The influences in the midst of which Ezekiel's youthful days were spent can readily be imagined. In addition to the solemnizing impressions and quickening impulses which must have been imparted to his opening intelligence and tender heart by the temple services, in which from an earh· age, in all probability, like another Samuel, he took part, for an earnest and religious soul like his, the strange ferment produced by Hilkiah's book of the Law, whether that was Deuteronomy (Kuenen, Wellhausen), Leviticus (Bertheau, Plumptre), or the whole Pentateuch (Keil, Hii.vernick), and the vigorous reformation to which, during J osiah's last years, it led, could not fail to have a powerful fascination. Nor is it likely that he remained insensible to the energetic ministry which, during all the twenty-five years of his residence in Jerusalem, had been exercised by his illustrious prede- cessor Jeremiah. Rather is there evidence in his obvious leaning on the elder prophet, revealing itself in words and phrases, completed sentences and connected paragraphs, that his whole inner life had been deeply per- meated, and in fact effectively moulded, by the spirit of his teacher, and that when the stroke fell upon his country and people as well as on himself, he went away into exile, whither Daniel had a few years before preceded him (Dan. i. 1), inspired with the feelings and brooding on the thoughts he had learnt from the venerated seer he had left behind. From this time forward the prophet's home was in the land of the ChaL deans, at a city called Tel-Abib ( eh. iii. 15), or "hill of com-ears," perhaps so named in consequence of the fertility of the surrounding district-a city whose site has not yet been discovered, though Ezekiel himself locates it on the river Chebar. If this stream (i_~:P) be identified, as it is by Gesenius, Hii.vemick, Keil, and the majority of expositors, with the Habor (ii:11~1) to which the captive Israelites were carried by Shalmanezer or Sargon (2 Kings xvii. 6) upwards of a hundred years before, and the Habor be found in the Chaboras of ihe Greeks and Romans, which, rising at the foot of the Masian Mountains, falls into the Euphrates near Circe- sium-which is doubtful-then the quarter to which the prophet and his fellow-exiles were deported must be looked for in Northern Mesopotamia. Against this, however, Noldeke, Schrader, Diestel, and Smend urge with reason that the two words "Chebar" and "Habor" do not agree in sound; that whereas the Habor was (probably a district) in Assyria, the Chebar is invariably represented as having been a river in the land of the Chaldeans, and that to this land the Judrean exiles are always declared to have been removed. Hence the last-named authorities prefer to look for the Chebar in a tributary stream or canal of the Euphrates, near Babylon, in Southern Mesopotamia. 1 In favour of the former locality may be mentioned that in it the prophet would have found himself established in the midst of tho main body of the exiles from both kingdoms, to all of whom ultimattly, 1 This opinion ce.n e.t lee.at cle.im in its support the.t tradition locates Tel-Abib south
of Ba.bylon at e. place ea.lied Kesil, where e.t the present day the prophet's grnve is pointed out, a.s the tombs of Jonah a.nd Nahum a1·e in the vicinity of Nineveh. Iv INTRODUCTION TO
although immediately to those of Judah, his mission had a reference; yet, inasmuch as the northern exiles might easily enough have been reached by the prophet's words without his residing among them, this consideration cannot be allowed to decide the question. Unlike Jeremiah, who appears to have remained unmarried, Ezekiel had a wife whom he tenderly cherished as "the desire of his eyes," but who suddenly died in the ninth year of his captivity, or four years after he had entered on his prophetic calling ( eh. xxiv.). Whether, like Isaiah, the first of the "greater" prophets, he had children, is not reported. If he had, it is dear that neither wife nor children hindered him any more than they hindered Isaiah from responding to the Divine voice which summoned him to be a watchman to the house of Israel. The summons came to him, as it bad come to Isaiah, in the form of a sublime theophany; only not, as in Isaiah's case, while he worshipped in the temple, from which at the moment he was far removed, but as he sat among the exiles (in the mid~t of the Golah) on the banks of the Chebar. He was then thirty years of age. With few interruptions, he exercised his sacred vocation till his fifty- second year. How long after he lived it is impossible to tell. Not the slightest value can be attached to the tradition preserved by the Fathers and Talmudists that he was put to death by a prince of his own people on account of his prophecies, and was buried in the tomb of Shem and Arphaxad. 2. The Times of the Prophet. When Ezekiel entered on his calling as a prophet in B.c. 595, the northern kingdom of Israel had for upwards of a hundred yeard ceased to exist, while the final overthrow of Judah, its southern" sister," was rapidly approaching. When Ezekiel was born, in B.C. 625, in the eighteenth year of Josiah, it seemed as if better days were about to dawn for both this land and people. Through the labours of Jeremiah, who had five years before been invested with prophetic dignity-in the expressive language of Jehovah, "set over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant" ( J er. i. 10)-and of Zephaniah, who probably commenced his work about the same period (Zeph. i 1), seconded as these were by the young king's vigorous reformation and Hilkiah'i, finding of the book of the Law of Jehovah, idolatry had been well-nigh purged from the realm. Yet the moral and religious improvement of the people proved as transient as it had been superficial. With the death of Josiah from a wound received on the fatal field of Megiddo in B.c. 612, and the accession of his second son Shallum under the tnrone-name of Jehoahaz, a violent reaction in favour of heathen- ism set in. At the end of three months, Shallum having been deposed by Necho Il, Josiah's conqueror, who still lay encamped at Riblath, his elder brother Eliakim, under the title of J ehoiakim, was installed in his rorJm as vassal to the King of Egypt. Then followed, in B.C. 605, THE BOOK OF THE PROPRE'r EZEKIEL.