Ezekiel 8:1-6 - Arthur Peake's Commentary on the Bible

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Ezekiel 8-13. Other Visions of Sin and Judgment.

Ezekiel 8. The Idolatry of Jerusalem Illustrated.

Ezekiel 8:1-6. The Jealousy Image. The visions which fill chs. 8- 11 occurred about a year after those that precede (Ezekiel 1:1), i.e. in 591 B.C. This chapter gives concrete illustrations of the kind of sin that justified the doom already announced: significantly enough, they all centre round idolatry (cf. Ezekiel 8:6), and most horrible of all the scene of it is the Temple itself. Thither, on the occasion of a visit of certain Judæ an elders to his house Ezekiel had been transported in ecstatic trance by the Divine Being, whose glory he had seen and described in ch. 1: there he had witnessed some think by a kind of second sight one idolatry after another, each one worse than the last, and all represented as constraining Yahweh to depart from His sanctuary. First was an image of jealousy, i.e. an image which provoked Yahweh: it may have been an image of the goddess Astarte, or it may only have been a sacred pole (ashç râ) forbidden to the Yahweh worship (Deuteronomy 16:21): enough, as an image, it was an abomination the more so, as it had been introduced after being abolished by Josiah (2 Kings 23:6).

Related Commentaries of Ezekiel 8:1

Ezekiel 8:1-6

1 And it came to pass in the sixth year, in the sixth month, in the fifth day of the month, as I sat in mine house, and the elders of Judah sat before me, that the hand of the Lord GOD fell there upon me.

2 Then I beheld, and lo a likeness as the appearance of fire: from the appearance of his loins even downward, fire; and from his loins even upward, as the appearance of brightness, as the colour of amber.

3 And he put forth the form of an hand, and took me by a lock of mine head; and the spirit lifted me up between the earth and the heaven, and brought me in the visions of God to Jerusalem, to the door of the inner gate that looketh toward the north; where was the seat of the image of jealousy, which provoketh to jealousy.

4 And, behold, the glory of the God of Israel was there, according to the vision that I saw in the plain.

5 Then said he unto me, Son of man, lift up thine eyes now the way toward the north. So I lifted up mine eyes the way toward the north, and behold northward at the gate of the altar this image of jealousy in the entry.

6 He said furthermore unto me, Son of man, seest thou what they do? even the great abominations that the house of Israel committeth here, that I should go far off from my sanctuary? but turn thee yet again, and thou shalt see greater abominations.