NGET BIBLE

Ezekiel 15 in plain modern English. New Ground English Translation.

Time Period

Around 591 BC, in the run up to Babylon's final assault on Jerusalem

Location

The Babylonian exile community, with Jerusalem in view as the subject of the picture

Audience

Exiles who took national pride in Israel's traditional self image as God's vineyard

Situation

A short parable asks what a vine's wood is good for compared with the wood of a forest tree, answers that it is useless for building and fit only for fuel, and applies that to the people of Jerusalem.

Key Background

The vine was a familiar emblem of Israel in older prophecy and in temple decoration, so hearers would have expected a compliment and instead get an inventory of the plant's practical worthlessness. Grapevine wood is thin, crooked, and soft, so it cannot be cut into a beam or even shaped into a peg to hang a pot on, which is the ordinary carpentry knowledge the argument depends on. In a timber poor region every scrap of wood had a use, so declaring a material fit only for the fire was a strong statement about value.

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The word of came to me:

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of — what is the compared to any branch among the trees of the forest?

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Can wood be taken from it to make anything useful? Can you even carve a from it to hang something on?

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Look — it gets thrown into the as fuel. The both ends and chars through the center. Is it good for anything now?

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Even when it was whole, it could not be made into anything. How much less — once the fire has devoured it and it is charred — can it be put to any use at all?"

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So this is what the says: "Like the vine wood among the trees of the forest — which I have to the fire as fuel — so I will give the people living in Jerusalem.

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I will my them. They escaped one fire, but another fire will devour them. And when I my them, you will that I am

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I will turn the land into a because they have with me," declares the Sovereign Yahweh.

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