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Commentary on Ezekiel

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Robert Tulip

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Commentary on Ezekiel

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Commentary on Ezekiel
Robert Tulip
30 December 2015

Perhaps best known for the vision of the valley of dry bones that miraculously come back to life, covered again with flesh, and for the fantastic wheels within wheels that shine like eyes in the sky, Ezekiel is a major prophet of the Jewish Bible.

Ezekiel is a mysterious book of prophecy, ostensibly written in Babylon during the Jewish captivity, beginning with celestial imagery and then heaping up war trauma in a repetitive and frightening dirge. The prophet predicts how God will use Babylon to smash Israel, Tyre, Egypt and other nations. Cruel men of war will destroy peaceful villages at the edge of the sword, and Israel will come to grief from the failure of the Jewish people to walk in the ways of God.

Chapter 19 of the Book of Ezekiel is an allegorical lament for the princes of Israel. Ezekiel describes Israel as a young lion, who “learned to catch prey, and devoured men. The lion of Israel knew the palaces of its victims and laid waste their cities. The lion made the land desolate before the noise of his roaring.” But this arrogant sense of Israel’s power was empty. The nations would not tolerate Israelite aggression and pride. “They set against the lion on every side, spreading a net over him and catching him in a pit. They put him in a cage with hooks, and brought him to the king of Babylon, imprisoning him so that his voice should no more be heard on the mountains of Israel.”

This political parable of Israel as a captured lion illustrates how military security is at the core of the prophetic vision of the Bible. The political lesson in this lion allegory is that Israel is a tiny land surrounded by large and powerful and dangerous empires. A small nation can only secure peace by political security, with alliances of trust built upon a reputation for good ethical conduct and shared understanding of mutual interest. Other people will only help and protect you, accepting your moral legitimacy, if they like and respect you. But the lament of Ezekiel is that Israel does the exact opposite of what it should do. Instead of building trust, Israel gets a reputation as an evil place, causing the empires to conquer and imprison instead of befriending it.

Ezekiel shows, in language that is now rather taboo and sensitive, that Israel’s bad reputation promoted by negative stereotypes is something the Jewish people were aware of in ancient times. Ezekiel identifies anti-Semitic racial prejudice as a problem that the people of Israel had to confront and address in order to maintain their own security from ancient times. Ezekiel speaks as a Jew, out of love and care for the Jews, reflecting on the tragedy of the captivity in Babylon, praying that his people may see the error of their ways and change to a good course. He is a type of critic who is sometimes castigated as a self-hater. His capacity for scorching honesty is at the centre of Jewish identity, in a syndrome of brutal self-criticism that gets ignored to Israel’s cost, then as now.

I have long been fascinated by the book of Ezekiel, but as with many of the more turgid books in the Bible, until now have not had the patience to sit down and read it right through. Although it is a long book by Biblical standards, at 38,000 words, it is a good read, full of tantalizing mysteries and riddles, as well as familiar ideas that were later used in the New Testament. In Chapter 17, God tells Ezekiel to put forth a riddle, and speak a parable to the house of Israel. In this story, an eagle takes a cedar from Lebanon to a city. Like Jesus with the parable of the sower, Ezekiel works through this example parable by giving us the meaning: Babylon will take Israel into captivity; only by keeping true to its covenant promise to God could Israel hope to avoid the fate of being scattered to the four winds. The prophet goes on to sigh and shrug; oy veh, people say Ezekiel is just a riddler, a spinner of allegory and parables. These riddles build upon a rather dazzling array of mysterious images, and invite the reader to look for a unifying purpose in his tall tales.

The trauma of war suffuses Ezekiel. The cruel and rather dubious lesson seems to be that conquerors are instruments of God to inflict a divine wrath upon the world, and that the weak must organize through religion for social defense. The constant political story is that Israel’s only hope of salvation is in returning to the covenant with God, turning away from sin and idolatry. But the question of what constitutes sin and idolatry is a conundrum. God is imagined here as single and transcendent. The mystery, and the point where I believe this book can be restored as making sense, is in how this single transcendent God manifests in reality.

