Ezekiel21chapter 21

The chapter opens by answering the complaint at the end of chapter twenty — is he not a maker of parables? — with the least parabolic thing in the book. A sword, drawn from its sheath, against righteous and wicked alike.

The sword song describes a blade being prepared for use: sharpened to slaughter and polished to flash like lightning. Bronze and iron weapons had to be honed and burnished, and a polished blade catching sunlight was a real battlefield effect. Ezekiel is told to clap his hands and strike his thigh — gestures of grief and of grim approval, both.

Then the camera moves to a fork in the road. Nebuchadnezzar stands where the highway divides, one branch running to Rabbah of the Ammonites and the other to Jerusalem, and he uses three standard Babylonian methods to decide. He shakes marked arrows in a quiver and draws one. He consults household idols. And he examines a liver.

That third method was the most respected of all. Babylonian priests read omens from the liver of a sacrificed sheep, and clay models of livers marked with omen inscriptions have been recovered from Mesopotamian sites and used for training. It was a whole profession with a technical literature. Ezekiel's point is not that the divination worked, but that the lot fell to Jerusalem anyway — God steered the omen.

The last stroke falls on the crown: remove the turban, take off the crown, the low will be exalted and the high brought low. The Davidic monarchy is set aside — a ruin, a ruin, a ruin — until he comes whose right it is.