Bible Fiber

In last week’s episode, Ezekiel offered encouragement and comfort to the exiles, who worried that they were excluded from God’s plans for the nation of Israel. Surprisingly, Ezekiel identified them as the prophesied remnant. To help them chart a fresh course, God promised to gift them a new heart made of flesh (11:19). Instead of rejoicing over the good news, Chapter 12 reveals that a contingent of exiles rejected Ezekiel as a divine messenger. His oracles and sign-acts, no matter how forceful and dramatic, were unsuccessful in getting through. Despite Ezekiel’s best efforts, they remained stonyhearted. God warned Ezekiel, “Mortal, you are living in the midst of a rebellious house who have eyes to see but do not see, who have ears to hear but do not hear” (12:2). Other prophets, like Isaiah and Jeremiah, used this same terminology to describe the epidemic of spiritual indifference in their time (Isa. 26:11; Jer. 5:21). Jesus, six hundred years later, also described how his teaching failed to affect those with deadened senses. Jesus used parables to reveal the purpose of his mission, recognizing that only those with perceptive eyes and attentive ears would understand his teachings (Matt. 13:13-15). For those listeners who were spiritually awake, the parables revealed “the secrets of the kingdom of God” (Luke 8:10). Like Jesus, Ezekiel hoped his message broke through to the seeing and hearing remnant, even if the spiritually blind and deaf rejected it.

This week we are studying Ezekiel 11, the concluding sequence in Ezekiel’s multi-part vision, and his last message before the glory of the Lord departed Jerusalem. So far, the prophet has taken a tour of the temple’s abominations, observed a squad of executioners on a killing spree, and watched the man in linen drop fiery coals on Jerusalem. The last episode ended with the Lord mounting his throne chariot to depart the temple complex, but his glory paused over the east gate. Chapter 11 opens with the divine spirit depositing Ezekiel at the east gate where the throne chariot still hovered (11:1). 

In Ezekiel’s vision of the departing presence, the glory of the Lord was represented by a cloud. God’s glory coming in the form of a cloud would have been familiar to Ezekiel and his audience. In the early days of Israel’s wilderness wandering, the Israelites were comforted by the divine cloud as it settled atop the tabernacle and filled the tent with the divine glory (Ex. 40:34). Throughout those forty years, the cloud was a constant reassurance that Yahweh abided in their midst. When the cloud lifted, it was time for the people to decamp and move to the next site. As they moved sites, the cloud moved as well, demonstrating that Yahweh remained with his itinerant people. The most terrifying aspect to Ezekiel’s vision was that Yahweh’s cloud of glory was moving out of Jerusalem without the covenant people. Acting with his own free and divine agency, God did not invite the Jerusalemites to follow him. The glory of God made a solo exit.

This week we were going to go over Ezekiel 10, the next chapter in our Ezekiel study. Ezekiel 10 is one of the lowest lows in the entire book because it records when God’s glory exited the Jerusalem temple. But that did not seem like the right message two days before Resurrection Sunday. I still regret doing a podcast on the Philistines five days before Christmas. So, we are going to pause Ezekiel this week and instead focus on a prophetic passage that Jesus himself used to introduce his ministry on earth. We are looking at Isaiah 61 and its connection to Luke 4. Isaiah 61 begins:  The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn. (Isa. 61:1-2).This passage in Isaiah is one of the most remarkable prophecies in the book. It throbs with messianic hope. On one particular Sabbath service in Nazareth, sometime around 27 AD, Jesus was the special congregant called up to the pulpit to read Isaiah 61. 