The traditional monotheist reading, which I dispute, is that Yahweh the God of Israel is a personal entity existing outside the material universe in a supernatural realm, superior to nature but able to rule the world through deliberate intentional action. I consider that this old conventional reading is a corrupted and self-serving misinterpretation of the prophetic message from Ezekiel. If we begin to approach the prophetic message as natural and scientific, not supernatural and magical, it can become relevant, powerful and insightful. Church tradition has failed to engage the political meaning due to the institutional corruption of religion, forcing the scientific meaning to be hidden beneath allegedly literal signs and wonders. Reconciling Ezekiel with modern rationality would help give his work some secular traction, bringing his ideas into dialogue with modern political and social debates, instead of his current banishment to the cranky realm of the impossible.

What is the core problem? The challenge of reading the Bible accurately is to apply logical analysis to explain how the text evolved. I personally think that such an evolutionary explanation, applying rigorous standards of historiography, can only be properly grounded in recognition of the ancient use of astronomical observation as the imagined framework of cosmic divine order at the foundation of religion.

An astronomical way of thinking about religion is extremely different from the supernatural conventions, which from the astral angle reflect the political corruption against which the prophets warned. In explaining the Bible, we have to try to understand the mentality and context of the authors. This is far harder than it seems, because of the dominance of the long tradition of reading through the context of later events and beliefs, and through the political convenience and comfort of the Christian church.

My view is that the key problem is that what Ezekiel describes as his riddling method has been lost to view. The real answer to Ezekiel’s riddles is not that a supernatural God deliberately intervenes in the world, but that the natural order of the cosmos provides the framework of reality.

This answer is a great stumbling block to the traditional theory of idolatry, because this answer indicates that the supernatural theory has itself become a means of idolizing the church hierarchy as the mediator between God and the world. In fact, the symbolic divinity discussed by Ezekiel is inherent in nature, and understanding the complex power of spirit in the world is the real source of prophetic vision. So when Ezekiel says in 44:12 that ministering before idols became a stumbling block of iniquity to the house of Israel, the critical challenge now is to ask who is the true God being discussed here.

Modern science holds that the natural order of the cosmos provides the framework of reality, as a basic assumption regarding the coherence, consistency and unity of the universe. Any discovery that appears to conflict with this basic natural axiom is taken by science as a great mystery and spur to analysis, to explain the anomaly against the universal principle of the physical consistency of the laws of nature.

Conventional theology often claims or implies that miracles disprove the scientific method. Religious metaphysics argues that revelation by an external God is superior to all logic and evidence as a guarantee of truth. Scientific argument, grounded in psychology, anthropology and neuroscience, suggests rather that theological opinions are better explained within a natural framework as arising from wishful thinking, tribal loyalties and cultural traditions, from the failures and interests of human psychology rather than from God breaking the laws of physics.

How to explain Ezekiel against this messy conflict between science and religion? Happily, the premise that prophetic vision is grounded in natural observation finds strong and striking alignment within Ezekiel, offering a way to read this strange book in a way that begins to make perfect sense, not only of Ezekiel but also of the prophetic tradition that built upon it, including in the New Testament.

Prophecy means accurate prediction of the future. Conventionally, a prophet is understood as operating by divine inspiration, within the framework that imagines God as an intentional entity. However, modernity, which as a cultural movement is essentially atheistic and rational, is founded upon the observation that there is no evidence for God as an intentional entity.

Instead of accepting religious cosmology as literal, modern reason either suggests that these ideas are just wrong, or that meaningful talk of God can only be allegory for a natural order. My view is that this latter modern allegorical method of interpretation as symbol is correct, and actually turns full circle to the real symbolic meaning intended by the prophet, that prediction is based on natural insight.

The key to unlocking the predictive power of Ezekiel, in my view, is to recognize that theology is based on astronomy. The real order of the cosmos is entirely natural, seen in the grand cycles of the day, the month and the year. There are also even longer stable longer periods of apparent solar motion, seen in the precession of the equinox, that ancient astronomers were able to patiently observe and record over centuries in locations such as Babylon. The Jews discussed such matters with the Chaldean seers, whose methods found their way in hidden form into the Jewish holy books.

