Ezekiel 40:1 - Exposition

In the five and twentieth year of our captivity ; i.e. in B.C. 575, assuming Jehoiakin's deportation to have taken place B.C. 600, i.e. in the fiftieth year of the prophet's age, in the twenty-fifth of his prophetic calling, and in the fourteenth after the fall of Jerusalem. As the last note of time was the twelfth year ( Ezekiel 32:17 ), it may be assumed the interval was largely occupied in receiving and delivering the prophecies that fall between those dates, though it is more than likely a period of silence preceded the vision of which this last section of the book preserves an account. If not the last of the prophet's utterances (see Ezekiel 29:17 ), it was beyond question the grandest and most momentous. Accordingly, the prophet notes with his customary exactness that the vision came to him in the beginning of the year , which Hitzig, whom Dr. Currey, in the 'Speaker's Commentary' follows, believes to have been a jubilee year, which began on the tenth day of the seventh month. As, however, the practice of commencing the year with this month was not introduced among the Jews till after the exile, and as Ezekiel everywhere follows the purely Mosaic arrangement of the year, the presumption is that the beginning of the year here alluded to was the month Abib, and that the tenth day of the month was the day on which the Torah enjoined the selection of a lamb for the Passover. Indeed, the two clauses in Ezekiel read like an abbreviation of the Mosaic statute ( Exodus 12:2 , Exodus 12:3 )—a circumstance sufficiently striking and probably significant, though emphasis should not, with Hengstenberg, be laid upon the fact that every word in Ezekiel's copy is found in the Exodus original. On that day, which was the anniversary of the beginning of a merciful deliverance to Israel in Egypt, of the initial step in a gracious process of transforming Pharaoh's captives into a nation,—on that day (for emphasis the selfsame day , as in Ezekiel 24:2 ), the prophet's soul was rapt into an ecstasy (see on Ezekiel 1:3 ), in which he seemed to be transported thither, i.e. towards the smitten city, and a disclosure made to him concerning that new community which Jehovah was about to form out of old Israel.