This week we are studying Ezekiel 8, the prophet’s second visionary experience. Ezekiel had been living in exile for five years without any updates about the situation in Jerusalem. One day, toward the end of his 430-day stint of lying on his side, he envisioned a messenger of God, fiery like gleaming amber, picking him up by his hair and supernaturally transporting him to Jerusalem. Out of all the prophets, Ezekiel may be the best at delivering a well-crafted hook. In describing his transport, Ezekiel said, “the spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven and brought me in visions of God to Jerusalem” (8:3). In my imagination, Ezekiel traveled the thousand miles from Babylon to Jerusalem in the same manner the characters traveled in Madeline L’Engle’s science-fiction book The Wrinkle in Time. In the book, Meg Murray, the main character, moved between places and eras by “tessering,” wrinkling the fabric of space-time. Ezekiel was reluctant to “tesser” which is why his divine guide had to grab hold of his hair. Again, this is all in my head where literature sometimes colors the Bible’s missing details and tessering is L’Engle’s made-up verb. According to the biblical text, Ezekiel’s body remained in Babylon, but his mind had a full sensory experience in Jerusalem.Ezekiel noted that the vision occurred “in the sixth year, in the sixth month, on the fifth day of the month” (8:1). Ezekiel used the sixth year of King Jehoiachin’s reign as his reference point, even though Jehoiachin was exiled in Babylon alongside him and not actually ruling over anything. (There is a lot more to say about King Jehoiachin, but I am going to save that for the episode on Ezekiel 17.) Ezekiel’s date works out to 18 September 592 BCE. According to his precise chronology, the Jerusalem vision occurred fourteen months after he first saw an apparition of God’s throne chariot by the Chebar River and accepted his call to the prophetic office. According to the text, a delegation of elders was with Ezekiel in his home when he had the visionary experience. They were likely lay leaders who came to Ezekiel seeking an oracle from the Lord. Despite the excesses of his sign-acts, the people recognized him as a prophet. Perhaps they inquired about Jerusalem and the fate of their compatriots, or they came because his elaborate sign-acts were a sight to behold. 

This week we are studying Ezekiel 7. On last week’s episode, our prophet-in-exile addressed the mountains of Israel from the plains of Babylon. In the two episodes before that, Ezekiel spoke to the city of Jerusalem. This week, he expands his message to all “the land of Israel” in a highly evocative sermon (7:1). We are only seven chapters into Ezekiel, but the message is starting to feel like the reverse of the classic folktale of Chicken Little. In the folktale, after an acorn falls on Chicken Little’s head, he falsely determines that the sky must be falling. He spreads the news to all his animal friends, like Lucky Ducky and Henny Penny, and total hysteria ensues in the community. Ezekiel had the opposite experience. He knew the proverbial sky was falling and it was not the result of naivety or a misunderstanding of gravity. As God reveals the inevitable devastation of Jerusalem, the panicked tone in Ezekiel’s prophecies ratchets up. However, unlike Chicken Little, the Israelites did not take his warnings seriously. 

This week we are reading Ezekiel 6. In his previous demonstrations, Ezekiel centered his actions and oracles around his Jerusalem city model. After that drama, God instructed the prophet to turn and address a new audience, the mountains of Israel. God said, “Set your face towards the mountains of Israel and prophesy against them and say: You mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord God” (6:2). Ezekiel certainly could not see the mountains of Israel from the plains of Babylon. In fact, in the low-lying valley between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, Ezekiel would have seen only flat fertile land for miles. As the prophet set his face towards his homeland, he had to conjure up the memory of Israel’s mountain ridge that ran north to south for almost the entire length of the country. Ezekiel’s address includes the hills, ravines, and valleys. All of Judah’s undulating landscape is in view, including Jerusalem situated on a plateau in Judea’s central highlands. However, Ezekiel did not recall the beauty of his homeland as a sentimental exercise. The prophet, speaking for Yahweh, pronounced, “I myself, will bring a sword upon you. And I will destroy your high places” (6:3). 

This week we are reading Ezekiel 5, a continuation of the prophet’s bizarre series of sign-acts. The Lord commanded Ezekiel to get a sharp sword, instead of a barber’s razor, and shave his head and beard (5:1). The laws of Leviticus forbid priests from making bald spots on their head or shaving off the edges of their beards (Lev. 21:5). Yet, as a priest, Ezekiel did not protest this defiling performance. With a sword in his hand, he dramatized what must have seemed to his audience like a self-appointed excommunication. In biblical times, shaving could be a legitimate expression of mourning (Job 1:20). Ancient mourners tore their clothes, put on sackcloth, and rubbed ashes on their head as outward representations of their internal suffering. One interpretation of the sign-act is that Ezekiel was symbolically mourning the coming loss of Jerusalem. If that was his intention, a razor would have sufficed. Instead, Ezekiel used a sword, an instrument of war, to shear himself. In the ancient Near East, victorious armies often degraded their captives by shaving them as a sign of their forced subjugation (Isa. 15:2). Ezekiel humiliated himself to represent the Babylonian’s military defeat of Jerusalem.After Ezekiel shaved, God instructed him to put the hair on a balancing scale so that he could divide it into three equal parts (5:1). Weighing and measuring were verbs often used to describe God’s careful and deliberate judgement. After he divided the hair into thirds, the prophet was to dispose of each section of hair through different actions that symbolized the fate of Jerusalem’s population, whether their death occurred by fire, famine, or sword. 

