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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadGreater Men and Women of the Bible by James Hastings: 424. The Personality of
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The Personality of Ezekiel
Literature
Clifford, J., Daily Strength for Daily Living (1887), 261.
Davidson, A. B., The Book of the Prophet Ezekiel (Cambridge Bible) (1892).
Davidson, A. B., The Theology of the Old Testament (1904), 339.
Driver, S. R., Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (1913), 278.
Edghill, E. A., The Evidential Value of Prophecy (1906).
Forsyth, P. T., Missions in State and Church (1908), 291.
Godet, F., Biblical Studies: Old Testament (1875), 161.
Harvey-Jellie, W., Ezekiel: His Life and Mission (Bible Class Primers).
Hitchcock, F. R. M., Hebrew Types (1913), 226.
Kent, C. F., The Makers and Teachers of Judaism (1911), 12.
Kirkpatrick, A. F., The Doctrine of the Prophets (1892), 321.
Knudson, A. C., The Beacon Lights of Prophecy (1914), 202.
Lewis, H. E., By the River Chebar (1903).
Lofthouse, W. F., Ezekiel (Century Bible) (1907).
McFadyen, J. E., Introduction to the Old Testament (1905), 162.
Maclaren, A., Expositions: Ezekiel to Malachi (1908).
Matheson, G., The Representative Men of the Bible, ii. (1903) 309.
Maurice, F. D., The Prophets and Kings of the Old Testament (1892), 445.
Orelli, C. von, Old Testament Prophecy (1885), 361.
Ottley, R. L., The Religion of Israel (1905), 108.
Peake, A. S., The Problem of Suffering in the Old Testament (1904), 17.
Redpath, H. A., The Book of the Prophet Ezekiel (Westminster Commentaries) (1907).
Sanders, F. K., and Kent, C. F., The Messages of the Later Prophets (1899), 19.
Westcott, B. F., Peterborough Sermons (1904), 291.
Whitehouse, O. C., The Book of the Prophet Ezekiel (Temple Bible).
Wood, I. F., and Grant, E., The Bible as Literature (1914), 71.
Woods, F. H., and Powell, F. E., The Hebrew Prophets, iii. (1911) 9.
Dictionary of the Bible, i. (1898) 814 (J. Skinner).
Dictionary of the Bible, i. (Single-volume, 1909) 251 (J. Taylor).
Jewish Encyclopedia, v. (1903) 313 (K. H. Cornill).
Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, v. (1898) 704 (C. von Orelli).
1. Every living “word” must be made flesh and dwell among us; live in a human and personal life, breathe our warm breath, grasp us with sympathetic and friendly hands, carry our sins and bear our sorrows, if it is to gain admission at “lowly doors”; stir the “spirit's inner deeps”; compel and inspire to an ampler life the reluctant souls of men. Disembodied ideas are very poor things in themselves, mere ghosts with which we may talk in our dreams, but from which we get little satisfying guidance, and less veritable strength in our hard workaday life. True it is that lilies preach innocence without words, and violets whisper humility without lips; that thoughts are made potent by poetry, eloquent by the artist's brush, and soothing and rousing by harp and organ; but it is when they throb and glow with the magnetism of an apt and living personality that they transfuse the soul with their greatness, fire the imagination with their flame, compel us to “clutch the golden keys and mould a mighty state's decrees,” and ever move from high to higher, and “without haste, without rest,” on to the highest. The maximum of power is never gained by ideas till they possess and sway the “body prepared for them,” and clothe themselves with the subtle and mysterious influence of a vital and impressive personality.
And what is a personality? A combination of heredity and environment? Both heredity and environment are to be reckoned with. They account for temperamental differences and difficulties; explain the greater or less strength of the obstacles to be faced and mastered; assist in determining the quantity of credit really due to an individual for any particular work, show the reasons why that which is easy to one is enormously difficult to another; and they are the cause of some of the suffering and misery in the human lot. But the real duty of the individual to God and to his fellow remains intact, springs out of his spiritual relations and powers, and binds him to be and do the highest and best possible to him, where he is and as he is. The man is not made by his “environment” or his ancestry. He makes himself. Guilt must be his own. He is an individual; he knows it, he feels it, and in his best and noblest moods he looks with ineffable scorn on the doctrine that he is the helpless slave of his body and bias.
2. More interesting than his writings and his importance for the development of Jewish thought is Ezekiel's own personality. We have the materials for knowing Ezekiel as well as any man in the Old Testament; perhaps, with the single exception of St. Paul, as well as any man in the whole Bible. The great characters of earlier history leave us with the problem of separating what later ages thought about them from what they were themselves; the writers of the prophetic as of the apostolic age leave us with equally difficult problems as to the time, order, and occasion of their writings-of our only data, that is to say, for becoming acquainted with the men themselves. But in the case of Ezekiel these problems are hardly suggested. We have a series of writings to which for the most part dates are carefully attached, and which reveal an orderly connexion both with one another and with the course of their author's thought and experiences. In the Book of Isaiah-and even in the first thirty-nine chapters of the book-is included much that modern study has attributed to later times. The writings of Jeremiah have strangely and almost hopelessly lost their chronological sequence. Even the “minor” prophets reveal themselves as compilations of different times and often of different authors. But the unity and orderliness of Ezekiel's works is striking and practically unquestioned; and the personality which they reveal is not less striking.
At first sight, the impression left by reading Ezekiel is disappointing and even repellent. All that is best in him seems borrowed from Jeremiah; all the rest nothing more than the product of a mind unable to separate the kernel of true religion from the husk of formula and ritual. But closer study reveals the opposite. What seemed mere enthusiasm for ritual now shows itself as a scrupulous and earnest conscientiousness, to which every command of God is important, simply because it is from God; which feels a single infringement of the law to be a breaking of the whole, and which is perfectly familiar with the truth, still only half learnt, that in religion the bodily and the mental, the inner and the outer, must for ever influence and react on one another.