Ezekiel 8:1-6

Ezekiel 8-13. Other Visions of Sin and Judgment.

Ezekiel 8. The Idolatry of Jerusalem Illustrated.

Ezekiel 8:1. The Jealousy Image. The visions which fill chs. 8- 11 occurred about a year after those that precede (Ezekiel 1:1), i.e. in 591 B.C. This chapter gives concrete illustrations of the kind of sin that justified the doom already announced: significantly enough, they all centre round idolatry (cf. Ezekiel 8:6), and most horrible of all the scene of it is the Temple itself. Thither, on the occasion of a visit of certain Judæ an elders to his house Ezekiel had been transported in ecstatic trance by the Divine Being, whose glory he had seen and described in ch. 1: there he had witnessed some think by a kind of second sight one idolatry after another, each one worse than the last, and all represented as constraining Yahweh to depart from His sanctuary. First was an image of jealousy, i.e. an image which provoked Yahweh: it may have been an image of the goddess Astarte, or it may only have been a sacred pole (ashç râ) forbidden to the Yahweh worship (Deuteronomy 16:21): enough, as an image, it was an abomination the more so, as it had been introduced after being abolished by Josiah (2 Kings 23:6).