mitigate his guilt, and to think that God has dealt too hardly with him. It may easily be the same persons, who think in vers. 10, 11 that they have been severely treated, and here that God has done too much for them. In such times of suffering, the one wave relieves the other.

Ver. 12. And thou, son of man, say unto the sons of thy people, The righteousness of the righteous shall not deliver him in the day of his transgression; and by the wickedness of the wicked he shall not fall in the day that he turns from his wickedness; and the righteous shall not be able to live thereby in the day of his sin. 13. When I say to the righteous that he shall live, and he trusts in his righteousness, and commits iniquity, all his righteousness shall not be remembered, and by his iniquity that he has done he shall die. 14. And when I say to the wicked, Thou shalt die, and he turns from his sin, and does judgment and righteousness; 15. If the wicked restore the pledge, repay that which is robbed, walk in the statutes of life, so that he do no iniquity, he shall live, not die. 16. All his sins wherein he sinned shall not be remembered to him: he has done judgment and righteousness, he shall live. 17. And the sons of thy people say, The way of the Lord is not right; but their way is not right. 18. When the righteous turns from his righteousness, and commits iniquity, then he shall die thereby. 19. And when the wicked turns from his wickedness, and does judgment and righteousness, he shall live thereby. 20. And ye say, The way of the Lord is not right: I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one after his ways.

"Thereby" (ver. 12): that he has been righteous formerly, or until now. "He trusts in his righteousness" (ver. 13): it was a widespread delusion among the Jews, that they possessed a hereditary righteousness; that whatever they might themselves be, yet the righteousness of their pious fathers, from Abraham down, would avail them; and if they experienced the contrary in their misfortunes, they held themselves justified in murmuring against God. The prophet teaches, on the contrary, that the fate of every generation is determined by its own. relation to God. "If the wicked restore the pledge" (ver. 15); comp. xviii. 7. "The way of the Lord is not right" (ver. 17): properly, not weighed; comp. xviii. 25, 29.

WORDS OF COMFORT.

CHAPTERS XXXIII. 21-XXXIX,

CHAPTER XXXIII. 21, 22.

HE book of Ezekiel has only two chief parts-prophecies before and after the destruction of Jerusalem—threatening and promise. If this be mistaken, and the prophecies against foreign nations be made a separate part beside the other two, the position of ch. xxxiii. 1-20 is inconceivable, as in that case it must have followed ch. xxiv. This follows also from the fact that the beginning of the prophecy against foreign nations in ch. xxv. is connected with that relating to home affairs in ch. xxiv. The prophecies against foreign nations are merely an appendix to the first part, designed to throw a stronger light on the judgments pronounced against Judah, by unfolding to the view the judgment impending over the heathen. This subordinate place is already assigned to the prophecies against foreign nations by this, that the prophet (ch. xxiv. 27) at the opening of the siege of Jerusalem is dumb, and (on the main subject) does not speak again until the fugitive comes. Accordingly, what he says between ch. xxiv. 27 and xxxiii. 23 cannot be co-ordinate with the rest; it can only have a subsidiary importance.

Our two verses give, in accordance with the end of ch. xxiv., the historical introduction to the discourses of the second epoch.

Ver. 21. And it came to pass in the twelfth year of our captivity, in the tenth month, on the fifth of the month, the fugitive from Jerusalem came unto me, saying, The city is smitten. 22. And the hand of the LORD was upon me in the evening before the fugitive came; and He opened my mouth,

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until he came to me in the morning; and my mouth was opened, and I was no longer dumb.

This cannot refer to the first news of the taking of Jerusalem. This took place nearly one and a half year sooner, on the ninth day of the fourth month in the eleventh year; and the news of such events spreads with amazing rapidity. The intelligence arrived no doubt in eight, or at the most fourteen, days at the abode of Ezekiel; so that the difficulty is not removed by assuming most arbitrarily an error in the text, and putting the eleventh in place of the twelfth year. It refers rather to the first account of an eye-witness, who had himself passed through the terrors of the catastrophe, and was in his miserable plight a living proclamation of it. The "fugitive" is here, as in Gen. xiv. 13, an ideal person, or according to the usual designation, a collectivum—not a single individual, but a transport. Ezekiel had already said, in ch. xiv. 22, 23, that a whole host of such fugitives would come to the exiles; comp. also ch. vi. 9. There we have the commentary on the fugitive here. These sufferers were by their very appearance a testimony to the fearfulness of the divine judgments in them the smitten city presented itself as it were bodily. Their narratives gave only the commentary on their appearance: they said, The city is smitten, even before they opened the mouth. Analogous to this is the deep impression, which, according to Neh. i., the description of the desolate condition of Jerusalem by eye-witnesses made on Nehemiah, although this condition had existed for a century. Here the impression must have been still deeper. On the night before the arrival of the transport, which was doubtless announced the day before, took place the opening of the prophet's mouth, that had been closed since ch. xxiv. 27-as it were the removal of the seal from it. The impulse to speak to the people again asserted itself. The prophetic activity itself first commenced after the transport appeared, the arrival of which was to form the ground for the assumption of new hopes. Only after the complete death, the annihilation of all earthly hopes, had passed before their eyes, could the announcement of the joyful resurrection be made. Already in ch. xxiv. 27 it was said that God would open the prophet's mouth to the fugitive. Accordingly the actual arrival of the ruined people, in whom

