd behavior. (Ezek 16:15–17, 20–21, 26–27)Footnote 37
Jerusalem's sisters are Sodom and Samaria (the ten tribes of Israel taken in captivity by Assyria) and she exceeds them in wantonness and perversity.
In Ezekiel 23 there is an elaborated allegory of two sisters, Oholah and Oholibah:Footnote 38
O mortal, once there were two women, daughters of one mother. They played the whore in Egypt; they played the whore while still young. There their breasts were squeezed and there their virgin nipples were handled. Their names were: the elder one, Oholah; and her sister, Oholibah. They became Mine [i.e., God's] and they bore sons and daughters. As for their names, Oholah is Samaria, and Oholibah is Jerusalem. (Ezek 23:2–4)Footnote 39
The author concatenates the images of wanton sexuality with images of the punishments and humiliations meted out by God for his wives' betrayal of him, exacerbated by Oholibah's refusal to learn from the fate of her older sister. The nations after whom they went whoring, courting their political favor and worshipping their idols, will turn on Jerusalem:
Assuredly … I am going to rouse against you the lovers from whom you turned in disgust, and I will bring them upon you from all around—the Babylonians and all the Chaldeans … and all the Assyrians with them. (Ezek 23:22–23)Footnote 40
The sisters sent for men from afar, lusting after foreign men whose penises were like donkey penises and whose ejaculates were like those of stallions. There are images in the later verses of this chapter of courtesans in brothels, with perfumes, couches, and jewelry. Political infidelity, sexual misconduct, sacrifice of children, and adultery are here conflated:
Arraign Oholah and Oholibah, and charge them with their abominations. For they have committed adultery, and blood is on their hands; truly they have committed adultery with their fetishes, and have even offered to them as food the children they bore to Me. (Ezek 23:36–37)Footnote 41
And finally:
I will put an end to wantonness in the land; and all the women shall take warning not to imitate your wantonness. They shall punish you for your wantonness and you shall suffer the penalty for your sinful idolatry. And you shall know that I am the Lord GOD. (Ezek 23:48–49)Footnote 42
Several striking features emerge from these chapters and passages. Wanton female sexuality serves as a vehicle for conveying the appalling nature of what the people—mostly men and male leaders!—have done. The people have betrayed God, looked to foreign nations, to idols, for salvation, thereby committing fornication and adultery. Bloodshed can be seen both literally in the sacrifice of children to idols, and also figuratively in the sacrifice of children in war and siege as a result of Israel's wanton alliances with other nations. Elsewhere in the book, social injustice is conflated with abominations of worship committed in the temple, and the sins of the rulers represent a falling away from the compact with God, their one true husband.Footnote 43 The male rulers who have misled the people have themselves been wanton and whoring.Footnote 44
Secondly, behind the picture of female promiscuity there is a reference point of sexually proper women, women whose sensibilities are outraged by this promiscuity. Even the Philistine women are scandalized by the Israelites, and the stoning of the adulterous sisters in the allegory serves as a warning and reminder to all women.
It is clear, then, that the text does not explicitly condemn the women of Israel, or women generally, but in its implicit use of the imagery of unbridled female sexuality there is a reinforcement of cultural norms about “good” and “bad” women.
I believe we are dealing with a fantasy structure, the splitting of women into good and bad avatars, Madonna and prostitute.Footnote 45 In brief, this psychic maneuver of dividing up the world of women into nurturing mother and selfish, lustful prostitute does much to protect a male self-esteem made fragile by male fears of dependency on women and the concomitant assumption that to be a weak male is equivalent to being a woman.
