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Commentary Index | Return to PrayerRequest.com | DownloadEzekiel, Jonah, and Pastoral Epistles by Patrick Fairbairn - Ezekiel 28:6 - 28:10
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This Chapter Verse Commentaries:
Eze_28:6. Therefore, thus saith the Lord Jehovah, Because thou hast set thine heart as the heart of God,
Eze_28:7. Therefore, behold, I bring upon thee strangers, the terrible of the nations; and they shall draw their swords against the beauty of thy wisdom, and pierce through thy splendour:
Eze_28:8. To the pit shall they bring thee down, and thou shalt die the deaths (Why deaths here, and in Eze_28:10, and not rather death? Because, say some, various kinds of death are referred to; or, because the abstract idea (as made up of the several particulars) is thus denoted when raised to its highest form. No, says Häv., “the plural is only used of death when several persons are spoken of.” This is not so clear. Isa_53:9 is not quite easily explained on that principle. And certainly the apostle Paul, whose style of thought was quite Hebraistic, used the plural in reference to different kinds, when he says, “in deaths oft.” ) of the pierced-through in the midst of the seas.
Eze_28:9. Wilt thou indeed say, I am God, in the presence of him that slays thee? and thou art man (that is, thou art assuredly man), and not God, in the land of him that pierces thee through. 10. The deaths of the uncircumcised thou shalt die by the hand of strangers: for I have spoken, saith the Lord Jehovah.
The judgment to be executed on the king of Tyre was thus to be exactly adapted to his guilt; it was to be such as would force on him the conviction that he had not the might and wisdom of God at his command, but, like other frail and erring mortals, was liable to be overcome and brought to destruction. This judgment, it is simply declared, was going to be executed by the hand of strangers, the terrible ones of the nations—an epithet elsewhere given to the Chaldeans (Eze_30:11, Eze_31:12); though there is no necessity here for absolutely confining it to them. Here it only intimates that terrible instruments of vengeance should be provided, fit for executing the Divine purpose of retribution; so that destruction would surely come in its appointed time—the death, as of persons given up to the slaughter, or as of the uncircumcised, who had no interest in the covenant of Heaven, and were doomed to perish.
The delineation we have considered, first of the high presumption and peerless glory of the king of Tyre, and then of his Divine chastisement and utter ruin, is followed by another in which precisely the same topics are again handled, and in the same order. The representation, however, at the beginning, of the king’s greatness and glory, while it is drawn in the same ironical vein as in the former case, is cast in an entirely different mould, and is intended to exhibit this proud monarch as a kind of normal or primeval man, the type of humanity in its best and most divine-like form; but only for the purpose of showing how incapable he was of bearing the glory, and how necessary it was that he should be visited with Divine chastisement, and brought to final ruin. The passage is not without its difficulties; but these have often been greatly aggravated by not perceiving the exact point of view from which the delineation is drawn; and hence, from the LXX. downwards, all manner of liberties have been taken with the original.