Prophetic sign-acts pop up frequently in the Major and Minor Prophets. They were real-life dramatizations that represented divine messages. I think of them as prophetic versions of immersive theater with object lessons. Knowing humans are visual, auditory, and tactile learners, God used all three communication methods to shake the covenant people out of their spiritual apathy. Elijah, Elisha, Hosea, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Zechariah all performed sign-acts during their careers to reinforce their primary message. However, no prophet relied on sign-acts more than Ezekiel. This probably had something to do with the fact that he was also the prophet that God struck dumb. God commanded Ezekiel to “take a brick and set it before you” and “on it portray a city, Jerusalem” (4:1). When imagining Ezekiel’s brick, do not picture a small, hardened, modern brick. It was more likely the size of a large tile or building block. Because God told Ezekiel to inscribe the brick, the clay must have not yet dried and hardened in the sun, according to typical Babylonian construction methods. Although the text does not indicate the level of Ezekiel’s artisanship, the prophet drew from memory a blueprint of his hometown, Jerusalem. God also instructed him to build models of siege equipment, possibly out of sticks, clay, or straw. Encircling the visual aid of Jerusalem was a miniature siege wall, a ramp, enemy encampments, and battering rams (4:2). According to Babylonian war tactics, the siege wall prevented escape during the siege, and the battering rams broke down the city’s gates and walls. In my imagination, Ezekiel engaged in a one-player version of the board game Risk. 

Today we are studying the rest of Chapter 3. The section opens with the spirt of God once again lifting Ezekiel up to his feet after he had fallen prostrate at the sight of Yahweh’s glory (3:11). As the Spirit transported him to the colony of exiles in Tel Abib, Ezekiel heard the commotion of the living creatures’ wings and the rumbling of the chariot wheels (3:11-12). When Ezekiel had faced the throne chariot head-on, the visuals overwhelmed him. When the throne chariot was behind him, he realized the high decibels. In a rare moment of personal expression, Ezekiel confessed the anger he felt about his burdensome assignment. He said, “I went in bitterness in the heat of my spirit” (3:14). Rarely in the book does Ezekiel give insight into his interior state, but this confession shows why the prophet required a long prompting from God. During his commissioning, the prophet listened to Yahweh’s presentations and speeches without pushing back. How could he argue with a gleaming figure sitting atop a supernatural throne surrounded by four-faced beasts? Only when he returned to the colony of exiles did the reality of his depressing message hit him.

Last week, we studied Ezekiel 1, the prophet’s first inaugural vision, which provided an intense peak at God’s heavenly throne chariot. The experience overwhelmed Ezekiel so much that he collapsed prostrate on the ground, which is where we find him in today’s episode when God verbally commissioned Ezekiel (2:1–3:11). Although Moses, Isaiah, and Jeremiah all included the narratives of their divine call, Ezekiel’s story is by far the longest account. Incidentally, it is the only call narrative where God did all the talking. Moses and Jeremiah pushed back on God’s request with their own counter-speech. Moses felt inadequate for the task because he was “slow of speech and slow of tongue” (Ex. 4:10). Jeremiah was insecure about his youth (Ex. 4:10; Jer. 4:6). Isaiah and Ezekiel both experienced such powerful theophanies that they were quick to comply with no reservation (Isa. 6:1-13). The major difference between Isaiah and Ezekiel’s inaugural visions is that God transported Isaiah to the heavenly throne, but for Ezekiel, he brought the divine throne to him in exile. 

If you have ever dipped your toe in Ezekiel’s waters, you know why the book can feel unapproachable: the quirky symbolic gestures, the bizarre visions, complex allegories, and harsh oracles. However, Ezekiel has also carved out a permanent place in the imagination of every Bible reader with his vision of God’s throne-chariot, the valley of dry bones, and the apocalyptic battles with Gog from the land of Magog. Indeed, the prophet’s message contains multitudes. We are going to use everything in our toolbox to study Ezekiel. Going chapter-by-chapter, we will consider the prophet’s historical, social, and geographical context to better understand his teaching. And when appropriate, I will offer the traditional Jewish interpretation of difficult passages and the traditional Christian interpretation. 