The reason for secrecy on the part of Jewish tradition is the dilemma produced by this basic observation that prophecy requires observation of natural patterns. Reliance on observation of nature stands in cultural conflict with the Jewish tradition that sees God as primarily revealed in word. Ezekiel adheres to this monotheist vision whereby the critique of idolatry involves a rejection of the nature worship prevalent in surrounding cultures.

So there is a subtle distinction within Judaism, whereby God is revealed in nature but not identified with nature. Unfortunately, this subtlety can prove too crafty, since distinguishing nature from God can lead to its own form of idolatry. An idolatry of the imagination of a transcendental heaven as the basis for knowledge of good and evil can present too stringent a rejection of natural order as the locus of the logos. This crafty religious attitude, reflecting on Genesis 3:1, could be associated with the fall from grace into corruption enticed by the snake, but that allegory would take us away from Ezekiel.

Ezekiel speaks in Chapter 8 of what he calls “great abominations”, women weeping for the Babylonian harvest divinity Tammuz at the gate of Yahweh's house, and men with their backs toward the temple of Yahweh, worshipping the sun toward the east. But then in Chapter 43, Ezekiel goes to the temple east gate, where he says “the glory of the God of Israel came from the way of the east and the earth shone with his glory… The glory of Yahweh came into the house by the way of the gate whose prospect is toward the east… and, behold, the glory of Yahweh filled the house.” While this reference to God shining into the temple from the east can be separated from the sun, it is also clear how it seems to refer to the sun as the image of God. So we have this ambiguity in Ezekiel, a deference to the monotheist view that God is beyond nature against a constant pull of the pantheist vision of God as within nature.

This tension between transcendence and nature appears most clearly in the famous first chapter, the wheels within wheels. These wheels have “high and dreadful rims full of eyes… when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up… for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.”

The reading that makes most sense of this allegory is astronomical: the “wheels” are the great circles of the sky visible to ancient astronomy, and the rims full of eyes are the stars of the night sky, an allegory that was picked up again in Revelation 4:8. The great wheels of astronomy are termed colures, as discussed in Dante’s Paradise, and include the equator, the sun path and the meridian circles running through the celestial poles.

Within these map circles the ancients imagined the celestial spheres or heavens, as when Saint Paul speaks in 1 Cor 12 of a man caught up to the third heaven. This image of great wheels in heaven goes back to the Timaeus dialogue of Plato, which speaks of an X in the sky formed by great circles. These Platonic circles are generally understood to mean the circle of the path of the sun, known as the ecliptic, and the circle of the celestial equator, marked by the points equally distant from the seemingly unmoving celestial pole in the northern sky.

Ezekiel says the wheels within wheels are animated by four living creatures, namely the bull, lion, eagle and man. This makes perfect simple astronomical sense, understanding the creatures as the four cardinal points around the path of the sun which are traditionally known as the bull, the lion, the eagle and the man, marking the north, east, south and west points of the sky over the course of the four seasons, in the orthogonal constellations of Taurus, Leo, Scorpio/Aquila and Aquarius.

How does this talk of creatures and circles link to prophecy? This is perhaps the most fascinating problem in the whole Bible, indicating a vigorously concealed but unconcealable natural blueprint for the supposedly divine message.

For more than a thousand years before the time of Jesus, the astronomer-priests of Babylon recorded the daily positions of the stars and planets on clay tablets from on top of their vast desert observatories, the ziggurats. They had such exact observation that they could measure the three orbital periods of the moon which form the eclipse Saros Cycle, the synodic, draconic and anomalistic months, and use this data to predict eclipses. This close observation of the moon indicates the seers of Babylon would have been able also to measure precession of the sun, but no direct evidence to this effect has survived.

