Bible Commentaries

Ezekiel 10:1-8. The Burning of the City.—But the guilty city must be destroyed as well as the people: so the awful carnage is followed by a no less awful conflagration—prophetic of the fire, kindled later by Babylonian hands, which reduced the city to ashes (2 Kings 25:9). But this fire was kindled by supernatural hands which took it from among the flames that flashed and blazed between the strange creatures in the Divine chariot (Ezekiel 1:13); and again (cf. Ezekiel 9:3) the ominous note is struck of the departure of Yahweh, confirmed by the loud whirr of the wings. Very solemn was the moment when the linen-clad angel took the fire and went forth to scatter it over the guilty city. But over this scene, as over the other (Ezekiel 10:9), a veil of silence is drawn. The passage is overpoweringly dramatic. The Temple is desolate, Ezekiel is alone, around him are the slain, not far off is the mysterious chariot with its strange creatures, and, to crown all, the angel scattering flame over the city.

Ezekiel 10:9-22. This splendid passage is followed by a description of the Divine chariot (Ezekiel 10:9-17) which does little more than duplicate the description in Ezekiel 1:15-21, and which, to a modern taste, seems of the nature of an irrelevance and anticlimax. The point of the repetition, however, is suggested by Ezekiel 10:20; Ezekiel 10:22, which identify the chariot seen at Jerusalem with that seen in the former vision by the Chebar. It is as if Ezekiel said that the glorious God of Israel, whose glory had been trailed in the dust by His worshippers (Ezekiel 10:8), had not only annihilated Jerusalem, her Temple and her people, but had definitely abandoned it—at least for a time—for Babylonia where the exiles were; and the departure by the eastern gate is described in Ezekiel 10:18 f.

(In Ezekiel 10:14 for "cherub" we should perhaps read "ox": cf. Ezekiel 1:10.)