2. Like many other visions, before and since, Ezekiel's vision of the Valley of Dry Bones was partly shaped by the circumstances of the times. The horrors of the Chaldaean invasion, which had resulted in the carrying away of the Jewish people into Babylon, were still fresh in the memories of men. In many a valley, on many a hillside, in southern Palestine, the track of the invading army, as it advanced and retired, would have been marked by the bones of the unoffending but slaughtered peasantry. In his work on Nineveh, Mr. Layard describes such a scene in Armenia — an upland valley covered by the bones of a Christian population which had been plundered and murdered by the Kurds.
^[ A page from the " Annals " of Tacitus throws the light of an illustration on the imagery of this chapter. The Eoman his- torian relates a gruesome incident in the march of one of the imperial armies through the forests of Germany. Some years before, Varus, a Eoman general, had been entrapped and cut off there with his whole force by the barbarians. The succeeding general, having marched his troops into the heart of the country, came one day upon a large open camp which was whitened all over 1 J. E. McFadyen, The City with Foundations, 73.
EZEKIEL xxxvii. 3 235
with a vast array of human bones. It struck with a chill upon the minds of the commander and of his men that these were the bones of their precursors — the remains of their friends and fellow- countrymen who had perished some years before upon that very spot.1
3. What does the vision treat of ? Life and death, in their barest, most glaring contrast ; life and death, and the way in which the one is to pass into the other ; life and death, and the huge gulf between them, and how that gulf is to be bridged over j life and death, with their unfathomable mysteries and their world- pervading power.
Life and death ! They compass us on every side : whither- soever we cast our eyes we see the workings of one or the other ; we see them perpetually battling and struggling and wrestling, and now one gains the mastery, now the other. But what they are in themselves we know not. No eye of man has ever seen either. No foot of man has ever reached the hidden cave in which either of them dwells, the dark fountains from which they spring.
There are three facts in Ezekiel's vision, each necessary to the complete picture —
I. Dry Bones. II. A Living Prophet. III. A Life-Giving God.
Dry Bones.
The prophet is borne upon the wings of his imagination to a valley filled with human bones — weird, gruesome, chaotic ; for they are not even skeletons, but an indiscriminate mass of bones. No prospect could have been more forlorn or unpromising. There they lie, sad emblem of a hopeless, lifeless people — the living dead.
It was the scene of so many visions, the valley by the river Chebar. Now it wore a hideous face. It seemed a valley of desolation. It was a vast charnel-house. A skeleton army to
1 J. Laidlaw, Studies in tlie Parables, 207.
236 LIFE FROM THE DEAD
Ezekiel's vision lay there, ghastly, not with the fresh horror of festering corruption, but with the gaunt squalor of dry ruin. The plain was white with the chronic leprosy of death. And it was the chill of old death, death grown grey and sere, death itself turned dead, because it was death with its beauty dead, its pathos dead, death not redolent of life just gone, but long hopeless of any life to come ; it was death long settled down into dismal posses- sion, death established, privileged, throned, and secure.
Eound and round the valley the prophet is led by his mysterious guide, the only living man in the grim silent valley. And everywhere are bones — the face of the valley is thick with them, so many that the soil beneath them does not peer through ; bones exceeding many and exceeding dry. Dry — for it is long, long, since the warm sap of life was about them ; and they are so shrivelled and wizened that nothing but a miracle can ever bring the life about them again. " Behold ! " says the prophet sadly, casting his despondent glance upon them, as he moves about the valley — " Behold them — exceeding many and exceeding dry."
1. What do these dry bones represent in the world to-day ?
(1) There are spiritual dry bones and desolations among the nations. Other armies than those of emperors and kings assault the soul of a people, and indeed they are always with us. The Lord of them all is Covetousness, and his Queen is the Pride of Life. Their daughters are many — Corruption, Cruelty, Luxury, Lust, Thoughtlessness, Idleness, Extravagance, Gambling, Ac- cumulation, Satiety, Hopelessness, Violence, Boasting, Division — a host of dreadful creatures who feed on the vitals of the people. To slay their father is to slay them all. To let him live in power is to scatter and blast the nation as the simoom blasts and dispels the caravan. And when we look round on England, Europe, and America, we see Covetousness, like Satan, throned ; and his foul hand has gripped the nations. The cry of "More, more," goes up, a monstrous prayer, to the listening ear of God ; and God's answer is that we will always live on the edge of war till we go to the root of the matter and dethrone Covetousness. Though every nation were to cry for peace, and every ruler to ask disarm- ament, and a hundred Peace Congresses to meet, we shall never make one step forward towards that true peace which is founded