Ezekiel 36:20 - Exposition

They profaned my holy Name ; or, the name of my holiness . According to Kliefoth, the subject of the verb is "the heathen," but expositors generally regard it as "the house of Israel" of Ezekiel 36:17 . Plumptre thinks that "while grammatically the words may refer to either the heathen or the exiles of Israel, possibly the sentence was purposely left vague, so as to describe the fact in which both were sharers," and cites in support of this view similar constructions in Isaiah 55:5 and Romans 2:24 . What led to the profanation of Jehovah's Name by the heathen was the arrival among them, not of the news of the calamity which had befallen Israel (Kliefoth, Hengstenberg), but of the house of Israel itself; and the actual profanation lay in this, that, having beheld the exiles, they said, These are the people of the Lord, and they are gone forth out of his land. As the heathen recognized only local divinities, they concluded Jehovah had either behaved capriciously towards his people and east them off (comp. Jeremiah 23:40 ; Jeremiah 29:18 ; Jeremiah 33:24 ), or had proved unequal to the task of protecting them so that they had been driven off (comp. Ezekiel 20:5 , etc.; Numbers 14:16 ; Jeremiah 14:9 ). In either case, the honor of Jehovah had been lessened in the minds and tarnished by the words of the heathen, and inasmuch as this result had been brought about by Israel's sin, on Israel properly the blame lay.