The Edomites are unique in our miniseries because much of what we know about them is from the Bible. Although archaeologists have excavated ancient Edom, they have found few inscriptions or epigraphic evidence shedding light on the religion, language, or government of the Edomites. Yet, the Bible pays more attention to the Edomites than any other ancient people group. The Bible presents their origin story in Genesis, depicts their enmity with the Israelites in Numbers, frequently predicts their downfall through the prophets, and includes prayers for vengeance against Edom in the Psalms. 

Welcome to Bible Fiber. I am Shelley Neese, president of The Jerusalem Connection, a Christian organization devoted to sharing the story of the people of Israel, both ancient and modern. One thing that makes reading the Hebrew scriptures difficult is that while the Bible is telling the story of one people, the Israelites, other ancient people groups enter and exit the scene. The Israelites did not live in a bubble, and they still do not. They were constantly interacting with their neighbors and subjugated by the rotating door of ancient empires. In our effort to be more informed Bible readers, we are doing a miniseries on the Peoples of the Bible. Today’s history lesson is on the Hittites. Although the Hittites were one of the great civilizations of the ancient Near East, most Bible readers are only familiar with the term Hittite from the famous story of David and Bathsheba. The book of 2 Samuel records that Bathsheba, the bathing woman that David seduced, was the wife of Uriah the Hittite. When Bathsheba became pregnant, David failed in his effort to cover it up because Uriah was a loyal soldier who refused to sleep with his wife when his comrades were at war. Instead of dealing with the consequences of his sin, David had Uriah killed in battle. In David’s confrontation with the prophet Nathan, Nathan compared David to a rich man who slaughtered the beloved sheep of a poor man, Uriah. The whole biblical episode is surprising and disturbing. First, the Bible presented the Hittite as the good guy in the story and the most beloved Israelite king as the bad guy. Second, it seems worth knowing why a Hittite was fighting in Israel’s army.To answer those questions, we must go back to the Bronze Age. RegionFrom 1700 to 1200 BCE, the Hittites were Israel’s neighbor to the north. Although scholars debate their place of origin, their language suggests they have Indo-European roots. Most likely, they were part of a large migration from the west in the Middle Bronze Age. They settled Anatolia, or Asia Minor, which is equivalent to today’s modern Turkey. One of the earliest Hittite kings stationed their capital at Hattusa, where it remained for over three centuries.A mountainous region in Anatolia’s central highlands, Hattusa had the great advantage of natural barriers, like deep gorges and ridges, making it easier to defend against potential invaders. But the Hittites still did not take any chances. They also heavily fortified Hattusa with massive walls and multiple gates. From their strategic perch, the Hittites controlled key trade routes and maintained their influence over neighboring regions. During the peak of the Hittite empire (1344–1272 BCE), they extended Hittite influence into various regions, including parts of northern Syria and upper Mesopotamia. Because the Hittite Empire and ancient Israel shared common borders, they had various interactions. Something to keep in mind while you are reading your Bible, the biblical authors broadly used the term Hittite to refer to people who lived in the region even after the historical Hittite Empire no longer existed. In the years after the empire’s decline, smaller Hittite city states formed with their own local regents. Modern historians call them Neo-Hittite or Hittite-Luwian states. The Israelites’ interaction with Hittites mostly occurred after the Hittite empire fell, but the biblical authors kept referring to people from the region as Hittites. They were not as concerned as modern scholars with clear-cut ethnographic classifications. A modern-day equivalent is that people might still refer to the Czech Republic as Czechoslovakia, forgetting that the name is no longer correct after 1993.LanguageEven prior to the fall of the Hittite Empire at the end of the Late Bronze Age, the Hittites abandoned Hattusa for reasons not fully understood. Over the centuries, the capital was b

The Philistines were an ancient people of uncertain origins. They settled in the southern coastal region of ancient Canaan around the 12th century BCE. They formed a confederation of five coastal cities: Gath, Ashkelon, Ekron, Gaza, and Ashdod. The modern-day equivalent of their former territory covers most of the Gaza Strip and coastal Israel. Archaeologists would love to excavate ancient Philistia, but that has not been feasible over the last couple of decades under Hamas rule. However, as we learn about the complex web of underground tunnels crisscrossing Gaza, I wonder how many Philistine artifacts the Palestinian laborers lost or destroyed. Surely, they came across Philistine material remains, even if they did not know it. Maybe one day, there will be a Gaza version of the Temple Mount Sifting Project in Israel, where they can wet sift all the debris from the Gaza tunnels. Of course, that is in the unforeseeable future.  Back to ancient Philistia. The five cities are called the Philistine Pentapolis. Each city had their own political leader, which meant they each enjoyed a combination of independence and alliance. On the west, the Mediterranean Sea bordered their territory, and their eastern border was the Shephelah, or the Judean hill country. The way their five cities ran up and down the coast meant they shared a long border with Judah. Keep that in mind when you read the biblical story of Samson. Samson frequently went back and forth between Judean and Philistine territory with little trouble (Judges 14-16). Before David became king, he also took advantage of the porous border between Philistia and Judah when he was trying to hide from King Saul (1 Sam. 27). 

