Ezekiel

de Walther Eichrodt

Besides giving a verse-by-verse commentary on the Book of Ezekiel, the author discusses its origin and composition and all the knotty problems of the prophet's own activity. Ezekiel represents in himself his priestly heritage and his prophetic charisma, between the tendency to conserve the past and the profound immersion in a present that forced a complete reorientation of Judah's religion. The author comes down, with many recent commentators, against the excesses that identified the book as a pseudoepigraph or as a small collection of authentic poems almost totally submerged in secondary material. Ezekiel himself is the basic compiler of the book, though some redactional insertions demonstrate that editors have been at work throughout the text, expanding and sometimes altering the meaning of the original oracles.