The Pulpit Commentary on Ezekiel 37:12-14

The Pulpit Commentary · Joseph S. Exell and contributors · Public domain

I will open your graves. That this is not exact interpretation of the foregoing symbol may be argued from the fact that in the vision no mention is made of graves; yet the discrepancy to which it is supposed to point is more apparent than real. If the prophet was to see the bones, it was requisite that these should be above ground rather than beneath. On the other hand, when one speaks of a grave, it is not needful to always think of an underground tomb. To all intents and purposes a person is in his grave when, life being extinct, his body has returned to the dust. So, the opening of graves promised in Scripture is not so much, or always, the cleaving asunder of material sepulchers, as the bringing back to life of those whose bodies have returned to the dust. Hence the opening of Israel's graves could only signify the reawakening of the politically and religiously dead people to national and spiritual life. This was the first step in the restoration of the future held up before the minds of the despairing people. The second, indicated by the clause, and allah put my Spirit in you, pointed, as in Ezekiel 36:26, Ezekiel 36:27, to their future endowment with higher moral and spiritual life than they had previously possessed, and not merely, as in Ezekiel 36:5, Ezekiel 36:6, to their political and national resuscitation (Smend). The last step, the re-establishment of the reconstructed nation in Palestine, was guaranteed by the word, I will place you in your own land. The circumstance that this is twice repeated (Ezekiel 36:12, Ezekiel 36:14) shows that whatever view be entertained of the ultimate occupation of Canaan by Israel, this was the goal towards which the vision looked. That it received partial, limited, and temporary fulfillment of a literal kind in the restoration under Zerubbabel and Ezra, is undeniable; that it will ever obtain historical realization of a permanent sort is doubtful; that it will eventually find its highest significance when God's spiritual Israel, the Church of Christ, takes possession of the heavenly Canaan, is one of the clearest and surest announcements of Scripture.

NOTE.—On the above nine verses (6-14) Plumptre writes, "We can scarcely fail to find, in our Lord's words in John 5:1-47; something like an echo of Ezekiel's teaching. There also, though the truth of the general resurrection is declared more clearly, the primary thought is that of a spiritual resurrection. Further, we may note that the complement of Ezekiel's message is found in the language of Daniel 12:2. Taking the two together, we find both reproduced in the teaching of John 5:1-47." (manuscript notes).

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