I will give them one heart. The LXX; following a different reading, gives "another heart" (as in 1 Samuel 10:9); but the Hebrew, represented by the Authorized and Revised Versions, is, without any doubt, right.
As in the symbolic action of the joining of the two sticks in Ezekiel 37:15-22, so here, the hope of the prophet, like that of Isaiah and Jeremiah (Jeremiah 32:37-39), looked forward to the unity of the restored people.
Judah should no longer vex Ephraim, nor Ephraim Judah (Isaiah 11:13). The long standing line of cleavage should disappear. Oneness of purpose and of action would characterize the new Israel of God. So, in our Lord's prayer for his Church, there is the prayer that "they may be one"—made perfect in one (John 17:21-23).
Left to itself, Israel tended, as all human communities have tended, to an ever-subdividing individualism, fruitful in sects and parties and schisms. Even the highest of those aspirations has remained as yet without any adequate fulfilment.
The ideal unity of the Christian Church is as far distant as that of the Church of Israel. It remains for us to welcome any approximate fulfilments as pledges and earnests of the future unity of the true Israel of God in the heavenly Jerusalem.
In the prophet's thoughts that unity was to be brought about by the Divine gift of a "new Spirit," loyal, obedient, unselfish. We note how distinctly, whether consciously or unconsciously, Ezekiel reproduces the thought, almost the very words, of Jeremiah 31:31-33; Jeremiah 32:37-39; how his words are in their turn reproduced in Revelation 21:3-5.
The eternal hope asserts itself again and again in spite of all partial failures and disappointments. I will take the stony heart out of their flesh. The thought is, as we have seen, identical with that of Jeremiah 31:31-33, but the form in this instance is eminently characteristic of Ezekiel, and meets us again in Ezekiel 36:26.
The "stony heart" is that which is "hardened" (Ezekiel 3:7) against all impressions of repentance, to all natural or spiritual aspirations of the good. So Zechariah 7:12 speaks of those who had made their hearts "harder than an adamant stone."
So we may remember, by way of illustration, that Burns says of the sin of impurity that "it hardens a' within," that "it petrifies the feeling." Ezekiel had seen enough of that stoniness in others, perhaps had, at times, felt it in himself.