The chapter we have just studied was evidently not composed with a view to immediate publication. It records the view of Jerusalem’s guilt and punishment which was borne in upon the mind of the prophet in the solitude of his chamber, but it was not destined to see the light until the whole of his teaching could be submitted in its final form to a wider and more receptive audience. It is equally obvious that the scenes described in ch. xxiv. were really enacted in the full view of the exiled community. We have reached the crisis of Ezekiel’s ministry. For the last time until his warnings of doom shall be fulfilled he emerges from his partial seclusion, and in symbolism whose vivid force could not have failed to impress the most listless hearer he announces once more the destruction of the Hebrew nation. The burden of his message is that that day—the tenth day of the tenth month of the ninth year—marked the beginning of the end. “On that very day”—a day to be commemorated for seventy long years by a national fast (Zech. viii. 19; cf. vii. 5)—Nebuchadnezzar was drawing his lines round Jerusalem. The bare announcement to men who knew what a Chaldæan siege meant must have sent a thrill of consternation through their minds. If this vision of what was happening in a distant land should prove true, they must have felt that all hope of deliverance was now cut off. Sceptical as they may have been of the moral principles that lay behind Ezekiel’s prediction, they could not deny that the issue he foresaw was only the natural sequel to the fact he so confidently announced.
The image here used of the fate of Jerusalem would recall to the minds of the exiles the ill‐omened saying which expressed the reckless spirit prevalent in the city: “This city is the pot, and we are the flesh” (ch. xi. 3). It was well understood in Babylon that these men were playing a desperate game, and did not shrink from the horrors of a siege. “Set on the pot,” then, cries the prophet to his listeners, “set it on, and pour in water also, and gather the pieces into it, every good joint, leg and shoulder; fill it with the choicest bones. Take them from the best of the flock, and then pile up the wood(70) under it; let its pieces be boiled and its bones cooked within it” (vv. 3‐5). This part of the parable required no explanation; it simply represents the terrible miseries endured by the population of Jerusalem during the siege now commencing. But then by a sudden transition the speaker turns the thoughts of his hearers to another aspect of the judgment (vv. 6‐8). The city itself is like a rusty caldron, unfit for any useful purpose until by some means it has been cleansed from its impurity. It is as if the crimes that had been perpetrated in Jerusalem had stained her very stones with blood. She had not even taken steps to conceal the traces of her wickedness; they lie like blood on the bare rock, an open witness to her guilt. Often Jehovah had sought to purify her by more measured chastisements, but it has now been proved that “her much rust will not go from her except by fire”(71) (ver. 12). Hence the end of the siege will be twofold. First of all the contents of the caldron will be indiscriminately thrown out—a figure for the dispersion and captivity of the inhabitants; and then the pot must be set empty on the glowing coals till its rust is thoroughly burned out—a symbol of the burning of the city and its subsequent desolation (ver. 11). The idea that the material world may contract defilement through the sins of those who live in it is one that is hard for us to realise, but it is in keeping with the view of sin presented by Ezekiel, and indeed by the Old Testament generally. There are certain natural emblems of sin, such as uncleanness or disease or uncovered blood, etc., which had to be largely used in order to educate men’s moral perceptions. Partly these rest on the analogy between physical defect and moral evil; but partly, as here, they result from a strong sense of association between human deeds and their effects or circumstances. Jerusalem is unclean as a place where wicked deeds have been done, and even the destruction of the sinners cannot in the mind of Ezekiel clear her from the unhallowed associations of her history. She must lie empty and dreary for a generation, swept by the winds of heaven before devout Israelites can again twine their affections round the hope of her glorious future.(72)