The spring and autumn equinoxes are marked in the stars where the sky circles of the equator and the sun path cross. The summer and winter solstices are where these two wheels are furthest from each other in the sky, with the solstices now crossing the Milky Way at Sagittarius and Gemini and the equinoxes precessing from Pisces and Virgo into Aquarius and Leo. The X positions of the equinoxes against the stars constantly precess at a steady rate of one degree every 71.6 years.

While we do not to my knowledge have extant evidence that the Chaldeans took interest in the positions of the equinoxes and solstices against the stars, but it would be surprising if they did not, given their obsessive star worship, the use later made by the Greeks of Chaldean measurement of the equinox, and the importance of these points as defining the seasonal circles of the sky by marking the entry of the sun into spring, summer, fall and winter.

What does all this have to do with prophecy in Ezekiel? A main task of ancient Babylonian astronomy was to predict the future, through precise long term measurement of patterns such as the orbit of the moon as a basis to predict eclipses. Ezekiel’s description of the wheels of heaven as animated by the four living creatures is presented as the orderly basis of his prophetic vision, providing surety when God speaks through Ezekiel at Tel Aviv (3:15) to say Israel will be scattered to the four winds as punishment for being more turbulent than other nations (Ch5).

The slow grinding of the celestial gears seen by Ezekiel formed the basis for a series of prophecies that provided creative inspiration for New Testament authors. The Last Judgement of Matthew 25, where Jesus Christ returns on the clouds of heaven to judge the nations, is based on Ezekiel 34:17, where God judges between the sheep and the goats. Saint John’s image of Christ as the good shepherd derives from Ezekiel 34, the imagery in the apocalypse of the river and tree of life comes from Ezekiel 47, and the four square holy city, the New Jerusalem, is from Ezekiel 48.

The use of the sun and moon as the framework of time appears in Chapter 45 with the opening of the temple east gate every new moon and also in the detail of the Passover, which Ezekiel says is celebrated after the spring equinox with seven daily sacrifices of bulls and rams. By coincidence or design, the Passover occurred around the time each year when the sun was moving from the constellation of the ram into that of the bull, so this central offering on earth could be seen to mirror the position of the sun in the heavens. Due to earth’s slow orbital change, each century the average star position of the Passover as determined by the equinox was earlier in the ram. Given the Babylonian interest and capacity, the ancient astronomers could readily have seen that by the time Christians now call the BC/AD turning of the age at the incarnation of Jesus Christ, the Passover stars would have shifted from their old position between the ram and the bull to now occur between the fish and the lamb. Hence texts such as Ezekiel’s prophecy of the shepherd must have created quite an expectation of messianic transformation.

The overall prophetic message in Ezekiel can best be understood by recognizing how the central place of astronomy in ancient religion was gradually lost to view. The Chaldean Seers of Babylon who inspired his vision placed central importance on astronomy, building vast monuments purely to enable activity of star watching. Astronomy informed prophetic vision, providing the unchanging framework of the stars in the sky, and the slow change as the sun and moon and planets form regular patterns. This interaction between stability and change, between eternity and time, is the core messianic idea informing Ezekiel, with God imagined as stable and eternal like the stars, and man on earth seen as unstable and ephemeral by comparison to God. Ezekiel poses the old question of how to live under the eye of eternity. He builds upon the hidden metaphor of the visible stars as rims of eyes around the great celestial circles that look like wheels within wheels, to inform a prophetic message for religious and political life.
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Re: Commentary on Ezekiel

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Congrats on reading the whole book of Ezekiel. Patience would be required, for certain, more for the repetitiveness than for the difficulty, to read every word. Much of the book is in fact rather straightforward, narrating Yahweh's inexorable vengeance against the impure enemies of Israel, internal and external. I'm not schooled in the book, Robert, but I know enough perhaps to make a few comments and ask a few questions about your reading of it.
This political parable of Israel as a captured lion illustrates how military security is at the core of the prophetic vision of the Bible. The political lesson in this lion allegory is that Israel is a tiny land surrounded by large and powerful and dangerous empires. A small nation can only secure peace by political security, with alliances of trust built upon a reputation for good ethical conduct and shared understanding of mutual interest. Other people will only help and protect you, accepting your moral legitimacy, if they like and respect you. But the lament of Ezekiel is that Israel does the exact opposite of what it should do. Instead of building trust, Israel gets a reputation as an evil place, causing the empires to conquer and imprison instead of befriending it.

