Commentary on Ezekiel 33:7-11

The prophecies in the book of Ezekiel address Judeans in exile. When the Babylonian Empire conquered Judah, they took the political and religious leaders, including Ezekiel himself, into exile in Babylon. Recent archaeological discoveries reflect that the Judean exiles lived together in a small ethnic enclave, doing manual labor. They had lost their homes, their land, their status, their loved ones, and their temple. The former elites were now subsistence farmers in a strange land.

These Judean exiles persisted in their faith; this required that they make a theological shift. Israelite and Judean religion differed from the practices of the surrounding cultures: They believed they should worship only one God. The Babylonians, like most of the surrounding cultures, believed there were many gods and goddesses, each of whom had a designated role. Some were in charge of rain or fertility; others represented and fought for individual nations. 

The Babylonians would have believed that their conquest of the Judeans meant that the Babylonian god had defeated the God of Judah because the former was more powerful. They would have expected Judeans, like other conquered nations, to stop worshiping a conquered god who had failed them and begin worshiping the Babylonian pantheon. Instead, the Judean exiles discerned that their one God had not been defeated but had allowed them to be defeated because they as a community had done something wrong. 

The prophecies in this section of the book of Ezekiel wrestle with how the community in exile can continue to worship their God and where they can find hope for restoration of their nation. Their experience of the trauma of warfare, defeat, exile, and loss is palpable throughout the book. Historically, we know that the Babylonian Empire was an ancient superpower that was rapidly conquering the ancient Afro-Asiatic world (see Wil Gafney for more on this term). A tiny nation like Judah could never have prevented its own military defeat against such an adversary. 

Survivors of trauma, however, often find the shame they feel from acknowledging this lack of control impossible to live with. They seek someone to blame—often themselves. This comes through in their theological response to the experience of exile. They survive by recognizing what they can and cannot control. The Judean exiles cannot control the Babylonian Empire or the living conditions in which they find themselves. What they can control is their own response to it. Ezekiel 33 begins a new section of the book that suggests they respond by becoming a better community.

Ezekiel 33 is a call to the prophet to act as a “sentinel.” The biblical prophets share an excellent use of compelling metaphors to convey their message. In this case, the prophet experiences a call to sound a warning when he foresees danger, as would a sentinel blowing a trumpet. Exiled survivors of warfare would have had a visceral memory of such an experience. The warning in this metaphor is not of a coming army but instead of the community’s wrongdoing. The use of this particular metaphor alludes to the exilic theology that the community’s wrongdoing is the reason they experienced military destruction. 

As God’s sentinel, the prophet is responsible for sounding the warning about destructive community norms. When he sees the community’s iniquity, he needs to speak out against it, whether the community listens to him or not. Knowing the response previous prophets have received, he cannot expect his message to be met with universal popularity or even acceptance. He is responsible for sharing uncomfortable truths anyway. He is not, however, responsible for others’ response to it. Just as the exiles cannot control the fact that they got exiled, God’s sentinel can only control his own courage to speak out. God will not hold him responsible for what he cannot control. 

From our perspective today, it is worth noting that the call to repentance is communal, not individual. Individualism is deeply embedded in our culture and pervades many modern theologies regarding our individual behavior and relationship with the Divine. This is something of a modern innovation, however; the book of Ezekiel comes from a culture of communal labor and responsibility in which interdependence was the norm. 

This community-oriented perspective is subtle in our English translations of Ezekiel 33 because formal English only has one word for the second-person “you,” whether it is singular or plural. The original Hebrew of Ezekiel, however, uses the singular “you” when God is speaking of the prophet but the plural “you” (or “y’all”) when speaking of “the wicked” and their ways, calling them to a collective “turn” from wickedness so they might re-turn to their land.

Our familiarity with ideas of individual wickedness and repentance can make it difficult to even imagine what collective wickedness and repentance would look like. Like Abraham in Genesis 18, it seems unlikely to us that everyone is behaving wickedly, or that everyone would respond to a call to repentance. 

Yet, the book of Ezekiel is not concerned with individual behavior, but with the kind of pervasive wickedness that is implicit in a culture’s way of being and behaving toward God and one another. It is pervasive not in that a certain percentage of individuals participate in it but in that it is the assumed normal. As the chapter continues and connects to later chapters, it becomes clear that Ezekiel is not concerned with repentance from individual sin, but from structural sin.

A conquered people in exile has very little control over their lives. Ezekiel 33 offers them something they can control: their own community culture. The prophet can act as sentinel, calling out what he has observed, but he cannot control how people respond to his message. The community cannot control the Babylonian culture or their captivity in it, but they can effect change in their own community’s culture, in the assumed normal, in “the way we do things.” We cannot control one another’s actions, but we can accept mutual responsibility for the community we create together through word and deed.