Ezekiel 21:21

21. Stood Literally, standeth. The prophet sees what shall come to pass as if it had already happened.

Made his arrows bright, etc. Rather, he shaketh with the arrows, he inquireth of the teraphim ( images); he looketh in the liver.

His arrows The Babylonians practiced five principal methods of divination: by the flight of arrows, by the flight of birds, by the livers of dogs, by divining cups, by terra cotta images. This practice of belomancy, or presaging the future with arrows, though mentioned nowhere else in the Old Testament, was the most common and simple form of martial divination in Babylon. As Professor Toy says, “Reference to this custom seems very natural in the mouth of Ezekiel, who might have seen the ceremony performed as we now have it figured on the Assyrian and Babylonian monuments.” ( See Society of Biblical Literature, vol. 1.) Perhaps these were arrows which were about to be used in the campaign. One text says, “The arrows are lances in the town and in the country, the terror of the earth” ( W.A.I., 3:52). The method of using the arrows is not explained on the monuments. Tacitus describes the Germans as cutting into several pieces a rod from a fruit-bearing tree, marking the different pieces according to the different plans proposed and then casting them at hazard and deciding the issue by the way in which the sticks lay. So several arrows might be thrown into the air at the junction of two roads and the way taken to which the arrows inclined in falling; or inscribed arrows might be shaken in a vessel and one selected at random (Lenormant, La Divination, chap. ii). Doubtless, divination was practiced in Babylon by shooting the arrow (Laurent, La Magie et La Divination, 1894, p. 83, etc.); but the mention of the king shaking the arrows would favor here some other method. These arrows or spears are often seen represented, on the cylinders, carried in the hands to the number of eight by Asshur, Marduk, and Ishtar.

Consulted with images This practice is again mentioned (Zechariah 10:2). These images seem to have been figures of Mul-lil, or Eu-lil, the ghost-god. The habit of consulting them dates back to the most remote date of Babylonian civilization. Some of these which were brought from Khorsabad can be seen to-day in the British Museum. These images are called by the Semitic name, teraphim. (See Genesis 31:19.)

He looked in the liver This is thoroughly Babylonian. A cuneiform text at Berlin says, “Incantation: The liver of a dog, the liver of a black dog, the utuk of fortune, the utuk of Mul-lil, I see.”