Ezekiel37chapter 37

The valley is a battlefield left unattended. Armies did not bury enemy dead, and Assyrian and Babylonian royal inscriptions boast of leaving corpses to rot and filling plains with bones. In Israelite thinking an unburied body was the worst dishonour there was, and it also defiled the land. Very dry bones means it happened long ago and nobody ever came back for them.

One Hebrew word carries the whole vision: ruach, which means breath, wind and spirit all at once. It appears throughout the chapter, so when Ezekiel prophesies to the breath and the wind comes from the four winds and the slain live, the same word is doing every job. English needs three words where the vision has one.

The order of the miracle matters. First a rattling and the bones come together, then sinews and flesh and skin — a valley of complete bodies, and still no life in them. The structure can be entirely restored and the thing still be dead. Only the second prophesying, to the breath, makes them stand up as an exceedingly great army.

The second sign uses two wooden staffs. Tribal staffs were emblems of a clan — the Hebrew word for tribe and for staff is the same, and Aaron's rod stood for the house of Levi among twelve rods representing twelve tribes. Ezekiel writes Judah on one and Joseph, that is Ephraim and the northern tribes, on the other, and joins them into one in his hand. The northern kingdom had been gone for over a century and was assumed lost for good.

The promises attached are national and concrete: one nation on the mountains of Israel, one king over them all, no longer two kingdoms, my servant David as their prince forever, an everlasting covenant of peace, and God's sanctuary in their midst forevermore. Read in the house frame, that is a real regathered nation under a real Davidic king in the coming kingdom; others read the whole vision as a picture of spiritual renewal or of the church, and the two readings are named rather than blended.