The one good woman explicitly mentioned in the book is Ezekiel's wife.Footnote 46 In Ezekiel 24, we learn of God's announcement to him that his wife is shortly to die—on January 15, 588 b.c.e., the tenth of Tevet, when the siege of Jerusalem would begin (the siege that would end in the city's destruction and the exile of its people). The juxtaposition of the female sexual promiscuity in Ezekiel 23 with the announcement from God that his wife, who is precious to him, will die, is quite striking: “Oh mortal, I am about to take away the delight of your eyes [i.e., your wife] from you through pestilence, but you shall not lament or weep or let your tears flow,” God announces in 24:16, and within two verses the prophecy is fulfilled: “In the evening my wife died, and in the morning I did as I had been commanded” (24:18).Footnote 47 This conveys a symbolic message—Jerusalem and the temple are the “delight of your eyes” () of the people of Israel and these are to be taken away from them and destroyed. The temple is also compared to a wonderful wife and woman, the delight of her husband's eyes.Footnote 48 Implied in the phrase “delight of the eyes” is a licit sexuality and sensuality. In a way, one could look at that phrase as a distillate of the sensuality and sexuality that is extolled in the Song of Songs. That work forms the polar opposite of the portrayal of indecent sexuality found in Ezekiel 16 and 23.Footnote 49
Another facet of this splitting of the woman may be seen in reference to the land as woman. Both of the usual Hebrew nouns for “land” are grammatically feminine. In symbolic terms, it is also typically feminine. It can be the good maternal image—“land of milk and honey”—or it can be contaminated. In Ezekiel the contaminations and impurities are described using specific female imagery of menstruation (e.g., 36:17). The blood of menstruation is conflated with the blood of murder and violence. Both kinds of blood can defile. The temple, the sanctuary, is a necessary part of the process of purging and purification, but that very temple implicitly is also the woman who can be made impure.Footnote 50
The extremely charged and disgust-ridden passages about the house of Israel as whores in chapters 16 and 23 make it impossible to ignore the question of what Ezekiel is saying about women in general. The crux of the current debate over these chapters is how much to use the lens of recent feminist biblical criticism to understand them. Are Ezekiel's characterizations misogynistic and/or are we encountering a conception of male-female relationships that is culturally syntonic with the worldview of the book, and therefore not so much misogynistic as espousing a very polarized view of male and female? My own position is that the extreme polarization of male and female is more likely to be associated with a downgrading of the female than of the male. Further, for many modern readers including myself, the vividness of the denunciation of Israel as harlot leaves a bad taste in the mouth—it is neither nice nor designed to be nice.
Even when Ezekiel concludes that there will be a return of the people to God and an end to the harlotry, it is not a loving return:
Nevertheless, I will remember the covenant I made with you in the days of your youth, and I will establish it with you as an everlasting covenant…. Thus you shall remember and feel shame, and you shall be too abashed to open your mouth again, when I have forgiven you for all that you did—declares the Lord GOD. (Ezek 16:60, 63)Footnote 51
There is a striking contrast with the earlier use in Hosea of the imagery of harlotry and betrayal. There Israel's return to her husband (God) is marked by declarations from God of eternal loyalty and mercy, including the term , “loving kindness” (Hos 2:21–25). The poetry is sweeter and the reconciliation there leaves a better taste than that in Ezekiel, where in fact the term is not found.
I suggest that in the book of Ezekiel one concomitant of the splitting of the woman is the need to bolster male self-esteem against a fear of feminization. The male psyche in this unconscious mode of thinking equates dependency on women with feminization, and the very figure of the “feminine” itself already signifies degradation. The other pole, woman as prostitute, allows for male domination and exploitation rather than the submission unconsciously signified by being dependent. For a defeated, humiliated people in exile, feeling abandoned by their God, the masculine ego is dangerously wounded, perhaps even gashed and bleeding, like a male version of the menstruating woman. The book of Ezekiel, in this construction, shares a culturally prevalent view of manhood and manliness that includes the notion that to be like a woman, whether a promiscuous woman or an abandoned woman, is the worst fate a man can suffer. The ultimate degradation is to be feminized.Footnote 52 One can further speculate that God, the God portrayed by Ezekiel, is disavowing a feminine side of himself.
But, the feminine does not square: there is no place for feminine imagery in Ezekiel 40–48. Rather, we find a progressive elimination of the feminine from the book, culminating in chapters 40–48, where there is scarcely any mention of women and no feminine imagery. Prior to these last chapters, we find that the image at the end of chapter 16 of God's restoring the marriage between him and Jerusalem is a fragile one.