Your Ezekiel sounds somewhat like a rational critic of state policy. Where do you see statements made to that effect? I could support a contrary view of Ezekiel as possibly insane, at least manic, and far beyond zealotry in his view of where Israel went wrong, which has everything to do with not keeping Yahweh's own strictures that the Jews separate themselves from the idolatrous customs of the surrounding peoples. Your view would seem to indicate a distance between the commandments to prophesize that Ezekiel is given and the feelings of Ezekiel himself, as if reluctantly or with loathing he carries out the mandate from his god. I do not see this in the text. I would even say there is a certain grim satisfaction shown by Ezekiel in the destruction that is sure to come. I'm much more likely to see everything that comes commanded from Yahweh as the thoughts of Ezekiel himself, of course, rather than from God. Would you see it any differently?
Ezekiel shows, in language that is now rather taboo and sensitive, that Israel’s bad reputation promoted by negative stereotypes is something the Jewish people were aware of in ancient times. Ezekiel identifies anti-Semitic racial prejudice as a problem that the people of Israel had to confront and address in order to maintain their own security from ancient times. Ezekiel speaks as a Jew, out of love and care for the Jews, reflecting on the tragedy of the captivity in Babylon, praying that his people may see the error of their ways and change to a good course. He is a type of critic who is sometimes castigated as a self-hater. His capacity for scorching honesty is at the centre of Jewish identity, in a syndrome of brutal self-criticism that gets ignored to Israel’s cost, then as now.
As much as you would like this to be an enlightened self-criticism along the lines you've described, there is again scant or no evidence that Ezekiel sees failure to play nice with foreigners as cause of Israel's problems and greater internationalism as the solution to them. This was about 2,700 years ago, remember, far before the idea of a family of nations was ever thought of. Ezekiel appears to be what we today would call ultra ultra conservative in his religion.
The trauma of war suffuses Ezekiel. The cruel and rather dubious lesson seems to be that conquerors are instruments of God to inflict a divine wrath upon the world, and that the weak must organize through religion for social defense. The constant political story is that Israel’s only hope of salvation is in returning to the covenant with God, turning away from sin and idolatry. But the question of what constitutes sin and idolatry is a conundrum. God is imagined here as single and transcendent. The mystery, and the point where I believe this book can be restored as making sense, is in how this single transcendent God manifests in reality.
The conquerors will get their own comeuppance, too, though, in the end. This is the point where I begin to have serious doubts about your method. You announce an agenda, the death knell for objectivity. It doesn't make sense to you that God could be "single and transcendent," so in an effort to make sense of the book you change the reality that probably every Jew saw. It isn't the purpose of analyzing a text to make it have messages acceptable to us, as you proceed to try to do.
The traditional monotheist reading, which I dispute, is that Yahweh the God of Israel is a personal entity existing outside the material universe in a supernatural realm, superior to nature but able to rule the world through deliberate intentional action. I consider that this old conventional reading is a corrupted and self-serving misinterpretation of the prophetic message from Ezekiel. If we begin to approach the prophetic message as natural and scientific, not supernatural and magical, it can become relevant, powerful and insightful. Church tradition has failed to engage the political meaning due to the institutional corruption of religion, forcing the scientific meaning to be hidden beneath allegedly literal signs and wonders. Reconciling Ezekiel with modern rationality would help give his work some secular traction, bringing his ideas into dialogue with modern political and social debates, instead of his current banishment to the cranky realm of the impossible.
"Monotheist reading" is first of all an irrelevant distractor. To see that the Jews viewed God in the way you describe, one needs only to read the texts, as a Christian monotheist or atheist--doesn't matter. In saying that this" reading" is corrupted, you need to prove that an uncorrupted reading of it existed before a certain point. That point seems for you to have come sometime after the Church came onto the scene, which would have been close to a millenium in the future. At this point, too, you apparently hope to distract us from the content of the Book of Ezekiel, so that you can substitute some other, uncorrupted content. You select passages that could have astronomical or astrological significance, such as the famous wheels visions, and claim that these have to subsume the entire rest of the text, a basic mistake of propotionality. From your account of the book, someone who hadn't read it would be surprised to learn that 99% of it tells of Yahweh's punishments and of his specifications for the reconstruction of Israel and, specifically, the temple. A reader without previous motivation would not see the cosmic allegory that you do, and the reason would not be that he had been brainwashed by the Church. It would be rather that his mind was more open to what is really before his eyes.

