Online Resource Library
Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.comKeil and Delitzsch Commentary - Ezekiel 21:18 - 21:18
(Show All Books | Show All Chapters)
This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
The sword of the king of Babylon will smite Jerusalem, and then the Ammonites also. - Eze 21:18. And the word of Jehovah came to me, saying, Eze 21:19. And thou, son of man, make to thyself two ways, that the sword of the king of Babylon may come by them; out of one land shall they both come forth, and draw a hand, at the cross road of the city do thou draw it. Eze 21:20. Make a way that the sword may come to Rabbah of the sons of Ammon, and to Judah into fortified Jerusalem. Eze 21:21. For the king of Babylon is stopping at the cross road, at the parting of the two ways, to practise divination. He is shaking the arrows, inquiring of the teraphim, looking at the liver. Eze 21:22. The divination falls to his right: Jerusalem, to set battering-rams, to open the mouth with a death-cry, to lift up the voice with a war-cry, to set battering-rams at the gates, to heap up a rampart, to build siege towers. - After the picture of the terrible devastation which the sword of the Lord will produce, the last word of God in this prophecy answers the questions, in whose hand Jehovah will place His sword, and whom it will smite. The slayer into whose hand the sharpened sword is given (Eze 21:11) is the king of Babylon, and it will smite not only Judah, but the Ammonites also. Jerusalem and Judah will be the first to fall, and then the arch-enemy of the covenant nation, namely Ammon, will succumb to the strokes of the sword of Jehovah, in order that the embittered enemies of the Lord and His people may learn that the fall of Jerusalem is not, as they fancy, a proof of the impotence, but rather of the omnipotence, of its God. In this way does our prophecy expand into a prediction of the judgment which will fall upon the whole of the world in hostility to God. For it is only as the arch-enemies of the kingdom of God that the Ammonites come into consideration here. The parallel between Israel and the sons of Ammon is carried out in such a way as to give constant prominence to the distinction between them. Jerusalem will fall, the ancient theocracy will be destroyed till he shall come who will restore the right (Eze 21:26 and Eze 21:27). Ammon, on the other hand, will perish, and not a trace be left (Eze 21:31, Eze 21:32).
This prediction is exhibited to the eye by means of a sign. The prophet is to make two ways, i.e., to prepare a sketch representing a road leading from a country, viz., Babylon, and dividing at a certain spot into two roads, one of which leads to Rabbath-Ammon, the capital of the kingdom of the Ammonites, the other to Judah, into Jerusalem. He is to draw the ways for the coming (לָבֹוא) of the sword of the king of Babylon. At the fork of the road he is to engrave a hand, יָד, i.e., an index. בָּרָא signifies in the Piel to cut away (Jos 17:15, Jos 17:18), to dig or hew (Eze 23:47), here to engrave written characters in hard material. The selection of this word shows that Ezekiel was to sketch the ways upon some hard material, probably a brick or tile (cf. Eze 4:1). יָד does not mean locus spatium, but a hand, i.e., an index. רֹאשׁ , the beginning of the road, i.e., the fork of the road (Eze 16:25), is explained in Eze 21:21, where it is called אֵם, mother of the road, inasmuch as the roads start from the point of separation, and רֹאשׁ שְׁנֵי הַדְּרָכִים, beginning of the two roads. דֶּרֶךְ עִיר, the road to a city. For Rabbath-Ammon, which is preserved in the ruins of Ammân, on the Upper Jabbok (Nahr Ammân), see the comm. on Deu 3:11. The road to Judah is still more precisely defined by בִּירוּשָׁלַיִם בְּצוּרָה, into fortified Jerusalem, because the conquest of Jerusalem was the purpose of Nebuchadnezzar's expedition. The omission of the article before בְּצוּרָה may be explained from the nature of the participle, in which, even in prose, the article may be left out after a definite noun (cf. Ewald, §335a). The drawing is explained in Eze 21:21 and Eze 21:22. The king of Babylon is halting (עָמַד, to stand still, stop) to consult his oracles, and inquire which of the two roads he is to take. קְסֹם, to take in hand, or practise divination. In order that he may proceed safely, he avails himself of all the means of divination at his command. He shakes the arrows (more strictly, the quiver with the arrows). On the practice itself Jerome writes as follows: “He consults the oracle according to the custom of his nation, putting his arrows into a quiver, and mixing them together, with the names of individuals inscribed or stamped upon them, to see whose arrow will come out, and which state shall be first attacked.”