Galambush points out that after Ezekiel 23, the metaphor of marriage between God and Jerusalem, or God and Israel, disappears: “The personified city has proven to be an utterly unacceptable consort to the god…. [R]ather, the elimination of the marriage metaphor will be an apparent precondition for the renewed and sustainable purity of Yahweh's new house in Ezekiel 40–48.”Footnote 53 By extension, in the vision of the temple chapters Jerusalem is no longer personified, not even named, and clearly not gendered; it is called only “the city,” and, in the last verse of the book, its name is changed from “Jerusalem,” with its now pagan and depraved connotations, to “the Lord is there” (48:35).
I hypothesize that the elimination of the female and feminine imagery in these last chapters is an indication that the male fantasy of a split between the virtuous woman and the prostitute is not stable and is not adequate to protect against the dread of female wildness and the concomitant male fear of feminization. The personages in those chapters are all male: priests, Levites, the “prince” (), Ezekiel himself, and the “man” who shows him the measurements. Women are mentioned in only two contexts, priests' marriage and death. In the first category are women the priests can marry: virgin women of the house of Israel or widows of priests, but no widows or divorced women. In the second category are deceased relatives of the priest: The priest is forbidden to enter a house in which there is a corpse, except if the deceased is blood kin—mother, father, son, daughter, brother, or unmarried sister.Footnote 54
Here, the “presence” of God is a masculine, not a feminine, manifestation, as might be the case in later Judaism. This is not the , which appears figuratively in rabbinic literature, and certainly not the “feminine principle” of God, the personified female presence of God, to be reunited with the Tiferet, the masculine principle, that appears in the mystical tradition.Footnote 55 Rather, here it is “the glory of God” () that Ezekiel glimpses, that departs from the temple still standing in Jerusalem, and that in his last vision returns to dwell in the restored temple (Ezek 43–44).
Further, the temple vision is almost totally devoid of feminine elements, with the one possible exception of the river flowing from the temple mount (to be discussed shortly). The temple is sparsely decorated or ornamented. There is the repeating pattern (cherub, palm tree, cherub, palm tree; 40:24; 41:15–26), and date palms crown the pillars (40:26, 31, 37). There is no color, nor any of the precious materials used in Solomon's temple (1 Kings 6–7), let alone those weavings of purple and scarlet and fine linen lavishly described as part of the desert tabernacle (Exod 25–28) where contributions of women are named explicitly!Footnote 56 In contrast, in the book of Ezekiel, ornamentation, elaborate bas–relief, jewelry, and color are all ascribed to the personified whoring women and their foreign paramours, the Assyrians and Egyptians. These do not belong in the temple.
Additionally, there are no explicitly round or even cylindrical elements in this temple. Everything is square or rectangular.Footnote 57 The temple of Solomon and the tabernacle of the wilderness included round features, especially basins for washing. Solomon's temple had a huge basin called the “sea.” There were also in that first temple two cylindrical pillars, although, as their masculine-power names suggest (Boaz, “with strength” and Jachin, “he will establish”) one could argue these must have conveyed something more phallic than feminine. One cannot argue that what is omitted in the text was barred or banned by Ezekiel (for example, no pots for boiling are described, but since boiling of the sacrificial meats is necessary, one would need pots, presumably round, not square). But from the point of view of the impact of the description, the omission of obviously or stereotypically feminine elements in this blueprint is significant.Footnote 58
The one important possible exception to the absence of the feminine in the closing chapters of Ezekiel is the marvelous vision of a fertilizing river that will come out of the temple and divide into four heads, creating virtually a new garden of Eden, even fertilizing the Dead Sea (47:1–12).Footnote 59 Even here, in the description of a trickle that grows to an impassable river, there are a series of precise measurements: four times, the man “with a cord in his hand measured one thousand cubits” (Ezek 47:3–5). Is this fertilizing river feminine? Masculine? It is not specifically gendered, although river, , is grammatically masculine. Its fertilizing effects evoke imagery of the Garden of Eden, and it heals the sick land. The Salt Sea is purged and fish flourish in it, although at the edges salty areas are left, presumably for harvesting salt needed for the sanctuary offerings (43:24).Footnote 60 I suggest that this scene is at best ambiguously gendered in the same way that the descriptions of creation and fertility in the early chapters of Genesis are not clearly gendered. Insofar as it is unambiguously gendered, it is a masculine God who is planting and fostering reproduction.Footnote 61 The imagery of the trickle of water dramatically turning into a mighty river is evocative of masculine images of powerful urinary and ejaculatory streams. Perhaps this stream represents a radical transformation of the copious stallion-like ejaculates of the lovers of Oholibah at Ezek 23:20.