Teachings of the Church were surely not needed for readers to be able to discern what the book is about, in a broad sense. Of course, it is in places complex in its symbolism, and much has been written about its relationship to the origins of Judaism, to a kind of influential apocalyism, and to the tradition of Jewish mysticism. All of this can be done without recourse to repression by the Church to explain the absence of the evidence for your claims that is still missing.
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Re: Commentary on Ezekiel

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DWill wrote:I could support a contrary view of Ezekiel as possibly insane, at least manic, and far beyond zealotry in his view of where Israel went wrong, which has everything to do with not keeping Yahweh's own strictures that the Jews separate themselves from the idolatrous customs of the surrounding peoples.
I think the reason Ezekiel enframes his prophecy in a concealed statement of stellar order is that the stars are stable and predictable, and he aims for his own ideas to have that same status, with the stars a template for his covenant of peace. Such a framework could be read as entirely rational, depending on your view of Ezekiel’s strategic vision as it relates to concepts such as the Jews as the chosen race, and the merits of separate exclusivity. His main point as I read him is that moral standards are needed for state survival.
DWill wrote:Your view would seem to indicate a distance between the commandments to prophesize that Ezekiel is given and the feelings of Ezekiel himself, as if reluctantly or with loathing he carries out the mandate from his god. I do not see this in the text. I would even say there is a certain grim satisfaction shown by Ezekiel in the destruction that is sure to come. I'm much more likely to see everything that comes commanded from Yahweh as the thoughts of Ezekiel himself, of course, rather than from God. Would you see it any differently?
A common theme in prophecy is that the prophet tries to explain reality, and what must be done to sustain community through orderly social values. He prays that society may return to divine values, but sees inevitable wrath as the effect of evil. Maybe there is joy in the death of the wicked, given the human tendency to revenge. There are also Christian ideas about forgiveness, mercy, love, grace, repentance, freedom and justice that find expression in the Old Testament prophetic tradition, even if these ideas only found a systemic unity in the gospel of Jesus Christ.

As to Ezekiel’s divine inspiration, I don’t think it ever makes sense to argue that human ideas come from God, considered in the traditional paternal sense as a wise active being. Prophecy seeks to express deep insight about the likely future of the world, in Ezekiel’s case regarding how the Jews could restore their covenant with God. This imagined framework of insight works better when God language is used as metaphor for description of natural order, lightly concealed for popular use. To get to the essence of Ezekiel, we should take seriously his claim to speak in allegory, and then examine the range of cosmic images that he employs to construct his paradigm of order and divinity.
DWill wrote: As much as you would like this to be an enlightened self-criticism along the lines you've described, there is again scant or no evidence that Ezekiel sees failure to play nice with foreigners as cause of Israel's problems and greater internationalism as the solution to them. This was about 2,700 years ago, remember, far before the idea of a family of nations was ever thought of. Ezekiel appears to be what we today would call ultra ultra conservative in his religion.
The basic message in Ezekiel is that the Jews have stuffed up their efforts at independence and deserve their captivity and scattering. You can characterize that as ultra, but there is another more coherent way to read this book, without trying to turn Ezekiel into something he is not.