(Note: The arrow-lot (Belomantie) of the ancient Greeks (Homer, Il. iii. 324, vii. 182, 183) was similar to this; also that of the ancient Arabs (vid., Pococke, Specim. hist. Arab. pp. 327ff., and the passages from Nuweiri quoted by Reiske, Samml. einiger Arab. Sprichwörter von den Stecken oder Stäben, p. 21). Another kind, in which the lot was obtained by shooting off the arrows, was common according to the Fihrist el Ulum of En-Nedîm among the Hananian Ssabians (see Chwolsohn, Ssabier, ii. pp. 26 and 119, 200).)
He consults the Teraphim, or Penates, worshipped as oracular deities and gods of good fortune (see the comm. on Gen 31:19 and my Biblical Archaeology, §90). Nothing is known concerning the way in which these deities were consulted and gave their oracles. He examines the liver. The practice of ἡπατοσκοπία, extispicium, in which signs of good or bad luck, of the success or failure of any enterprise, were obtained from the peculiar condition of the liver of the sacrificial animals, was a species of divination to which great importance was attached by both the Babylonians (vid., Diod. Sic. ii. 29) and the Romans (Cicero, de divin. vi. 13), and of which traces were found, according to Barhebr. Chron. p. 125, as late as the eighth century of the Christian era among the Ssabians of Haran.
The divination resulted in a decision for Jerusalem. בִּימִינֹו הָיָה is not to be translated “in his right hand was,” but “into his right hand there came.” הָיָה: ἐγένετο (lxx), נְפֵיל (Chald.), קֶסֶם does not mean lot (Ges.), but soothsaying, divination. יְרוּשָׁלַיִם is connected with this in the form of a noun in apposition: the divination which indicated Jerusalem. The right hand is the more important of the two. The meaning of the words cannot be more precisely defined, because we are not acquainted with the king of divination referred to; even if we were to take the words as simply relating to the arrow in this sense, that an arrow with the inscription “Jerusalem” came into his right hand, and thus furnished the decision, which was afterwards confirmed by consulting the Teraphim and examining the liver. But the circumstance itself, that is to say, the fact that the divination coincided with the purpose of God, must not be taken, as Hävernick supposes, as suggesting a point of contact between Hebraism and the soothsaying of heathenism, which was peculiar to Ezekiel or to the time of the captivity. All that is proved by this fact is, that even heathenism is subject to the rule and guidance of Almighty God, and is made subservient to the accomplishment of the plans of both His kingdom and His salvation. In the words, to set bettering rams, etc., the substance of the oracle obtained by Nebuchadnezzar is more minutely given. It is a double one, showing what he is to do: viz., (1) to set bettering rams, i.e., to proceed to the siege of Jerusalem, as still further described in the last portion of the verse (Eze 4:2); and (2) to raise the war-cry for storming the city, that is to say, to take it by storm. The two clauses 'לִפְתֹּחַ וגו and 'לְהָרִים וגו are synonymous; they are not “pure tautology,” however, as Hitzig affirms, but are chosen for the purpose of giving greater emphasis to the thought. The expression בְּרֶצַח creates some difficulty, inasmuch as the phrase “ut aperiat os in caede” (Vulg.), to open the mouth in murder or ruin, i.e., to put to death or lay in ruins, is a very striking one, and could hardly be justified as an “energetic expression for the battle-cry” (Hävernick). ב does not mean “to,” and cannot indicate the intention, all the less because בְּרֶצַח is parallel to בִּתְרוּעָה, where תרועה is that in which the raising of the voice expresses itself. There is nothing left then but to take רֶצַח in the sense of field-or war-cry, and to derive this meaning either from רָצַח or, per metathesin, from צָרַח.