EZEKIEL 8

God is supreme. He sees everything. He knows everthing. He is all powerful. Only by the grace of Jesus Christ and in His salvation do we have any hope. GOD can see your sin or He can see the righteousness of CHRIST in you. Evil has an end!

This second exact date given in Ezekiel is 592 b.c., when Ezekiel was acting out the siege of Jerusalem.  All idolatry was forbidden, and any idol represented a violation of the loyalty that belonged to Israel’s God. The people thought that just because the temple stood among them, whatever wrong they might do could not bring ultimate disaster. They thought the temple guaranteed their security. They did not realize that their evil had actually caused God to leave His temple, which would then no longer be their protection. The people’s abominations were not limited to a periphery. They extended deeply into the hierarchy of Israel’s religious leadership. In conformity with surrounding pagan nations (primarily Egypt), God’s people were worshiping images of clean and unclean creatures that represented various gods. Polytheistic idolatry was being practiced in Israel. The seventy elders represented the nation’s leaders. The censer each man carried (a vessel for holding burning incense) and the burning incense would not necessarily be evil, but here they were being used to worship idols. Ironically and inconsistently, they thought of God in limited, human terms, much as their neighbors viewed the gods of the nations. They thought He was not omniscient and omnipresent. Tammuz was a fertility god. The women were crying out to the idol because they had no children or because the crops were failing. In the sixth month, August-September, Tammuz was thought to “die” with the scorched land. Worshipers would wail over his death and cry for his resurgence. The location for the sun worship was in the inner court … between the porch and the altar. These 25 men must have been Levites if temple regulations were being followed; otherwise, the area was forbidden. Whether priests or not, they were turned in the wrong direction—their backs were to God’s temple and they were worshiping the sun.

Extensive violence was occurring in Judah as a result of idolatry. NKJ Bible.

The vision in this chapter takes Ezekiel through the temple to witness scenes of idolatry that his divine guide promises will escalate in severity. These abominations in the temple are Yahweh’s justification for rejecting Israel, removing His presence, and punishing His people. The leaders of the exiled community are with Ezekiel in his home when he is overcome by the vision from God. The exact nature of the leaders’ business with the prophet is unstated. Ezekiel describes a supernatural, dream-like experience in which God shows him what is happening in Judah. This is the essence of Ezekiel’s vision: The idolatry in the temple has driven Yahweh away. The number of elders signifies the upper level of leadership in Israel. 

Shaphan was the scribe of Josiah during religious reforms described in 2 Kgs. Shaphan’s family members are mentioned favorably in the book of Jeremiah and seem to have been loyal followers of Yahweh. The family’s positive reputation may explain the specific mention here of one member involved in idol worship. If Ezekiel recognized the man, his presence among the idolaters may have been a shock.

The elders believed Yahweh had abandoned them or had been defeated and was unable to save them. 

Tammuz (Dumuzi) was a Sumerian  deity and part of the dying-and-rising-god mythology connected to fertility rituals. During the dry, unproductive season, Tammuz inhabited the underworld. Rituals of mourning for Tammuz—the apparent scene described here—were intended to restore Tammuz to life and thus restore the land’s fertility. The worship of Tammuz at the Jerusalem temple adds an element of Mesopotamian idolatry to the Canaanite idolatry already present. Turning their backs shows great disrespect to Yahweh. In ancient cultures, turning one’s back on the king was tantamount to treason and worthy of death. The sun, or shemesh, was worshiped as a deity named Shamash. Mesopotamian texts depict Shamash and Tammuz as temple guardians. 

Ezekiel 8

8 And it came to pass in the sixth year, in the sixth month, on the fifth day of the month, as I sat in my house with the elders of Judah sitting before me, that the hand of the Lord God fell upon me there. 2 Then I looked, and there was a likeness, like the appearance of fire—from the appearance of His waist and downward, fire; and from His waist and upward, like the appearance of brightness, like the color of amber. 3 He stretched out the form of a hand, and took me by a lock of my hair; and the Spirit lifted me up between earth and heaven, and brought me in visions of God to Jerusalem, to the door of the north gate of the inner court, where the seat of the image of jealousy was, which provokes to jealousy. 4 And behold, the glory of the God of Israel was there, like the vision that I saw in the plain.

5 Then He said to me, “Son of man, lift your eyes now toward the north.” So I lifted my eyes toward the north, and there, north of the altar gate, was this image of jealousy in the entrance.

6 Furthermore He said to me, “Son of man, do you see what they are doing, the great abominations that the house of Israel commits here, to make Me go far away from My sanctuary? Now turn again, you will see greater abominations.” 7 So He brought me to the door of the court; and when I looked, there was a hole in the wall. 8 Then He said to me, “Son of man, dig into the wall”; and when I dug into the wall, there was a door.

