The hand of the Lord was upon me. The absence of the customary "and" (comp. Ezekiel 1:1, Ezekiel 1:3; Ezekiel 3:14, Ezekiel 3:22), wanting only once again (Ezekiel 40:1), appears to indicate something extraordinary and unusual in the prophet's experience.
In the words of Ewald, such a never-beheld sight one sees freely (by itself) in a moment of higher inspiration or never;" and that in this whole vision the prophet was the subject of a special and intensified inspiration is evident, not alone from the contents of the vision, but also from the language in which it is recorded.
And carried me out in the Spirit of the Lord. So the Vulgate and Hitzig—a translation which Smend thinks might be justified by an appeal to Ezekiel 11:24, in which the similar phrase, "Spirit of God (Elohim)," occurs; though, with Grotius, Havernick, Keil, and others, he prefers the rendering of the LXX; "And Jehovah carried me out in the Spirit."
The Revised Version combines the two thus: "And he carried me out in the Spirit of the Lord." Keil suggests that the words, "of God," in Ezekiel 11:24, were omitted here because of the word "Jehovah" immediately following.
And set me down in the midst of the valley. As the article indicates, the valley in the neighborhood of Tel-Abib, where the prophet received his first instructions concerning his mission (Ezekiel 3:22); although Hengstenberg holds, wrongly we think, that "the valley here has nothing to do with the valley in Ezekiel 3:22."
Which (literally, and it) was full of bones; i.e. of men who had been slaughtered there (Ezekiel 3:9; comp. Ezekiel 39:11), and whose corpses had been left unburied upon the face of the plain (Ezekiel 3:3), so that they were seen by the prophet.
Whether these bones were actually in the valley, or merely formed part of the vision, can only be conjectured, though the latter opinion seems the more probable. At the same time, such a plain as is here depicted may well have been a battle-ground on which Assyrian and Chaldean armies had often met.