To return to the detailed description of the temple courtyards and compartments with their exits and entrances: the temple itself is not gendered, but the emphasis on carefully regulated exists and entrances presents a striking contrast to the unregulated “entrances” in the allegories of faithless women in chapters 16 and 23.Footnote 62 These women take on all comers, showing neither discrimination nor control of their bodily orifices. In the restored temple, no uncircumcised men can enter (44:7, 9) as they had apparently been allowed to enter the Solomonic temple and, clearly, the bodies of faithless Jerusalem and Samaria. The uncontrolled orifices suggest both mouth and genitalia—mouth through the sacrifice of children as food for idols (e.g., 5:11 and 23:31–37 for the devouring of children),Footnote 63 and genitalia through the terms of uncontrolled lust (e.g., 16:25). In stark contrast, in the new vision, traffic into and out of the temple will be carefully regulated.
The Old Self and the New Self of the People: Measurement and Morality (43:10–11)
Chapters 1–24, so harsh and full of condemnation of the house of Israel, yield a cumulative portrait of a people rebellious, impudent, and stubborn—Ezekiel is sent to them to live surrounded by briars, thorns, and scorpions (ch. 2). But God has decided, for his own sake, to redeem the house of Israel, and in chapter 36, announces how he will transform them. He will cleanse them with clean water, and: “A new heart I will give you and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh” (Ezek 36:26).
But how will this hold? I believe that chapters 40–48 are required to assure the permanence of this new heart and new spirit. The connection between transforming the moral and religious wildness and sinfulness of the people by means of temple measurement is explicit in Ezek 43:10–11:
As for you, mortal, describe the temple to the house of Israel, and let them measure the pattern () and let them be ashamed of their iniquities. When they are ashamed of all that they have done, make known to them the plan of the temple, its arrangement, its exits and its entrances, and its whole form—all its ordinances and its entire plan and all its laws; and write down in their sight, so that they may observe and follow the entire plans and its ordinances.
What is the import of these verses, whose interpretation is controversial? First, the wording of v. 10 begins with a reiteration of the motif of the “house”—“tell the house of Israel about the House,” as if to say, until Israel has built this house according to the measurements, and this house has become a part of it, Israel is not fully a “house,” but remains the stubborn and defiant house that it has hitherto been.
On the phrase “measure the ,” ZimmerliFootnote 64 and BreuerFootnote 65 both emphasize the root as signifying perfection and completion. Breuer adds “a weighing and establishment of the [true] individual proportion of things, of their [true] relationship to one another; … [t]he numerical ratio of the parts of the whole to one another.” Compare the English phrase “it doesn't square.” We thus see a confluence of proper proportion in the moral and architectural realms.
Verses 43:10–11 follow Ezekiel's vision of God's glory, the , entering the temple through the gate facing east with noise and light illuminating the earth. God announces his permanent residence there. Then the house of Israel is to be told about this house and God's residence within, and they are to “measure the pattern,” at which point they will be ashamed. And if they have indeed become ashamed of what they have done, Ezekiel is to tell them all the details of the structures and of the protocols or precepts, and write it down to reaffirm it that they may observe and preserve it.
Ezekiel explicitly likens this vision of God's “glory” (or “honor”) to his earlier visions, but that “glory” enters the sanctuary unattended. The has become “rarified” and “de-angelicized.” This supposition is consonant with the fact that the holy of holies is now empty, no longer containing cherubim (live or statuary), ark, or tablets of the commandments—it is aniconic.Footnote 66 The structure of the “house” and the nature of the indwelling will therefore contribute to a construction and stabilization of the new self, a self with knowledge of its own behavior and its consequences, knowledge induced by shame and set in motion by God's action—a new “moral self.”Footnote 67 God's transformation of his people involves a transformation in the nature and quality of shame that they experience, a shift from the shame and humiliation of defeat, exile, degradation, to a shame of self–awareness.
