Tuesday, August 6, 2024

Ezekiel 40: the description of the new temple

We read:
1-3 In the twenty-fifth year of our exile, at the beginning of the year on the tenth of the month—it was the fourteenth year after the city fell—God touched me and brought me here. He brought me in divine vision to the land of Israel and set me down on a high mountain. To the south there were buildings that looked like a city. He took me there and I met a man deeply tanned, like bronze. He stood at the entrance holding a linen cord and a measuring stick.

Jerusalem had been destroyed for 14 years. The temple is destroyed too (to my understanding). Ezekiel, in a vision, will follow a man tanned like bronze.

4 The man said to me, “Son of man, look and listen carefully. Pay close attention to everything I’m going to show you. That’s why you’ve been brought here. And then tell Israel everything you see.”

5 First I saw a wall around the outside of the Temple complex. The measuring stick in the man’s hand was about ten feet long. He measured the thickness of the wall: about ten feet. The height was also about ten feet.

We can imagine Ezekiel following the man taking measures of the temple, but, it must be a new temple. They go to the east, north and south in this chapter.

As I have a Christian lens, I really don't understand the reason of so many detais in this chapter. For instance:

38-43 There was a room with a door at the vestibule of the gate complex where the burnt offerings were cleaned. Two tables were placed within the vestibule, one on either side, on which the animals for burnt offerings, sin offerings, and guilt offerings were slaughtered. Two tables were also placed against both outside walls of the vestibule—four tables inside and four tables outside, eight tables in all for slaughtering the sacrificial animals. The four tables used for the burnt offerings were thirty-one and a half inches square and twenty-one inches high. The tools for slaughtering the sacrificial animals and other sacrifices were kept there. Meat hooks, three inches long, were fastened to the walls. The tables were for the sacrificial animals.

Jesus said that He is the Temple. He said that the great temple of Jerusalem would be destroyed.
Are there a right reading of the description of the temple in Ezekiel vision?
To the Jews, listening to Ezekiel, it was a message of hope, restoration. I believe that the details of the first temple were very important; so the presentation of the new temple follows a lengthy description as in the first temple.
Perhaps, this description is to show that details are important to the Lord. It is part of the organization, of the salvation plan. Even in the New Testament we have details: Jesus was to enter in Jerusalem mounted in a donkey. Perhaps, Ezekiel 40 and the following chapters show that the Lord is control of my salvation, even in little details.

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