Ezekiel 36:8 - Exposition

For they are at hand to come . Keil and Plumptre make the subject of the verb the material blessings in which Israel's prosperity is depicted as consisting, viz. the foliage and fruit her mountains were soon to bear for the people of Jehovah. The majority of expositors believe the subject to be the people whose return from exile was in this way declared to be approaching. Nor is there any reason why Ezekiel should not have represented the return from exile as an event soon to take place, since of the seventy years of captivity predicted by Jeremiah ( Jeremiah 25:11 ) at least twenty years had passed, if its commencement be dated from the fourth year of Jehoiakim ( Ezekiel 33:21 ); and the fulfillment of Jehovah's promise was to the prophet so much a matter of certainty ( Ezekiel 11:17 ) that his fervent imagination conceived it as at hand.