Ezekiel39chapter 39

Burning the weapons for seven years sounds impossible until you remember what ancient weapons were made of. Bows, arrow shafts, spear shafts, clubs and the frames of wicker-and-hide shields were mostly wood. In a country where firewood was scarce and people cooked over dung and thorn scrub, an abandoned army's equipment really would be fuel, and the text says as much: they will not need to gather wood from the field or cut it from the forests.

The seven months of burial is a purity problem, not a tidiness problem. Under the Law, a body in the open field defiled anyone who touched it for seven days, and a hanged man's body had to be buried the same day so the land would not be defiled. A country covered in corpses could not function. So everyone buries, then professional searchers go through the land marking any bone they find with a stake so the buriers can come and remove it. The valley gets a new name, Hamon-Gog, the horde of Gog.

The birds and beasts summoned to eat are the opposite side of the same coin. Being left for scavengers was the standard curse in ancient treaties and inscriptions, the fate reserved for the enemy nobody would honour. Ezekiel turns it into an invitation to a sacrificial feast, which is a deliberately shocking way to put it.

The closing section steps back from the battlefield and explains the whole exile to the watching world. The nations will know that Israel went into captivity for their iniquity, not because God was too weak to protect them. He hid His face from them and gave them into the hand of their enemies; now He brings them back and pours out His Spirit on the house of Israel.