Vv. g-10. The prophet absorbs the
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x For basis of this passage, cf. Ezek. ii. 8—iii.3, ἔσται γλυκὺ ὡς μέλι’. Pssicxix,
1ο], απὰ χΧειρὸς τοῦ ἀγγέλου, καὶ κατέφαγον αὐτό
4Esd. Vill. 4 (absorbet ergo anima sensum et deuoret quod Sapit). Moulton, i. 111, 115). John xii. 16: = “of,” “concerning”.
μου.
word of God; in our phrase, he makes it his own or identifies himself with it (Jer. xv. 16). Το assimilate this revelation of the divine purpose seems to promise a delightful experience, but the bliss and security of the saints, he soon realises, involve severe trials (cf. xi. 2, xii. 13 f., etc.) for them as well as catastrophes for the world. Hence the feeling of disrelish with which he views his new vocation as a seer. The distasteful experience is put first, in ver. 9, as being the un- expected element in the situation. (The omission of bitterness in LXX of Ezek. iii. 14 renders it unlikely that this addi- tional trait of unpleasant taste is due, as Spitta thinks, to an erroneous combina- tion of Ezek. iii. 2 and 14). The natural order occurs in ver. το. The only an- alogous passage in early Christian litera- ture is in the ‘‘ Martyrdom of Perpetua” (iv. cf. Weinel, 196,197). Wetstein cites from Theophrastus the description of an Indian shrub οὗ 6 καρπὸς . . . ἐσθιόμε- νος γλυκὺς. οὗτος ἐν τῇ κοιλίᾳ δηγμὸν ποιεῖ καὶ δυσεντερίαν. Before the happy consummation (ver. 7), a bitter prelude is to come, which is the subject of national and political prophecies. In order to underline his divine commission for this task of punitive prediction, he recalls his inspiration.
Ver. 11. λέγ. pot, an oblique, rever- ential way of describing the divine im- pulse, due to Aramaic idiom and common in later Biblical Hebrew (cf. Dalman, i., viii. 11). The series of oracles, thus elaborately inaugurated, is concerned in- creasingly (“ again,” in view of iv. 4, 15, Vil. 4, 9, ΥΠ. 13, ix. 6, 16 f.) with those international movements (‘‘kings” = Φυλαί, or those in xvii. 1Ο, 12) which a prophet related to the course of the divine kingdom. Strictly speaking, the revelation assimilated in x. 10, II opens in xii., but the intervening passage is linked to both (see below). The first part of this passage (xi. 1-2, 3-13) evi-