The themes of the wheels and creatures refer to cosmic order, both natural and supernatural. The natural dimension is the observation of the stars, while the supernatural dimension is the belief that this natural order reflects a divine will. So Ezekiel wants Israel to live in harmony with nature, as the foundation of his covenant of divine peace. But this is nature seen on the grand scale of the cosmos, not any sense of humans as equal to animals and plants.
DWill wrote:
The trauma of war suffuses Ezekiel. The cruel and rather dubious lesson seems to be that conquerors are instruments of God to inflict a divine wrath upon the world, and that the weak must organize through religion for social defense. The constant political story is that Israel’s only hope of salvation is in returning to the covenant with God, turning away from sin and idolatry. But the question of what constitutes sin and idolatry is a conundrum. God is imagined here as single and transcendent. The mystery, and the point where I believe this book can be restored as making sense, is in how this single transcendent God manifests in reality.
The conquerors will get their own comeuppance, too, though, in the end. This is the point where I begin to have serious doubts about your method. You announce an agenda, the death knell for objectivity.
Well, no, an agenda of reading the Bible scientifically, by asking how God manifests in reality, is not a death knell for objectivity. Rather, seeing the cosmic ground within the text provides a more evidence based and objective method. The issue here is science, where the criterion is falsification, the ability of a critic to show that a hypothesis is false.
DWill wrote: It doesn't make sense to you that God could be "single and transcendent," so in an effort to make sense of the book you change the reality that probably every Jew saw.
Transcendent is one of those complex words that cover several meanings. Concepts are inherently transcendent, as timeless spiritual entities formed by language rather than material objects. So all discussion of ideas is equally transcendent. For this split between thing and idea to morph into the religious idea that a supernatural eternal being has specific discernible intentions involves a series of unscientific steps.

Better to bracket the transcendence of God and instead look at how divine energy manifests in matter, if that could make any sense. Here the concept of divine requires analysis, examining how traditional attributes of the divine, such as eternity, grace, love, justice and truth, may have empirical meaning.

You cannot rightly say that Jews see a single and transparent God, since that God is by definition invisible. They can imagine God as manifest in word and idea, with stories such as the vision by Moses of God in the burning bush obviously mythical.
DWill wrote: It isn't the purpose of analyzing a text to make it have messages acceptable to us, as you proceed to try to do.
You misread me. The idea that Ezekiel believed Jewish security required shared belief in God based on astral order can stand or fall based on analyzing the text. Whether that hypothesis may be acceptable today is secondary. I do think it is informative today, since the geopolitics of the Middle East occupy similar contours as in ancient time to some extent.
DWill wrote:
The traditional monotheist reading, which I dispute, is that Yahweh the God of Israel is a personal entity existing outside the material universe in a supernatural realm, superior to nature but able to rule the world through deliberate intentional action. I consider that this old conventional reading is a corrupted and self-serving misinterpretation of the prophetic message from Ezekiel. If we begin to approach the prophetic message as natural and scientific, not supernatural and magical, it can become relevant, powerful and insightful. Church tradition has failed to engage the political meaning due to the institutional corruption of religion, forcing the scientific meaning to be hidden beneath allegedly literal signs and wonders. Reconciling Ezekiel with modern rationality would help give his work some secular traction, bringing his ideas into dialogue with modern political and social debates, instead of his current banishment to the cranky realm of the impossible.
"Monotheist reading" is first of all an irrelevant distractor. To see that the Jews viewed God in the way you describe, one needs only to read the texts, as a Christian monotheist or atheist--doesn't matter.
The question of monotheism is whether the order of the universe reflects a single transcendent divine intent.

It is relevant to ask how interpretation of God today is marred by reading Ezekiel through a Christian lens, through a glass darkly as Paul put it. Ezekiel gives much higher importance to cosmic order in interpreting God than is generally understood.

