Ezekiel19chapter 19

Ezekiel 19:1-2

A qinah, the meter of grief, is set over the house of David before a single line names its wrong. The mother is Judah, pictured as a lioness among lions, an image of royal strength lying down among the nations she once matched. Henry reads the whole chapter as a dirge sung in advance, mourning kings who had not yet finished reigning when Ezekiel wrote it.

Ezekiel 19:3-4

The first whelp learns to catch the prey and devour men, then is trapped and dragged in chains to Egypt, a fit matched by the bench to Jehoahaz, whom Pharaoh Necho deposed and carried off after a three month reign. Gill and Clarke both read taken in their pit as the language of a beast hunt turned on the hunter, the king who fed himself as a lion is himself snared. The nations also heard of him is the chapter's own proof that this is public record, not private complaint.

Ezekiel 19:5-9

When the mother's hope in the first whelp is lost she raises a second, who repeats the same course of violence and is likewise taken, this time to Babylon rather than Egypt. The bench divides over which king stands behind the second lion, since the chapter names no one and keeps the identification a beast's biography rather than a name. What the readings share is the verse's own point, his voice should no more be heard upon the mountains of Israel, a throne silenced rather than a man merely exiled.

Ezekiel 19:10-11

The allegory changes without warning: Judah is now a vine planted by the waters, fruitful, its strong rods fit to be the sceptres of them that bare rule. The image reads as the united strength of the Davidic house before exile stripped it, the fulness of many waters standing for the resources and royal offspring the kingdom once had. Keil ties the figure back to the vine brought out of Egypt in Psalm 80, the same national image carried across the canon.

Ezekiel 19:12-14

The vine is plucked up in fury and cast to the ground, the east wind, this book's standing figure for judgment out of the desert, drying its fruit until no strong rod remains for a sceptre. Planted now in a dry and thirsty ground rather than by the waters, the once fruitful vine sets fire in its own branches, a ruin that consumes itself rather than one only inflicted from outside. The chapter names its own genre a second time, this is a lamentation, and shall be for a lamentation, grief the text means the reader to feel rather than merely observe.