Amongst the people of Jerusalem who were taken by the Babylonians in 597 B.C. and deported to Babylonia, was a priest named Ezekiel. After living as an exile in Babylon for four years, he received a call to be a prophet to his people and to preach to those amongst whom he was living in Babylonia. He continued to speak to his exiled fellow Jews, on behalf oftheir God, for about 22 years. He was therefore a contemporary of Jeremiah but his prophetic ministry was carried out about 1300 kilometres away from Judah, in very different surroundings from those in which Jeremiah was living. He had been a priest, not a prophet, when he was living in Jerusalem before he was exiled and we do not know whether he knew Jeremiah. There is a quotation in his book which is paralleled in the book of Jeremiah; Jeremiah 31 :29-30 and Ezekiel 18: 2 refer to the same popular proverb, and both prophets are con-cerned with teaching about the individual's responsibility for his own sin, but it cannot be proved from Ezekiel's book that he was influenced by the preaching of Jeremiah in Jerusalem. Ezekiel followed in the great prophetic tradition of the eighth to sixth centuries B.C. and we therefore find themes in his book with which we are now familiar in the teaching of the great prophets; but we also find distinctive insights and the influ¬ence ofthe situation in which he was forced to live.

The evidence available, from the Bible and from Babylonian sources, indicates that the Jews who were deported to Babylonia lived in poor but not intolerable conditions. They kept together in groups and did settle into communities in which they were able to marry, have families and maintain their own customs. Amongst the people deported in 597 B.C. were the most educated and skilled men of Jerusalem and many of these were probably used by the Babylonians in work which enabled them to keep up their knowledge and skills. As far as we know, the exiles were not treated with harsh cruelty although their status was that of slave workers. Understandably, the great hope of the exiles, particularly in the early years of the exile, was that they would soon return to Judah, but when this eventually became possible, after 539 B.C., many of the Jews who had been born in Babylonia, as the children of the original exiles, did not return. They became part of the increasing number of Jewish communities living outside Palestine.

After the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 B.C., Judah was left in a very bad state. The second deportation of the people took away a great number of the people to Babylonia and the ruined cities and deserted farms were left to the poorest people of the land. Some Jews who had escaped from the Babylonians fled to Egypt, as did the group who forced Jeremiah to go with them, and communities of refugee Jews grew up in that country. Although the prophetic teaching about the remnant of' Israel from whom God would create his new people had not been understood by most of those who heard it, it was from the exiles in Babylon that a remnant would eventually return to begin on the very hard task of rebuilding their shattered country. During the period of the exile, Judah remained a ruined country, with no attempt being made by the Jewish population left there to restore it.

The book is written in the first person and passage after passage begins with words like this: 'The LORD spoke to me ....' It can be divided into four sections, after the introduction formed by chapters 1-3 which describes the prophet's call. Oracles concerning Judah and Jerusalem given between 593 and 587 B.C. are found in Ezekiel 4-24. Oracles against foreign nations are given in Ezekiel 25-32. Oracles of restoration are given in Ezekiel 33-39. The final part of the book, Ezekiel 40-48, describes a great vision which the prophet was given of the detailed restoration of the" Jerusalem Temple and cult, and the resettlement of the land of Palestine by the restored tribes of Israel. Thirteen times in the book exact information is given about the time when the prophet received a revelation. The book gives the impression of being put together in an orderly way.