Ezekiel, Ezekiel

He was one of the Israelite exiles who settled at a place called Tel-abib ( mound of the deluge ), on the banks of the Chebar River "in the land of the Chaldeans." Traditionally, the book of Ezekiel is thought to have been written in the 500s BC during the Babylonian exile of the southern Israelite kingdom, Judah. This estimate is supported by evidence that the author uses a dating system which was only used in the 500s BC.

Ezekiel, like Jeremiah, is said by Talmud (Meg. 14b) and Midrash (Sifre, Num. 78) to have been a descendant of Joshua by his marriage with the proselyte Rahab.

At first God revealed to the prophet that they could not hope for a miraculous rescue; whereupon the prophet was greatly grieved, since these three men constituted the "remnant of Judah". But after they had left the house of the prophet, fully determined to sacrifice their lives to God, Ezekiel received this revelation: "Thou dost believe indeed that I will abandon them. That shall not happen; but do thou let them carry out their intention according to their pious dictates, and tell them nothing" (Midrash Canticles Rabbah vii. 8).

Although the Hebrew Bible describes this event as an ecstatic vision rather than a historical occurrence, later interpreters speculated as to the fate of these men, both before and after their revitalization. Some say that they were godless people, who in their lifetime had denied the resurrection, and committed other sins; others think they were those Ephraimites who tried to escape from Egypt before Moses and perished in the attempt. There are still others who maintain that after Nebuchadnezzar had carried the beautiful youths of Judah to Babylon, he had them executed and their bodies mutilated, because their beauty had entranced the Babylonian women, and that it was these youths whom Ezekiel called back to life.

This date was chosen because it is the day after the feast day of the Prophet Elias. Ezekiel is commemorated on August 28 on the Calendar of Saints of the Armenian Apostolic Church and the Armenian Catholic Church.

Specifically, it is claimed that Ezekiel himself may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, which has several characteristic symptoms that are apparent from his writing. Altschuler, E.L.: "Did Ezekiel Have Temporal Lobe Epilepsy?", Arch Gen Psychiatry.

Source: Wikipedia > Ezekiel