Lamentations and Ezekiel for Everyone

By John Goldingay

In the Old Testament for Everyone series, Old Testament scholar John Goldingay addresses Scripture from Genesis to Malachi in such a way that even the most challenging passages are explained simply and concisely. The series is perfect for daily devotions, group study, or personal visits with the Bible.

In this volume on Lamentations and Ezekiel, Goldingay explores these two prophetic books. Lamentations is considered one of the most tragic books in the Bible, with graphic and blunt language about the destruction of Jerusalem at the hands of the Babylonians and the people's feelings of loss and despair amid God's silence. Ezekiel contains the prophet's thoughts after a tumultuous political time that saw many taken away from their homes and sent into exile. Where is God, Ezekiel asked, and what must we do for God to return?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Release date: Apr 13, 2016
• ISBN: 9781611647761

John Goldingay

John Goldingay is David Allan Hubbard Professor of Old Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California. An internationally respected Old Testament scholar, Goldingay is the author of many commentaries and books.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

As far as Jesus and the New Testament writers were concerned, the Jewish Scriptures that Christians call the Old Testament were the Scriptures. In saying that, I cut corners a bit, as the New Testament never gives us a list of these Scriptures, but the body of writings that the Jewish people accept is as near as we can get to identifying the collection that Jesus and the New Testament writers would have worked with. The church also came to accept some extra books such as Maccabees and Ecclesiasticus that were traditionally called the Apocrypha, the books that were hidden away—a name that came to imply spurious. They’re now often known as the Deuterocanonical Writings, which is more cumbersome but less pejorative; it simply indicates that these books have less authority than the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings. The precise list of them varies among different churches. For the purposes of this series that seeks to expound the Old Testament for Everyone, by the Old Testament we mean the Scriptures accepted by the Jewish community, though in the Jewish Bible they come in a different order, as the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings.

They were not old in the sense of antiquated or out of date; I sometimes like to refer to them as the First Testament rather than the Old Testament to make that point. For Jesus and the New Testament writers, they were a living resource for understanding God, God’s ways in the world, and God’s ways with us. They were useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the person who belongs to God can be proficient, equipped for every good work (2 Timothy 3:16–17). They were for everyone, in fact. So it’s strange that Christians don’t read them very much. My aim in these volumes is to help you do so.

My hesitation is that you may read me instead of the Scriptures. Don’t fall into that trap. I like the fact that this series includes much of the biblical text. Don’t skip over it. In the end, that’s the bit that matters.

An Outline of the Old Testament

The Christian Old Testament puts the books in the Jewish Bible in a distinctive order:

Genesis to Kings: A story that runs from the creation of the world to the exile of Judahites to Babylon

Chronicles to Esther: A second version of this story, continuing it into the years after the exile

Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs: Some poetic books

Isaiah to Malachi: The teaching of some prophets

Here is an outline of the history that lies at the books’ background. (I give no dates for events in Genesis, which involves too much guesswork.)

Lamentations

Lamentations is a series of five psalm-like prayers that follow Jeremiah in the English Bible and grieve over the destruction of Jerusalem. As far as we know, they have nothing directly to do with Jeremiah, but he’d agree with their understanding of what has happened, particularly their understanding of the city’s destruction. It’s an act brought about by human enemies, but it comes as an act of divine punishment for the city’s faithlessness over the years. In the Hebrew Bible the poems come elsewhere, not after Jeremiah. They’re associated with four other short books (Song of Songs, Ruth, Ecclesiastes, and Esther) because each of the five was used at one festival every year. Lamentations belongs to Tisha B’av, an occasion in July or August when the Jewish community recalls the occasions when Jerusalem was destroyed, in 587 and in AD 70. This usage fits well the nature of the five prayers, which grieve over the first of those two destructions, express sorrow at the sins that led to it, and plead with God for mercy.

Ezekiel

Ezekiel would also agree with Lamentations’ understanding of what has happened to Jerusalem. He was a younger contemporary of Jeremiah, but he’d been taken off to Babylon with the people who were transported there in 597, a decade before the city’s final fall. For the last years before that event he was thus seeking to prepare Judahites in Babylon for it, at the same time as Jeremiah was seeking to prepare people in Jerusalem.

His book is neatly organized, as follows:

Like Jeremiah, Ezekiel came from a priestly family, but he never functioned as a priest because he’d been transported from Jerusalem before he reached the right age. You could say that this event turned him into a priestly pastor or a priestly prophet. He has a priest’s way of thinking, as emerges in the way he describes the people’s waywardness, God’s disciplining them, and the way God will restore them.