The Bible’s reference to Canaanites creates the impression to the modern reader that the Canaanites were a unified people group. Really, the term Canaanite is an umbrella term that applied to all the people groups living in the land of Canaan during the Middle and Late Bronze Age. We should not take Canaanite as an ethnic term. Canaan included many tribes, each with their own social stratification and hierarchy. Each tribe had its own ruler and distinct culture. Each city-state had their own defense system and alliances. Because Canaan comprised diverse groups, Joshua had to approach each of them separately with unique battle plans, which we see in the book of Joshua and the story of the conquest. 

In over seventy episodes over the course of two years, we have done a deep dive into the 12 Minor Prophets, a monthlong minicourse on why prophecy ended, and then tackled the postexilic books of Ezra and Nehemiah. The next book on the horizon for Bible Fiber is Ezekiel. But before we start a new book, I am giving a minicourse on the Peoples of the Bible. One of the many things we have learned since October 7th is that neighbors really matter, and neighbors can be very problematic for the tiny nation of Israel. Israel did not exist in a bubble during biblical times, and it does not live in a bubble now. This week we are learning about the Babylonians, one empire that seems to have permeated the entire Old Testament story. The name Babylon occurs 289 times in the Hebrew scriptures, starting in Genesis and ending with Habakkuk. In Genesis, even though the story of the Tower of Babel is critical of Babylon’s misplaced arrogance, it credits Babylonia as being the birthplace of many cultures, languages, and civilizations. After Genesis, Babylon was synonymous with evil and greed. God used Babylon to punish Judah when she had strayed too far from the covenant and refused to repent. Despite serving as God’s agent of punishment, Babylon then becomes the target of God’s wrath as he swore to vindicate his covenant people. They are the villains of the Old Testament because they were the army that ransacked Jerusalem, looted, and burned the First Temple, and carted off Judeans into captivity.  

When the biblical authors recorded Israel’s history, they presumed their audience was familiar with the Assyrians, Babylonians, Philistines, Amorites, Edomites, and the list goes on. I am sure that was a safe assumption at the time they wrote their story. However, most modern readers see the names of foreign people groups in the Bible as mere names on a page. Unless you are well-versed in ancient Near Eastern history, you are unlikely to know the distinction between Edomites and Ammonites or what led to the domination of the extensive empires, like the Assyrians and Babylonians. Thankfully, the grand theological and ethical lessons of the Bible do not require believers to also be students of history. The most Christ-like people in my life are not history nerds. However, I believe learning more about all the characters and peoples in the Bible is helpful for going deeper into the narratives and prophecies. For the next seven or eight episodes of Bible Fiber, I will debrief you on the major Peoples of the Bible: the Canaanites, Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Arameans, and Hittites. We will do an overview of their history, language, politics, and religion. And I will outline how, when, and why each group interacted with biblical Israel. We are going to start with the Assyrians, because they are the empire in the Bible that gets the most textual real-estate, especially in the prophets. 

This week we are studying Nehemiah 11. The last three chapters of the book make up Ezra-Nehemiah’s final literary unit. Ever since the edict of Cyrus, the returnees had their sights set on Jerusalem. The first wave of arrivals rebuilt the temple under the leadership of Jeshua and Zerubbabel. Seventy years later, Nehemiah’s arrival in Jerusalem moved the restoration process into phase two: rebuilding the city walls. The wall project was complete in 52 days. Although the wall completion was viewed as a thrilling miracle, Nehemiah was disappointed that Jerusalem still seemed empty. Nehemiah vented “the city was wide and large, but the people within it were few, and no houses had been built” (7:4). What was the point of rebuilding the walls if Jerusalem remained underpopulated? That is the predicament that Nehemiah’s final initiative attempted to solve.