the ruined city was represented, was the prerequisite of the discourse.

Ch. xxxiii. 23-29. The new discourse here first takes up again the former threatening, and meets those who, still giving themselves up to illusions, thought that the judgment would not inexorably run its course. That there were such people, was proved by the revolt in which Gedaliah the Chaldean governor was slain. The new discourse is essentially comforting. But before the seed of divine hope could be sown, the last thorns and thistles of false human hopes, and of the efforts that grew out of them, had to be destroyed, which even now, although against all appearances, were convulsively grasped by those who avoided the passage through the strait gate of repentance, which is the condition of participating in the divine hope, and did not wish to put off the spotted garment of the flesh.

Ver. 23. And the word of the LORD came unto me, saying, 24. Son of man, the inhabitants of those ruins in the land. of Israel say, Abraham was one, and he inherited the land: and we are many; the land is given to us for a possession. 25. Therefore say unto them, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah, Ye eat with the blood, and lift up your eyes to your detestable things, and ye shed blood and shall ye possess the land? 26. Ye stand upon your sword, ye work abomination, and defile every one his neighbour's wife: and shall ye possess the land? 27. Say thus unto them, Thus saith the Lord Jehovah, As I live, they that are in the ruins shall fall by the sword; and him that is in the field I will give to the beast for food; and they that are in the forts and the caves shall die of the pestilence. 28. And I will lay the land desolate and waste, and her mighty pride shall cease; and the mountains of Israel shall be desolate, without any passing through. 29. And they shall know that I am the LORD, when I lay the land desolate and waste, for all their abominations which they have done.

"The inhabitants of these ruins" (ver. 24): according to ver. 27, the ruins are those of the places destroyed. The whole land was a land of ruins, and therefore ground enough to let go at length the hopes of a deluded heart. They still cherish these hopes, and connect them with Abraham. He was childless, and yet has inherited the land in his posterity. Why

shall they, who are still numerous in reference to him, not receive again the possession of the land? They believe that they must approach the nearer to Abraham, as they hold themselves to be the true continuation of Abraham's being-the holders of the promise given to him-but overlook the wide gulf that stands between them and him. If they were Abraham's children, they would do his works. "Ye eat with the blood!" The eating of blood was forbidden in Gen. ix. 4 as the first step to the prohibition of murder: in the blood of animals was to be seen a type of the blood of man. The prescription had a didactic end. It was to call forth an abhorrence of shedding human blood. Whosoever disregarded this prohibition showed, under the Old Testament, after the law had made the horror of animal blood national, that the germ of the murderous spirit was in him. "Ye work abomination" (ver. 26) the feminine form of the verb is surprising: Your wives work. This goes hand in hand with the fact that in ch. xiii. 17 f. the false prophets appear as women. The feminine character of the sinner is already indicated in Gen. iv. 7. There it appears unmanly to let sin conquer, instead of ruling over it. In reference to sin, the men are not to be womanly, but the women manly. The abomination is afterwards more exactly defined. It is adultery. The man who defiles his neighbour's wife is, in truth, himself a woman. In the foregoing we have the transgression of the first commandment of the first table, and of the first of the second: the eating of blood is only mentioned by way of introduction. Here we have the transgression of the first two commandments of the second table. The pestilence is in ver. 27 the companion of the famine, which pursues those who have fled from the Chaldeans to the inaccessible hills, and to the caves.

Ch. xxxiii. 30-33. This second part of the introductory discourse, which proves itself to be such by this, that the sentence, "And the word of the Lord came unto me, saying," first recurs in ch. xxxiv. 1, endeavours in another respect to prepare the mind for the chief contents of the new message. The prophet had, otherwise than Jeremiah, a well-affected audience, especially now, after the violent catastrophe had gone over Jerusalem, and confirmed his former predictions: as the power