Jeremiah and Ezekiel

Two prophets of the Babylonian catastrophe: Jeremiah (feast 1 May), the weeping prophet of the new covenant, and Ezekiel (feast 21 July), the priest-prophet of the fiery chariot, the dry bones, and the closed gate. This file treats the christological and typological readings the Church draws from them — the new covenant of Jeremiah, and Ezekiel’s merkabah, his paschal vision of the dry bones, and his closed gate as a type of the Theotokos.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

Jeremiah the Suffering Prophet

Jeremiah (feast 1 May; Prophet Jeremiah, Orthodox Church in America, oca.org) prophesied in Jerusalem through the last agony of the kingdom of Judah, from the reign of Josiah to the fall of the city to Nebuchadnezzar in 587 BC and beyond. His long ministry is one of rejection and grief: called from the womb — “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations” (Jeremiah 1:5) — he is made to preach an unwanted word of judgment, is beaten and put in the stocks (Jeremiah 20), thrown into a miry cistern to die (Jeremiah 38), and forced down into Egypt by the remnant, where tradition says he perished. His “confessions,” the anguished laments scattered through his book (“Cursed be the day wherein I was born,” Jeremiah 20:14), make him the most inwardly exposed of the prophets, and the Church reads his sufferings — the innocent prophet rejected by his own, plotted against, “like a lamb or an ox that is brought to the slaughter” (Jeremiah 11:19) — as a type of the rejected and suffering Christ. The Gospel indeed hears Jeremiah at the Passion: the potter’s field bought with the thirty pieces of silver is referred to “that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet” (Matthew 27:9–10).

To Jeremiah the tradition also attaches the book of Lamentations, the five dirges over the ruined Jerusalem, chanted through with grief — “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people!” (Lamentations 1:1). The Church reads Lamentations in the light of the Cross: the desolation of the holy city becomes a figure of the desolation of Holy Friday and Saturday, and the very form of the Lamentation shapes the Enkomia or “Praises” sung over the tomb-bier (epitaphios) at the Matins of Holy Saturday, the Church’s own lamentation over the buried Christ (see The Divine Liturgy and the paschal services). But Jeremiah’s deepest word is not lament but promise. In the midst of the catastrophe he proclaims the new covenant: “Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel… I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts… and I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:31–34; numbered 38:31–34 in the Septuagint). This is the only place in the Old Testament where the phrase “new covenant” (kainē diathēkē, whence “New Testament”) occurs, and the Epistle to the Hebrews cites it in full as fulfilled in Christ, whose blood is “the blood of the new testament” (Hebrews 8:8–12; Matthew 26:28). Jeremiah, the prophet of the old covenant’s collapse, is thus the prophet who first named the new — the covenant written not on stone but on the heart, sealed in the blood of the Christ he foresuffered.

Ezekiel the Priest-Prophet

Ezekiel (feast 21 July; Prophet Ezekiel, Orthodox Church in America, oca.org) was a priest carried into the Babylonian exile, who prophesied among the captives “by the river of Chebar” (Ezekiel 1:1). His book is the most visionary and strange of the prophets, and three of its visions are woven deep into Orthodox theology and worship.

The chariot (merkabah). Ezekiel’s inaugural vision is of the divine throne borne upon a chariot of four living creatures — each with four faces (man, lion, ox, eagle) and joined to whirling wheels “full of eyes,” over them a crystal firmament and, above it, the likeness of a throne and “the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord” (Ezekiel 1:4–28; 10). This merkabah (“chariot”) vision became the seed-text of a whole current of Jewish mysticism (merkabah mysticism); in the Christian tradition the four living creatures were early identified with the four Evangelists (man–Matthew, lion–Mark, ox–Luke, eagle–John), and the “wheels full of eyes” (the Ophanim, “Thrones”) were ranked by St. Dionysius among the highest angelic orders (see The Bodiless Powers). Ezekiel’s chariot-throne, with its refusal of any direct sight of God — everything is “likeness” and “appearance” — is read by the Orthodox tradition as a supreme instance of the apophatic vision, and it entered iconography in the image of Christ enthroned in glory.

The dry bones — the paschal reading. In the valley of dry bones, the prophet is set down among the scattered remains of the dead and commanded to prophesy: “Can these bones live?… Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. And the breath came into them, and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army” (Ezekiel 37:1–14). The Lord interprets the vision as the raising of Israel from the grave of exile — “I will open your graves… and ye shall live.” The Church reads it as the great Old Testament prophecy of the resurrection of the dead, and appoints it to be read at the Matins of Holy Saturday, over the tomb of Christ, on the eve of the Resurrection — so that the vision of the bones clothed with flesh and quickened with the Spirit is proclaimed at the very hinge of Pascha, the promise of the general resurrection sealed in the rising of Christ (the reading is appointed in the paschal services of the Triodion; see The Twelve Great Feasts, for the paschal cycle).

The closed gate — a type of the Theotokos. In the vision of the restored temple, Ezekiel is shown the outer east gate of the sanctuary, and told: “This gate shall be shut, it shall not be opened, and no man shall enter in by it; because the Lord, the God of Israel, hath entered in by it, therefore it shall be shut” (Ezekiel 44:1–2). The Fathers read the “closed gate” through which the Lord alone passes as a type of the ever-virginity of the Theotokos — the gate opened to God alone, kept shut before and after, as the Virgin bore the Lord and remained a virgin (Ouspensky and Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, SVS Press, 1982, on the closed gate among the Marian types; and see The Theotokos). The image is embedded in Marian hymnography and iconography and stands beside Moses’ bush and Aaron’s rod among the great Old Testament figures of the Mother of God.

Two Witnesses to the Fulfillment

Jeremiah and Ezekiel are the prophets of the Church’s darkest hour of the Old Covenant — the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile — and yet each is, for the Church, a prophet of the fulfillment that lay beyond the ruin. Jeremiah, weeping over the fallen city, named the new covenant written on the heart; Ezekiel, among the exiles, saw the glory borne away on the chariot and then the dead raised, the gate through which God alone would come. The Church, reading them at the tomb of Christ and singing them in her Marian feasts, hears in the prophets of the catastrophe the prophets of the Pascha: out of the grave of Israel, the resurrection; out of the closed gate, the Incarnation; out of the old covenant’s collapse, the new. Their deaths and burials, like those of the other prophets, come to us chiefly through the Lives of the Prophets, and are treated with that collection’s traditions in the source-critical file (see The Prophets in Icon, Relic, and Legend).

See Also

References

  • The Holy Bible, KJV (Jeremiah 1:5; 11:19; 20; 31:31–34, LXX 38:31–34; 38; Lamentations 1:1; Ezekiel 1; 10; 37:1–14; 44:1–2; Matthew 26:28; 27:9–10; Hebrews 8:8–12).
  • Prophet Jeremiah (1 May) and Prophet Ezekiel (21 July), Orthodox Church in America, oca.org. (The feasts; the lives; the received traditions.)
  • Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1982. (The closed gate and the four living creatures / Evangelists.)
  • Pentiuc, Eugen J. The Old Testament in Eastern Orthodox Tradition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. (The Orthodox reading of Jeremiah and Ezekiel; the new covenant; the dry bones.)
  • The Lenten Triodion, trans. Mother Mary and Kallistos Ware (London: Faber, 1978), for the Holy Saturday reading of Ezekiel 37 and the Enkomia.