Ezekiel 7:23

"Make the chain; for the land is full of bloody crimes, and the city is full of violence. Wherefore I will bring the worst of the nations, and they shall possess their houses: because I will also make the pride of the strong to cease; and their holy places shall be profaned. Destruction cometh, and they shall seek peace, and there shall be none. Mischief shall come upon mischief, and rumor shall be upon rumor; and they shall seek a vision of the prophet; but the law shall perish from the priest, and counsel from the elders. The king shall mourn, and the prince shall be clothed with desolation, and the hands of the people of the land shall be troubled: I will do unto them after their way, and according to their deserts will I judge them; and they shall know that I am Jehovah."

DISMAY AND DESPAIR SHALL COME TO ALL CLASSES

"Make the chain ..." (Ezekiel 7:23). May stated that this clause, "gives little sense";[22] but to us the message is clear enough. It means get the chains ready, the surviving citizens of Judah are to be deported to Babylon!

"The worst of the nations ..." (Ezekiel 7:24). Canon Cook called this a "designation of the Chaldeans."[23] Watts has this comment on the Chaldeans.

Events of our own generation reveal that invading armies produce outrages on persons, the waste of stores of food, the outbreak of epidemic diseases; and the unearthed Assyrian sculptures prove that all such calamities were still more hideously the product of the Chaldean armies. They spared neither age nor sex; they burned up crops, destroyed stores of grain that they could not carry off, leaving behind an impoverished and depressed population, among whom pestilence and famine would tend to further death.[24]

"They shall seek peace, and there shall be none ..." (Ezekiel 7:25). We think this is probably a reference to the Israelites seeking favorable terms of surrender to Nebuchadnezzar; but he insisted upon the total rain and destruction of the city. Plumptre suggested this as one of the possible meanings of the verse.[25]

"The prophet ... the priest ... and the elders ..." (Ezekiel 7:26). "There is a threefold division of the people religiously in this verse";[26] and these give the three sources from whom the people should have been able to receive religious guidance and counsel; but the thought here is that every avenue of spiritual help was closed. "A world which has turned its back upon the source from which it derives its life (as Israel had done) is on the very brink of min."[27]

"The people of the land ..." (Ezekiel 7:27) This is an expression often used in the Old Testament for the landed gentry; but Brace tells us that, "Here the phrase is used of the common people as distinguished from the king and the princes, the priests and the prophets, the principal divisions of the `establishment.'"[28] The thought is that all classes of society are depressed and dismayed by the impending disaster.