The next set of details of altar and sacrifice also help stabilize this new self. God has given the people a new heart, a heart of flesh instead of a heart of stone, but the flesh is still too fallible on its own. Therefore the new heart requires structures and processes in order to stabilize, maintain, and transform itself. Such structures and processes not only involve carefully prescribed and measured spaces and rituals, but also seem to entail increasing interiority or “dematerialization” culminating in the most sacred space with nothing material in it. There is a potential for a new inwardness, a new structure of mind and heart that knows differently than it did before. The carefully designed and unique spaces of the new temple, including its progressive narrowing into the holiest places, may also serve as a model of the new mind and heart.
The Wildness of God: “That You May Know I Am Yahweh” and “For the Sake of My Name”
God's vindictive wrath, God's concern for his “name,” God's concern that “they” or “you” shall know that I am “yhwh”—these are the hallmarks of most of the book of Ezekiel. God's enormous outrage and destructive judgment against the house of Israel dominate chapters 1–24, and his rage against both Israel and the nations is threaded even through chapters 25–39, chapters of renewal and redemption. The prophet brings the message home that the house of Israel has utterly deserved all that God has brought and will bring against them. It is not the sins of previous generations for which they are paying, but their very own deeds of violence, licentiousness, and betrayal. Consider a few of the images of wrath and destruction, and desolation:
In Ezek 21:8–10 God unsheathes his sword against Israel; righteous and unrighteous alike shall fall, he shall never return it to its sheath. In Ezek 23:25, “I will direct my indignation against you, in order that they [the Babylonians] may deal with you in fury. They shall cut off your nose and your ears, and your survivors shall fall by the sword. They shall seize your sons and your daughters, and your survivors shall be devoured by fire.” In the condemnation of Oholibah (Jerusalem) in Ezek 23:32–35: “You shall drink your sister's cup, deep and wide; you shall be scorned and derided, it holds so much. You shall be filled with drunkenness and sorrow. A cup of horror and desolation is the cup of your sister Samaria; you shall drink it and drain it out, and gnaw its sherds, and tear out your breasts.”
God's rage at other nations and his destruction and degradation of these nations is detailed. Tyre shall be brought down from its haughtiness; Egypt, Edom, Ammon, and the Philistines will variously suffer destruction and humiliation (e.g., Pharaoh, presumably circumcised, is disgraced and condemned to Sheol among the uncircumcised). God's rage is fueled by feelings of being dishonored, disgraced, and even cuckolded (as in chapters 16 and 23). The of God is both his “glory” and the honor owed to him. Rage cannot abate till honor is restored. Humiliation is a recurrent theme of the punishment both of Israel and of the nations.
God's destructiveness is augmented in the recurrent phrases of “I shall not pity,” “my eye shall not pity,” and “I will show no mercy.” Terms of mercy and pity generally appear only in the negative in the book, except when God says he shall have pity on his own name.Footnote 68 When he decides to reverse his course and redeem the house of Israel, bring them back to their land, install a good shepherd, and have them live in peace and security, it is his own decision; he is not moved by the people's repentance or by pity. Perhaps he is moved by covenantal loyalty, but he is definitely motivated to protect his reputation among the nations.
“Radical theocentricity,” a phrase used by Paul Joyce, well captures the sense in which God is preoccupied with the need to have the greatness of his name recognized by all and to deny any limitations on his power.Footnote 69 Indeed, paradoxically, God's destruction of the house of Israel, a manifest proof of God's power to punish the disloyalty and betrayal of his people, is an invitation for the nations of the world to say that God is not powerful and cannot even protect his own people. This “taunt” by the nations provokes God, as it were, to ever more strongly announce that “you” (the house of Israel”) or “they” (the nations) shall “know that I am God.” These phrases and variants occur roughly seventy-five times in the book, and are conspicuously absent from 40–48.
