Ezekiel 46:16-18

16-18. These regulations protecting the sons of the prince prove that Ezekiel thought of him as a civil officer. The old interpreters who tried to make every phrase concerning the prince point to a coming heavenly Messiah were wrong. That every ceremonial act of the prince, king, and priests, in the Hebrew, as in every other ancient ritual, was intended to teach some religious lesson cannot be doubted; but what these lessons were must be determined by the symbolic language of the age and not by pressing our Christian conceptions into the Old Testament law (note Ezekiel 43:10-11). The property of the prince (Ezekiel 45:7-8) if given to a servant must revert back to the prince at the “year of release” (probably the fiftieth, the year of jubilee, Leviticus 25:10; Leviticus 27:24; though it is possibly the seventh, the year of release from debts, Jeremiah 34:14; Deuteronomy 15:12). But the gifts of the prince to his sons should be theirs forever: “as for his inheritance, it shall be for his sons” (R.V., Ezekiel 46:17). The prince must not, however, take any of the people’s lands in order to increase the inheritance of the royal princes (Ezekiel 46:18; compare 1 Kings 21:0). The rights of each Hebrew citizen to a portion of the land were sacredly guarded by the old law (Leviticus 25:23; Numbers 26:27).