9 And He said to me, “Go in, and see the wicked abominations which they are doing there.” 10 So I went in and saw, and there—every sort of creeping thing, abominable beasts, and all the idols of the house of Israel, portrayed all around on the walls. 11 And there stood before them seventy men of the elders of the house of Israel, and in their midst stood Jaazaniah the son of Shaphan. Each man had a censer in his hand, and a thick cloud of incense went up. 12 Then He said to me, “Son of man, have you seen what the elders of the house of Israel do in the dark, every man in the room of his idols? For they say, ‘The Lord does not see us, the Lord has forsaken the land.’ ”

13 And He said to me, “Turn again, and you will see greater abominations that they are doing.” 14 So He brought me to the door of the north gate of the Lord’s house; and to my dismay, women were sitting there weeping for Tammuz.

15 Then He said to me, “Have you seen this, O son of man? Turn again, you will see greater abominations than these.” 16 So He brought me into the inner court of the Lord’s house; and there, at the door of the temple of the Lord, between the porch and the altar, were about twenty-five men with their backs toward the temple of the Lord and their faces toward the east, and they were worshiping the sun toward the east.

17 And He said to me, “Have you seen this, O son of man? Is it a trivial thing to the house of Judah to commit the abominations which they commit here? For they have filled the land with violence; then they have returned to provoke Me to anger. Indeed they put the branch to their nose. 18 Therefore I also will act in fury. My eye will not spare nor will I have pity; and though they cry in My ears with a loud voice, I will not hear them.”

Exodus 20:4 | “You shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth;

Deuteronomy 32:16 | They provoked Him to jealousy with foreign gods; With abominations they provoked Him to anger.

Deuteronomy 32:21 | They have provoked Me to jealousy by what is not God; They have moved Me to anger by their foolish idols.But I will provoke them to jealousy by those who are not a nation; I will move them to anger by a foolish nation.

2 Kings 23:5 | Then he removed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense on the high places in the cities of Judah and in the places all around Jerusalem, and those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun, to the moon, to the constellations, and to all the host of heaven.

Ezekiel 5:11 | ‘Therefore, as I live,’ says the Lord GOD, ‘surely, because you have defiled My sanctuary with all your detestable things and with all your abominations, therefore I will also diminish you; My eye will not spare, nor will I have any pity.

Commentary:

The seventy members composing the Sanhedrim, or great council of the nation, the origination of which we find in the seventy elders, representatives of the congregation, who went up with Moses to the mount to behold the glory of Jehovah, and to witness the secret transactions relating to the establishment of the covenant; also, in the seventy elders appointed to share the burden of the people with Moses. How awfully it aggravates the national sin, that the seventy, once admitted to the Lord’s secret council (Ps 25:14), should now, “in the dark,” enter “the secret” of the wicked (Ge 49:6), those judicially bound to suppress idolatry being the ringleaders of it!

Tammuz—from a Hebrew root, “to melt down.” Instead of weeping for the national sins, they wept for the idol. Tammuz (the Syrian for Adonis), the paramour of Venus, and of the same name as the river flowing from Lebanon; killed by a wild boar, and, according to the fable, permitted to spend half the year on earth, and obliged to spend the other half in the lower world. An annual feast was celebrated to him in June (hence called Tammuz in the Jewish calendar) at Byblos, when the Syrian women, in wild grief, tore off their hair and yielded their persons to prostitution, consecrating the hire of their infamy to Venus; next followed days of rejoicing for his return to the earth; the former feast being called “the disappearance of Adonis,” the latter, “the finding of Adonis.” This Phoenician feast answered to the similar Egyptian one in honor of Osiris. The idea thus fabled was that of the waters of the river and the beauties of spring destroyed by the summer during the half year when the sun is in the upper heat. Or else, the earth being clothed with beauty, hemisphere, and losing it when he departs to the lower. The name Adonis is not here used, as Adon is the appropriated title of Jehovah.

The next are “greater abominations,” not in respect to the idolatry, but in respect to the place and persons committing it. In “the inner court,” immediately before the door of the temple of Jehovah, between the porch and the altar, where the priests advanced only on extraordinary occasions (Joe 2:17), twenty-five men (the leaders of the twenty-four courses or orders of the priests, 1 Ch 24:18, 19, with the high priest, “the princes of the sanctuary,” Is 43:28), representing the whole priesthood, as the seventy elders represented the people, stood with their backs turned on the temple, and their faces towards the east, making obeisance to the rising sun (contrast 1 Ki 8:44). Sun-worship came from the Persians, who made the sun the eye of their god Ormuzd. It existed as early as Job (Job 31:26; compare De 4:19). Josiah could only suspend it for the time of his reign (2 Ki 23:5, 11); it revived under his successors.

Not content with outraging “with their violence” the second table of the law, namely, that of duty towards one’s neighbor, “they have returned” (that is, they turn back afresh) to provoke Me by violations of the first table [Calvin]. Rather, they held up a branch or bundle of tamarisk (called barsom) to their nose at daybreak, while singing hymns to the rising sun [Strabo, 1.15, p. 733]. Sacred trees were frequent symbols in idol-worship. Calvin translates, “to their own ruin,” literally, “to their nose,” that is, with the effect of rousing My anger (of which the Hebrew is “nose”) to their ruin.