“Mischief will come upon mischief, and rumour will be upon rumour, and they shall seek a vision of the prophet, and the law will perish from the priest, and counsel from the elders. The king will mourn and the prince will be clothed with desolation, and the hands of the people of the land will be troubled.”
‘Mischief upon mischief.' An endless chain of problems and suffering and misery and heartache. And to top it all constant rumours of worse to come, and of what was to happen to them. But they would have nowhere to turn. There would be no message from their religious or civic leaders, no vision from the prophet, no guidance from the priest, no counsel from the elders (see Amos 3:5-7 and contrast Jeremiah 18:18). This would be because these have nothing worth while to offer. They would have no solution (in contrast with Jeremiah and Ezekiel). They themselves would be equally totally bewildered and without explanation, and have no message from God. They had been too involved in the abomination of idolatry, in polluting the house of Yahweh (2 Chronicles 36:14).
Thus the king will be in mourning, for he sees the trouble descending on them, but receives no prophetic word from God. The prince will be ‘clothed with desolation', overwhelmed by it, because he is aware of the desolation that is coming, and does not receive guidance from the priest. And the hands of the people of the land will be troubled. They will be in great distress and yet there will be no counsel from the elders.
Not the careful parallelism. Prophet and priest are in the singular, as are the king and the prince. The elders are in the plural as are ‘the hands of the people of the land'. This suggests the particular application as above. But behind it all is the fact that the guidance of prophet by prophetic vision, priest through the teaching of the Law and elders through general wisdom, based on experience, which should be for all, king, prince (tribal leader) and people, would be noticeably absent. Thus all would be left with no one to help them, without guidance in the face of the worst thing that had ever happened to them.
It is interesting that ‘the king' receives little mention in Ezekiel elsewhere. This may partly be due to the fact that Jehoiachin was still alive in exile and looked on by the people as the true king, so that he wanted to avoid too much reference to Zedekiah as king. But it was probably mainly because he did not want to divert the blame and guilt from the people. All were involved. Everyone would suffer for his own sin. However Ezekiel 17:12; Ezekiel 17:16 do refer to ‘the king and princes', so the two were clearly distinguished, and he speaks there of the king as being made king by Nebuchadnezzar.