According to these earlier chapters, God must act that “all should know that I am Yahweh” and “for the sake of my name.” Chapter 36 combines the themes of God's concern for his name and the theme of “they shall know that I am God”:
But I had concern for my holy name, which the house of Israel had profaned among the nations to which they came. Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord God: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. I will sanctify my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, and which you have profaned among them; and the nations shall know that I am the Lord, says the Lord God, when through you I display my holiness before their eyes [and take you back to your own land]. (Ezek 36:21–23)
The vindictive wrath of God that runs through much of the book begins to become significantly modified in the chapters preceding 40–48, especially 33–37. These chapters, including 37 with its vision of the valley of the dry bones and the restoration to life of those bones, continue themes and images of judgment, condemnation, and the violent consequences of the misdeeds of the house of Israel. But they add messages of hope: restoration for the house of Israel and punishment of nations that have attacked Israel. The ratio definitely shifts in the direction of renewal and restoration. Chapters 40–48 carry out a program of restoration without violent images either of destruction or of revenge, and a program dictated with measurements and with measured tone. In fact, a kind of calm descends upon the text and the language becomes more ordinary, contained, and factual.Footnote 70 The phrase “you shall know that I am yhwh” and prospective concern for his name do not occur in these chapters. The structure of the temple, the details of measurement, bound and bind the powerful destructive affects of both man and God.
Cracks in the Wall
The visionary temple where God will establish his dwelling forever among the children of Israel (43:7) is massive. The walls surrounding Ezekiel's temple are extraordinarily thick, some 10–11 feet (40:5; 41:5),Footnote 71 and the gates or gatehouses are formidable, bulwarks, not just walls.Footnote 72 I suggest that, figuratively, such thick and formidable structures are needed as bulwarks against the possibility that the restored people, renewed in mind and heart, may again break faith and backslide. Alternatively—or additionally—the structures are needed as a kind of guarantee that God will not relent on his pledge, “this is the place of my throne and the place for the soles of my feet, where I will reside among the people of Israel forever” (Ezek 43:7).
I suggest that the “geometric vision” in these last chapters temporarily resolves, but does not solve, all the tensions and anxieties implicit in the story of the relationship between God and the house of Israel. Job does not disappear, nor the torment of the psalmist pleading with God:
Yet you [God] have rejected us and abased us, and have not gone out with our armies…. You have made us like sheep for slaughter and have scattered us among the nations…. All this has come upon us, yet we have not forgotten you, or been false to your covenant. Our heart has not turned back, nor have our steps departed from your way, yet you have broken us in the haunt of jackals and covered us with deep darkness. (Ps 44:9–19)
The facts of exile and the destruction of the temple loom large, along with the question of how the community can ensure that there will not be a repetition of the calamities that destroyed the first temple. For example, there is the problem of proportionality or lack of proportionality between sin and the ensuing punishment, as expressed in different forms throughout the book. Sons are not to suffer punishment for the sins of their fathers (and vice versa, Ezek 18:2–4), but it is not entirely clear whether the destruction of the first temple and the exile can be attributed to the sins of this generation, to the fathers' sins, or to the sins of King Manasseh, several generations back (2 Kings 23:25–28). The cumulative life record of a person, or of a people, does not seem to be a major deciding factor—the sinner who becomes righteous is regarded as righteous, but the lifelong righteous person who sins does not have his history of righteousness remembered by God.Footnote 73 Thus, even while Ezekiel 18 sets out Ezekiel's version of God's policy of collective and individual reward for obedience and punishment for disobedience, the resolution in chapters 40–48 depends on God having restored the people and given them a new heart, not on the people first having seen the light, experienced their shame and guilt, and repented.Footnote 74 How much can one rely on the people's experience of shame in maintaining these new conditions of purity and justice?Footnote 75
Still, could there be uncertainty about the permanence of God's act of restoration, including a restored temple with its precise architecture and measurements and measured rituals? The proportionality of the architecture is clear; that of the relation between human actions and consequent punishment is not so clear. The degree of faith that is required is enormous—faith not only in God keeping his word, but faith in the people keeping theirs.