The book begins with an appearance by Yahweh in Babylon, which leads into Yahweh’s commissioning Ezekiel to preach to his people there, though the young man is warned that they won’t listen. All through reading his book, we have to bear in mind that he isn’t in Jerusalem. He sees much of what is happening in the city, but he sees it by visionary means. He talks much about the city and about the clan area of Judah around it, but he does so for the sake of people from Jerusalem who have been taken into exile. He needs to get them to see that the continuing waywardness of the people left behind in the city makes its judgment and fall inevitable. Like Jeremiah in his ministry in Jerusalem itself, he has to get them to see that the fall of Jerusalem and their exile isn’t the end of judgment, soon to be followed by restoration. They’re only its beginning. He portrays the city’s waywardness in a priest’s terms. While he speaks of the faithlessness of its people to one another, he’s more concerned about the faithlessness of their religious life. The form that judgment will take is thus Yahweh’s departure from the temple.

Halfway through the book, at the end of chapter 24, Yahweh tells him that a fugitive from the city that has now fallen is about to arrive in Babylon to bring news of this event. This announcement prepares the way for good news, which occupies the second half of the book. One function of the messages about other nations is that they constitute a transition to the good news, because bad news for Judah’s adversaries is good news for Judah itself, though in themselves they also function as warnings to Judah not to think that alliances with other nations might be their salvation.

News of the city’s fall comes in chapter 33. It doesn’t mean that Ezekiel’s work as a prophet is over. Indeed, his mouth is opened in a new way. He now shares a series of positive visions of what Yahweh intends. This last section of the book is dominated by an account of his being taken on a visionary tour through a remodeled temple, though it lies at the center of a remodeled country. The fact that his vision of a new future takes this form is a further reflection of the fact that Yahweh chose a priest to be his prophet in Babylon, and by means of him Yahweh pictures the future in priestly terms. Ezekiel’s vision was especially influential on John of Patmos in providing the imagery that appears in his visions in the book of Revelation.

LAMENTATIONS 1:1–22

The City Pours Out Its Heart

We’ve just returned from driving around cities in Turkey such as Ephesus and Laodicea to whose churches John writes in Revelation, some of which Paul also visited. Seeing them generated a twofold shock. First there’s their size. I’d thought of them as something more like villages or small towns, but they’re monumentally vast. They’re the New York, Los Angeles, London, and Glasgow of their day. The second shock is then the fact that they’re simply ruins. Ephesus, for instance, was destroyed by the Goths in AD 262 and again by an earthquake in 614. What was it like to go through that experience? How did people pray in light of the event? How do you pray in light of an earthquake or a tsunami or an event such as 9/11?

Lamentations tells us the answer from Jerusalem’s angle, in light of the city’s devastation by the Babylonians in 587. It begins with a bare exclamation, Oh!—a cry of pain. This word gives the book its title in Hebrew (the title Lamentations comes from the old Greek translation). It’s also the first word in chapter 2 and in chapter 4. One reason for opening the book with this Hebrew word is that it begins with the first letter of the alphabet, aleph. The chapter has twenty-two verses; that number recurs in each chapter of the book. It’s the number of letters in the Hebrew alphabet. In the first four chapters the verses begin with the successive letters of the alphabet. The poems give expression to grief and pain from A to Z. Linking with this fact, the word all comes sixteen times: all Judah’s allies fail it, all the people’s pursuers catch them, all its enemies gloat, all passersby ignore it, though all peoples are urged to listen to its cry of pain, all Zion’s strong men are thrown aside, all its people are gone and all its gateways are deserted, all its glory, all its honor, and all its treasures are gone, all day Zion faints, all its rebellions have met with their punishment, and all their enemies’ evil should come before Yahweh to the same end.

One should allow for hyperbole; the Old Testament makes clear that the Babylonians didn’t transport the city’s entire population (still less Judah as a whole), and many people who fled from the city and the country during the Babylonian invasion doubtless crept back when the Babylonian army was gone. Yet the contrast between past and present is horrifying. Jerusalem was not a great city like Ephesus, or Babylon. But with its temple and its palaces, for its people it was a great city. Further, it was a great city because of the great God worshiped there. The poem imagines it as a person bewailing the loss of its people, a mother bewailing the loss of her children. The roads to Jerusalem mourn because they’re not full of pilgrims coming to its festivals. Conversely, the sanctuary’s been invaded by pagan feet (it would be no problem if these foreigners came to worship Yahweh, but they came to pillage).

