Ezekiel upheld the covenant faith at a time of very great difficulty. It is not an exaggeration to say that without the prophetic witness and courage of the prophets who spoke to the exiles-Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Isaiah-the covenant faith would have disappeared, humanly speaking. In the message of the prophecies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and the prophecies of Isaiah 40-55, an astonishing hope was offered to people in a position of despair and disgrace. The full realization of some of these prophecies had to wait until the coming of Jesus Christ, but the immediate promise of restoration to their own land, and of God's forgiveness, were hopes which carried the exiles through a time of terrible testing.

Ezekiel stands at a point of great change for his people. When the descendants of the exiles returned to Judah, after 539 B.C., a new phase of Jewish history began. We may regard Ezekiel as an important founder of post-exilic Judaism, whose ideas were taken up and developed in the renewed faith and way of life of the Jews. As Ezekiel had prophesied, the rebuilt Temple, the Law and a purified cult became the centre of Jewish worship and life. Never again did idolatry appear in Jewish worship. The written Law governed Jewish life. The written scrolls of the prophetic utterances and of the records of Israelite history and experience became the precious possessions of the Jewish people, for in them the voice of their God spoke to them; but particularly, it was in the scrolls of the Law that the direct commands of God came to them. The two books of Ezra and Nehemiah describe how the reorganization of Jewish life and worship began after the freeing of the Jews by Cyrus the Persian.

We have already referred to the later development of apocalyptic writing in Judaism and seen a connection between the extraordinary visions of Ezekiel and the extraordinary imagery used in this kind of literature. Jewish apocalyptic writings exist which were not included in the Bible.