The durability of the vision of restoration also involves a wish-fulfilling belief—certainly familiar in the ancient world—that it is God's doing that determines the political fate of Israel and the nations. Faith in God's promise of retribution to all the nations that have assaulted Israel and the restoration of Israel's national continuity depends on not believing that larger political currents in the world (e.g., the rise and fall of Assyria, Babylonia, Egypt, Tyre, and Edom) determine the life and fate of the children of Israel. Ezekiel's vision of the restored twelve tribes of Israel defies any actual political analysis of why the exile occurred to begin with.Footnote 76 Indeed, in Ezekiel, Babylon is never blamed!Footnote 77 What matters is whether or not the people of Israel behave justly and remain loyal to God. It is a common observation that those who are relatively powerless, a group or individuals, can find refuge in blaming themselves for the bad things that happen to them. From the perspective of a small child, if a death or calamity can be explained as a result of her or his own bad thoughts and deeds, then potentially other calamitous events can be prevented by the best behavior and thoughts. Indeed, a frequent experience of adults in the face of death and disaster is to ruminate, “if only I had done, or said, such and such, this would not have happened.”
In sum, as invasive plants can work their way through even the sturdiest of stone walls, so doubts and lapses of faith in God and in oneself can effect such “cracks in the wall,” thereby posing new challenges for believers.
Conclusion and Further Directions of Inquiry
In order to test further the utility of my hypotheses about the uses of measurement and geometry in Ezekiel as a means to repair the “cracks in the wall,” we would have to look in two directions: “back” into the rest of the Hebrew Bible and “forward” to later Jewish and Christian interpretations of these last chapters of Ezekiel. In narratives involving measurement and precision, does measurement appear in order to contain chaos, especially the moral chaos inherent in human behavior? As prime examples, it would be necessary to take a fresh look at the accounts of the construction of the desert tabernacle and of Solomon's temple, but we have much more to explore in this regard as well,Footnote 78 such as the flood narrative in Genesis and passages on measurement and boundary such as Isaiah 40:12 and Job 38.
Looking forward, there are questions to be explored about how Jewish and Christian commentators struggled to deal with some of the inconsistencies and difficulties in Ezekiel, especially 40–48. My preliminary explorations suggest that the attempts to “repair the cracks in the wall” were never entirely satisfactory, but at the same time, they stimulated creative solutions that did much to sustain both religious traditions. In Jewish tradition, suggestions in this regard arising from the work of several authors include: the idea of study as a replacement for the destroyed templeFootnote 79; resurrection of the dead;Footnote 80 legal order, the order of the Mishnah, as a transformation of geometric order;Footnote 81 “measure for measure” in the dispensing of divine punishment; the transformation of , as “measure” to as moral attribute (especially of God). Another rabbinic extension of the use of is in the ascription to God of two modes of judging people, with either the “attribute (measure) of the law,” or with the “attribute (measure) of mercy” .Footnote 82 As a corollary, one finds in Ezekiel commentaries an evocation of the reparative role of God's , “loving-kindness” or “faithfulness” (a term lacking in Ezekiel) despite human perversity.Footnote 83
In Christian religious development, commentators often weave the word “grace” into discussions of the problems raised by Ezekiel,Footnote 84 as well as emphasis on resurrection of the dead. Also worthy of reexamination is the complex relation between Revelation and Ezekiel 40–48 in terms of the replacement of the physical temple by Christ as temple and by a celestial Jerusalem.Footnote 85 Concomitantly, the sacrifice of the Son of God, the Lamb, presents another attempt at solution to the inevitability of human sinfulness and its effects on God.Footnote 86
My assumption is that tracking these various developments and attempted theological solutions would reveal that the search for solution and resolution of the problems raised in Ezekiel continues. There is a need to integrate the image of God wielding the “rod of his wrath” and of God holding the “rod of measurement.” That need resonates with the need to integrate the divided creature that is the human being, and to answer the question, “how can two beings, each divided within itself, namely man and God, manage to forge and maintain a durable and trustworthy connection?”
