Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month, as I was among the captives by the river Chebar, that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God.- Eze_1:1.
The Book of Ezekiel is generally considered to be one of the most difficult in the Bible; it is certainly one of the most interesting. At the centre of the development of Israelite history and religion stand the prophets; at the centre of the goodly fellowship of the prophets stands Ezekiel. The religious thought and activity of Israel is full of contrasts; the contrast between prophet and priest, the messages which they brought to the nation and the principles for which they stood; the contrast between their ideals for the nation and their ideals for the individual, and the consequent difference in their thoughts of God, the soul, and the world; the contrast between the speaker and the writer, and between the preacher who directs himself to the needs of the present and the seer who projects his gaze to the day of the final consummation of God's righteousness; the contrast between the philosophic interpretation of national history and the inspired outbursts of religious emotion;-all these contrasts meet in Ezekiel, at once priest and prophet, inspirer of a nation and pastor of individual souls, the preacher to expectant audiences and the writer for future generations.
It may be said, I think, without rashness that for every ten readers of Isaiah, readers who think and love, there are seven readers of Jeremiah, and not more than two or three who turn to Ezekiel with a like spirit of reverential study. In the old lectionary of the English Church, the latter prophet was almost conspicuous by his absence, and there were but fifteen lessons taken from his writings. It is one of the many gains from the new table of lessons that the balance is, in some measure, redressed, and that men are taught not to look on one of the great prophets of the Old Testament as too hard for them to understand or profit by. But it may be questioned how far that lesson has as yet been adequately learned.1 [Note: Dean E. H. Plumptre.]
Ezekiel is at once one of the most mysterious, yet one of the most entrancing, of the Hebrew seers.2 [Note: Jean Paul Richter.]