Why did it happen? Whereas the Psalms protest about invasions that Jerusalem’s done nothing to deserve, Lamentations knows that this time the city cannot claim innocence. It’s been rebellious. It’s offended against Yahweh’s expectations, fallen short of them, missed the target because it hasn’t even aimed at it. It resembles someone unclean because of an involvement in something carrying a taboo (for instance, contact with blood or death or false worship).

The reference to friends and allies offers a further hint about the nature of its waywardness. Several prophets berate Judah for assuming that alliances with nations such as Egypt or Philistia are the proper safeguard for its destiny, that these people would support Judah in a crisis. The prophets’ assessment has been vindicated. The city is like a woman whose nakedness has been exposed.

The poem shows that knowing you got what you deserved doesn’t mean you can’t pray for mercy. The city does so. The poem describes Zion as spreading out her hands in the posture of appeal but finding no comforter. In what direction is she spreading them—toward Yahweh, or toward those other helpers in whom she has trusted?

The people who pray this poem don’t know, but for later readers like us, its fivefold reference to there being no comforter offers paradoxical reassurance. During the decades when the poem is being used in Jerusalem, Yahweh will give the order, Comfort, comfort my people (Isaiah 40). There’s no comforter is the truth about the situation at the moment, but things won’t be that way forever.

LAMENTATIONS 2:1–22

I Don’t Get Angry

A friend of mine told us a story about a church teaching event where people were invited to draw their anger. He described his wife’s mother, a grand old Southern lady, grasping her pencil firmly and declaring, I don’t get angry. He was not implying she was always all sweetness and light. He reminded me of an occasion when I’d taken part in a teaching event on the Psalms for some pastors. I hadn’t talked about the anger in the Psalms, and one of the pastors did so, with the evident assumption that it was a problem. I remember reflecting on how he seemed to be someone bound in on himself emotionally and I wondered whether his anger was turned in on himself. I don’t get angry very often, but when I allow myself to do so, it’s a bit scary for me, whatever effect it has on other people.

Lamentations is both scared and not scared of God’s anger. It’s an especially prominent theme in this chapter, which uses a range of words to describe these strong feelings of God’s. The Hebrew word for anger is also the word for one’s nose, which suggests it may link with the idea of snorting with anger. The word for fury comes from a verb that means go over, which suggests feelings that burst out from someone and overwhelm the object of them. The background of the word for blazing lies in the idea of burning, so it suggests blazing anger that consumes the angry person and consumes the object of the anger. Indeed, Lamentations goes on from talk about angry blazing to speak of God burning against Jacob like a flaming fire consuming all around and pouring out rage like fire. The word for rage also means heat. The word for wrath refers more to an attitude or to speech; in later Hebrew and in related languages it denotes threatening or scolding or cursing (or a camel’s roar).

The poet and the people who used this prayer wouldn’t be continually conscious of the different nuances of these words; part of their effect would be simply the piling up of different words with related meaning. They were certainly not afraid to talk of God’s anger, as the Scriptures aren’t afraid to talk of human anger, not merely as a sin but as a passion that can energize action. Whereas we’re inclined to divide emotions into good and bad (mercy and compassion are good, anger and hatred are bad), the Scriptures see these emotions as neutral. The question is, in what context are you showing mercy or hatred? Sometimes mercy is wrong and hatred is right, for human beings, and for God. We have this range of emotions through being made in God’s image. Conversely, God’s having this range of emotions indicates that God is a real person, not a principle or an abstract idea or an essence underlying everything or a being without passions. Passion doesn’t mean irrationality or arbitrariness but being involved and energized as a feeling being as well as a thinking being.

In principle, then, for God to be capable of blazing anger is good news. Of course, when you’ve become the object of that anger, the situation is scary. Judah has done so, and there’s nothing to be gained by denying it. Human beings can be properly angry about situations but unable to do anything about them. When God sees things are wrong, he can do something about it. Often he declines to do so. He’s long-suffering—literally, long of anger or long-tempered. But sometimes he decides, That’s it—the time has come to stop being long-tempered. The

Reviews for Lamentations and Ezekiel for Everyone

[deusvitae · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

(reviewing the Ezekiel section)From the "For Everyone" series and following the program: a translation of a section of a text, some kind of modern story, a basic interpretation of the section in context, and an application when appropriate.The Ezekiel addition to the series is serviceable and performs its purposes admirably: the author's translation is good, the interpretations are sound, and most applications understandable and effective.A good basic level commentary to help a reader understand the text.