EXPOSITION
The magnificent temple-vision, as it is usually styled, a description of which forms the closing section of this book (Ezekiel 40-48.), was the last extended" word" communicated to the prophet, and was given him in the five and twentieth year of the Captivity, i.e. about B.C. 575. Two years later he received a brief revelation concerning Egypt, which, in compiling his volume, he incorporated with the other prophecies relating to the same subject (Ezekiel 29:17-21). Of the present oracle as a whole the significance will be best understood when its several parts have been examined in detail. Meanwhile it may suffice to note that it manifestly connects itself with the promise in Ezekiel 37:27, Ezekiel 37:28, and forms an appropriate conclusion to the series of consolatory predictions which the prophet began to utter when tidings came to him that the city was smitten (Ezekiel 33:22, Ezekiel 33:28). Having set forth the moral and spiritual conditions upon which alone restoration was possible for Israel (Ezekiel 33:24 -34.), announced the destruction of all Israel's ancient enemies, of whom Edom was the standing type (Ezekiel 35:1-15.), foretold the dawning of a better day for Israel (Ezekiel 36:1-38.), when she should be resuscitated, reunited, and re-established in her old land, with Jehovah's sanctuary in its midst (Ezekiel 37:1-28.), and predicted the utter and final overthrow of all future combinations of hostile powers against her (Ezekiel 38:1-23; Ezekiel 39:1-29.), the prophet proceeds to develop the thought to which he has already alluded, that of Israel's re-establishment in Canaan, and to sketch an outline of the reorganized community or kingdom of God as that had been shown him in vision. His material he arranges in three main divisions, speaking first of a re-erected temple (Ezekiel 40-43.), next of a reorganized worship (Ezekiel 44-46.), and lastly of a redistributed territory (Ezekiel 47:1-23; Ezekiel 48:1-35.). That Ezekiel, sorrowing over the first Israel's glories which had vanished with the fall of Jerusalem and the burning of her temple, and filled with eager anticipations of the golden era which was then beginning to loom up before him in ever fairer proportions and brighter colors—that Ezekiel himself may have inwardly believed or hoped the picture he was then placing on his canvas would be ultimately realized upon the old soil, is by no means improbable; that the Holy Spirit, the real Author of the temple-vision, was drafting for the new Israel, soon to arise from the ashes of the old, a fresh religious and political constitution, which could not be satisfied with any merely local, temporal, and material realization, such as might be given to it in Palestine on the close of the exile, but reached out to something larger, broader, and more spiritual, even to the Israel of Messianic times, i.e. to the Church of God in Christian ages;—that the Holy Spirit had some such design is at least an idea which one might be pardoned for enter-raining. (For the different views which have been held as to the proper interpretation of this vision, see note at the end of Ezekiel 48:1-35.)