Ezekiel was one of the priests of Jerusalem who was carried off to Babylonia with King Jehoiachin in the deportation of 597 B.C. Those who were thus deported were the upper classes, including, of course, the royal family and the court and the aristocracy of the priesthood, and skilled artisans, particularly the smiths (armorers). Having thus removed the natural leaders of the rebellious people, Nebuchadnezzar made Zedekiah, an uncle of Jehoiachin, king in his stead and gave Judah another trial. The eight or ten thousand Jews with their families who were removed to Babylonia were colonized at different points, Ezekiel repeatedly mentions the river Chebar, that is, probably, the grand canal in the vicinity of Nippur. The patricians in exile thought very poorly of the new lords who had stepped into their shoes in Jerusalem, and they flattered themselves that events would soon take such a turn that they would return to JudÆa and to power. They had prophets and diviners among them who encouraged them in this expectation. When Zedekiah revolted and the Babylonian armies a second time besieged Jerusalem, their faith in the inviolability of Zion, confirmed, rather than shaken, by the outcome of things in 597 B.C., when Jehoiachin surrendered and the holy city took no harm, made them refuse hearing to Ezekiel's prediction of ruin; they may even have dreamed that Nebuchadnezzar would find out his mistake and restore to Judah its legitimate rulers, chastened by experience, and pack Zedekiah and his advisers into exile in their place.

Against this vain and superstitious optimism Ezekiel had to contend until the disastrous issue made a rude end of all their dreams and threw the exiles into the depths of hopelessness: Bel had triumphed over Jehovah, and it was all over with the nation. Thenceforth Ezekiel's task was to save them from despair by the assurance that God still had a purpose to fulfil with them, and that, in his own time, when they had been thoroughly purged from their old sins and filled with a new spirit, he would restore them to their own land and bring to life again the dead nation.

These two periods of the prophet's mission sharply divide the Book of Ezekiel. To the day when the word came to him that the Babylonian armies had invested Jerusalem (Ezek. 24) he combats delusion; from the arrival of the tidings of the fall of the city (xxxiii. 21 ff.) he combats despair. The first part is all menace, the second is full of promise. Numerous dated oracles serve as landmarks, especially in the first part.

Between the two, in the two years of suspense, when about his own people the prophet is dumb, is placed the group of prophecies against foreign nations (cc. 25-32), beginning with oracles against the neighbours of Judah who held true to Nebuchadnezzar in this crisis and had their reward at Judah's cost—Ammonites, Moabites, Edomites, and Philistines. These are followed by long predictions of the ruin of Tyre, over whose calamity the prophet exults more loudly than the grievance of Jerusalem (Ezek. xxvi. 2) seems to justify. Nebuchadnezzar did in fact besiege Tyre for thirteen years (585-572 B.C.), and doubtless inflicted upon it great losses; but the island city, with its command of the sea, he could not take. Ezekiel himself, in a remarkable passage which is perhaps his latest word in the book, admits that his predictions of the capture of Tyre (xxvi. 7-14) had not been fulfilled—Nebuchadnezzar had had to raise the long and ineffectual siege—but he promises that Jehovah will reward him for these fruitless labours in the Lord's service by giving him Egypt instead (xxix. 17-21). The animosity against Egypt which finds expression in the predictions of the Babylonian subjugation of that country is more easily explained. Egypt had been the evil genius of Judah, instigating rebellion against the Babylonian suzerainty, and promising armed aid which always failed in the decisive hour; it was meet that it should taste the cup of humiliation itself. In c. 32 the descent of Egypt to the hell of fallen nations is vividly depicted; a similar picture of the descent of the Babylonian king in Isa. 14 has already been noted. Not improbably Babylonian notions of the nether world may have influenced the imagery of both, as a myth of paradise seems to have suggested the imagery of Tyre in Eden (xxviii. 12 ff.). Outside this group is an oracle against Edom (c. 35), and the great prophecy of the irruption of Gog and his hordes and their fate (cc. 38 f.).

A conspicuous feature of the Book of Ezekiel are the extended visions and the elaborated symbolical actions. In the inaugural vision (Ezek. i.-iii. 15), for instance, God appears, a veritable deus ex machina, on a high seat in a curious motor car made up of animated wheels and winged monsters. In a later vision (c. 10) he sees God leave the doomed temple in Jerusalem and mount this cherubim car, in which he is whirled away through the air to the east; and in the great vision of the new temple in the golden age God returns to his abode in the same conveyance (c. 43). Striking examples of symbolical actions may be found in Ezek. 4, and in xii. 1-20. They are of such an extraordinary character as to raise the question whether they were really enacted before the eyes of the people or only described in discourse.

Ezekiel's visions are sometimes ecstatic states, in which he is instantaneously translated from place to place. At the end of the inaugural vision, "the spirit" lifted him up and took him away, setting him down in amazement among the colonists at Tell-Abib. In viii. 1 ff., as he sat in his own house in the midst of a company of the elders of Judah, the spirit, which is described as a strange luminous creature, took him up by the hair of his head and wafted him "in the visions of God" to Jerusalem, where his conductor showed him all the idolatrous cults and the abominable mysteries that were practised in the temple under the very eyes of "the glory of the God of Israel" (c. 8); after seeing God take his flight from the desecrated sanctuary, the prophet is translated by the spirit to ChaldÆa again. Another such vision in ecstasy is the famous scene in the valley of dry bones (Ezek. 37). In such cases it is impossible to say how much is actually the experience of the visionary, how much literary form.

In the great vision of the restoration, cc. 40-48, which also is introduced as an ecstasy with the translation of the prophet to Palestine, we may be pretty sure that the element of conscious composition predominates. The chapters contain a programme for the coming age when all the twelve tribes, gathered together from exile and dispersion, shall reoccupy the holy land, with a new, geometrical division of the territory, with a new plan for the city of Jerusalem, a new constitution for the state, a new temple after the old model, a reorganized ministry of religion, and a reformed worship. The ruling idea which runs through all is to make impossible those sins against the holiness of God, his land, his house, his people, which had been the cause of former ruin.

The Book of Ezekiel seems to have been arranged and published by the author, and though some derangements and repetitions may be observed, it has not been much meddled with by later editors, and, to whatever reason it may be attributed, exhibits none of the phenomena of compilation and amplification which we have found in Isaiah and Jeremiah. The Hebrew text, however, has suffered more than most books in transmission, and has reached us in an unusually corrupt state. The author has a style of his own, which can rise to eloquence (as in the oracles against Tyre), but is generally pedestrian and sometimes clumsy. He has plenty of imagination, not always regulated by taste or restrained by decency. His drastic figures of the unfaithfulness of Israel and Judah are often unfit to translate.