The fact that Christians still fail to see that the four living creatures and wheels are readily visible in the stars as primary markers of cosmic order is a good indicator of how monotheist reading has been corrupted by church teaching.
DWill wrote: In saying that this" reading" is corrupted, you need to prove that an uncorrupted reading of it existed before a certain point. That point seems for you to have come sometime after the Church came onto the scene, which would have been close to a millennium in the future.
There was co-existence between esoteric astral schools and the exoteric public cult of Judaism, with the astral teachings concealed as secret mysteries among a priestly elite. The use of the zodiac as the high priest breastplate in the holy of holies is one good proof of this secret astral tradition. But the secrecy left the astral blueprint highly vulnerable to suppression when Christianity became the guarantor of Roman imperial stability.

We still have no historical consensus on how Christianity evolved, especially on the crucial question of the role and identity of Jesus Christ, who really appears fictional.
DWill wrote: At this point, too, you apparently hope to distract us from the content of the Book of Ezekiel, so that you can substitute some other, uncorrupted content. You select passages that could have astronomical or astrological significance, such as the famous wheels visions, and claim that these have to subsume the entire rest of the text, a basic mistake of proportionality.
That is like saying whether a house is built on sand or rock makes no difference to its stability. The foundation of Ezekiel’s vision is the divine order manifest in the stars, as the template against which he judges Jewish obedience to the covenant of peace.
DWill wrote: From your account of the book, someone who hadn't read it would be surprised to learn that 99% of it tells of Yahweh's punishments and of his specifications for the reconstruction of Israel and, specifically, the temple. A reader without previous motivation would not see the cosmic allegory that you do, and the reason would not be that he had been brainwashed by the Church. It would be rather that his mind was more open to what is really before his eyes.
My motivation is to try to explain the Bible scientifically. You may not have noticed my comment above about Ezekiel’s comments on allegorical riddles. Reinstating the allegory of the stars solves the riddle.
DWill wrote:
Teachings of the Church were surely not needed for readers to be able to discern what the book is about, in a broad sense. Of course, it is in places complex in its symbolism, and much has been written about its relationship to the origins of Judaism, to a kind of influential apocalyism, and to the tradition of Jewish mysticism. All of this can be done without recourse to repression by the Church to explain the absence of the evidence for your claims that is still missing.

Repression of astral teachings by the church was obvious and large scale and long term, as core to the project of rooting out heresy. As such, correcting for this repression is essential if we want more accurate understanding, and requires forensic analysis of fugitive traces of astral teachings in the Bible. Happily these are abundant. Ezekiel shares with books such as Job, Genesis, Psalms and most of the New Testament a double vision, with supernatural myth concealing astral meaning.
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DWill

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Re: Commentary on Ezekiel

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Okay, I can see my point about engaging with the text in front of us didn't go through. There are reasons for our teachers hammering this into us, and for the Ds and Fs we get if we ignore their direction. Read Harold Bloom on Ezekiel. He shows how to be mind-stretching while staying grounded in the text and relating it to the panoply of biblical writings. It's not about him, he knows that.
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Re: Commentary on Ezekiel

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DWill wrote:Okay, I can see my point about engaging with the text in front of us didn't go through. There are reasons for our teachers hammering this into us, and for the Ds and Fs we get if we ignore their direction. Read Harold Bloom on Ezekiel. He shows how to be mind-stretching while staying grounded in the text and relating it to the panoply of biblical writings. It's not about him, he knows that.
Harold Bloom is always a pleasure to read. I had no idea he had written about the Bible as a work of literature. Is this what you're talking about DWill?

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Re: Commentary on Ezekiel

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DWill wrote:Okay, I can see my point about engaging with the text in front of us didn't go through. There are reasons for our teachers hammering this into us, and for the Ds and Fs we get if we ignore their direction. Read Harold Bloom on Ezekiel. He shows how to be mind-stretching while staying grounded in the text and relating it to the panoply of biblical writings. It's not about him, he knows that.
No need to patronise. I am engaged with the text. I feel that you are not, since you appear to reject on principle (of cultural familiarity?) my observation that cosmology is central to it. The removal of astronomy from Christianity is a major lacuna. You would give me an F for that comment though. Hammering by teachers can often be a way to enforce conformity and prevent free thought, expertly developed by the church in its methods of indoctrination.
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