Ezekiel 37:7

Ezekiel was a prophet among the exiles in Babylon. Jerusalem had been taken and its temple burned in 586 BC, and the people had been carried away in more than one deportation (2 Kings 25). The exiles felt that God had abandoned them, and that their nation and their covenant with the LORD were finished. Their own words come in verse 11: “Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts.” This vision is God’s answer to them.

It comes just after the promises of chapter 36, where God says he will gather Israel from the nations, give them a new heart and put his spirit within them. Before that, in chapter 34, the LORD promised to shepherd his scattered flock himself (Ezekiel 34). The valley shows those promises carried out before the prophet’s eyes. After it come the two sticks joined into one, Israel and Judah made one nation again (Ezekiel 37:15–28), and later the vision of the new temple (Ezekiel 40–48).

“The hand of the LORD was upon me” is Ezekiel’s way of saying that God took hold of him to give him a vision and a message. He says it of his calling (Ezekiel 1:3), of the time the Spirit lifted him up and took him away (Ezekiel 3:14), and of the day he sat with the elders of Judah (Ezekiel 8:1). The word yâd, hand, stands for power and action, and with a preposition it marks the one through whom something is done. Here God is the one at work, and the prophet goes where he is taken.

He is “carried out in the spirit of the LORD”. The word for spirit is rûwach, and it comes back again and again in these verses as breath and wind. So in the very first verse, the Spirit who carries the prophet is the one who will give life to the bones.

God asks, “Son of man, can these bones live?” The title “son of man”, with bên, son, is how God addresses Ezekiel throughout the book. It reminds him that he is a mortal man standing before the Lord of life. The verb châyâh means to live, and in its causative forms to revive or bring back to life. It returns in God’s promise (“ye shall live”, verses 5, 6 and 14) and in what happens (“they lived”, verse 10), so the question of verse 3 is answered with its own word.

People ask why God would ask a question he already knows the answer to. He asks it to bring the prophet face to face with the fact that, as far as any man can see, these bones are past hope, so that the miracle to follow is seen to be God’s alone. Ezekiel’s answer, “O Lord GOD, thou knowest,” is humble and wise. Everything his eyes could see pointed one way, and he leaves the question with the one who knows, using the verb yâdaʻ, to know. A psalmist speaks to God the same way: “there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O LORD, thou knowest it altogether” (Psalm 139:4).

This is the faith of Abraham, who believed God, “who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were” (Romans 4:17). Moses’ song had already declared God’s word, “I kill, and I make alive” (Deuteronomy 32:39), and Jesus said, “With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible” (Matthew 19:26).

God then gives an order that sounds strange: “Prophesy upon these bones, and say unto them, O ye dry bones, hear the word of the LORD.” The verb nâbâʼ, to prophesy, means to speak by inspiration, whether foretelling or simply declaring. Ezekiel speaks as God’s messenger, and the power lies in the word he is given. The noun dâbâr means a word or speech, and also a matter or thing. “The word of the LORD” is what God says, and here it goes out to the dead.

Bones without ears are told to hear, because the word of God is able to make them live, as it made the world in Genesis 1. A psalm says, “he spake, and it was done” (Psalm 33:9), and through Isaiah God says of his word, “it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please” (Isaiah 55:11). Jesus speaks of the same power: “The hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God: and they that hear shall live” (John 5:25).

“So I prophesied as I was commanded.” Ezekiel obeys a command that sounds absurd to say aloud, and as he speaks, “there was a noise, and behold a shaking”. The noise is qôwl, a sound or voice, a word that can also mean thunder. The shaking is raʻash, a quaking or rattling, the word used for an earthquake, and here it is the rattle of bones on the move. God’s great acts are often marked by shaking, as when Mount Sinai “quaked greatly” at his coming down upon it (Exodus 19:18).

Then “the bones came together, bone to his bone.” The word for bone, ʻetsem, is the ordinary word for a bone, and it can stand for the body as well. Each bone finds the one it belongs to. God gathers what was scattered, and he does it in order.

Verse 8 shows the next stage as Ezekiel watches. He “beheld”, with râʼâh, the common verb for seeing, and “lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.” The bodies are whole and look like men, and they are still dead. Bodies put together by God’s own hand are corpses until the breath enters them, as Adam was dust until God breathed into him.

This pause is one of the most important moments in the vision. A people could be gathered, given back its land and its shape as a nation, and still lack life with God. What makes the bodies live is the breath, as Jesus told Nicodemus that a man must be “born of water and of the Spirit” (John 3:5–6), and as Paul writes, “the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life” (2 Corinthians 3:6). Order and outward form in a church or a life are good gifts of God, and the life itself comes from his Spirit.

So God gives a second command: “Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.” Ezekiel prophesies again, and this time his words go to the wind.

In verse 11 God explains the vision himself: “Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel.” The word bayith means a house, and so a household, a family or a nation. “The whole house” takes in all the people together, the nation as one body.

Then God quotes the people’s own words: “Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts.” Here “dried” is the verb yâbêsh, to dry up or wither, which can also mean to become weak or to be ashamed. “Cut off” is gâzar, to cut down or off, and so to destroy, divide or exclude. “For our parts” means that each of them, and all of them together, feel cut off from their land, their temple, their God and their future. The bones in the valley were the picture, and here are the people who feel that way. God has heard what they say about themselves, and he answers it.

The same grief fills the psalm of the exiles who sat down and wept by the rivers of Babylon and asked, “How shall we sing the LORD’s song in a strange land?” (Psalm 137:1–4). It is in Isaiah too: “But Zion said, The LORD hath forsaken me, and my Lord hath forgotten me” (Isaiah 49:14). In Isaiah God meets the complaint with a promise.

“Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel.”

The picture moves from a valley of bones to graves. The word qeber means a grave, tomb or burying place. The exiles in Babylon were alive in body, and as a nation they were as good as buried. God promises to open, pâthach, to open wide, loosen or set free, and to bring them up. He says “your graves” twice in verse 12 and twice more in verse 13, so that the promise stands out plainly.

He calls them “O my people”, with ʻam, a people gathered as one. After all their sin and the judgment of the exile, God still names them his own, and their return rests on his faithfulness and his love.

“Bring you into the land of Israel” makes the promise concrete. The land was the inheritance God promised Abraham: “Unto thy seed will I give this land” (Genesis 12:7). The prophets speak of Israel’s gathering again and again (Isaiah 43:5–6, Jeremiah 30–33), and some decades after Ezekiel the exiles did come home from Babylon.

“And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land.” Here rûwach is “my spirit”, and so the breath of the vision is God’s own Spirit. This is the promise of the chapter before: “A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you... And I will put my spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes” (Ezekiel 36:24–28). Jeremiah gives the same promise of the new covenant: “I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts” (Jeremiah 31:33).

The land is ʼădâmâh, ground, soil or land, their own soil. Jeremiah had told the exiles that after seventy years in Babylon God would bring them back “into the place whence I caused you to be carried away captive” (Jeremiah 29:10–14). In verse 14 the Spirit comes first and the land second. Life with God comes first, and the land is the place where that life is lived.

Three times the passage gives the purpose of all God does: “ye shall know that I am the LORD” (verse 6), “ye shall know that I am the LORD, when I have opened your graves” (verse 13), and “then shall ye know that I the LORD have spoken it, and performed it” (verse 14). The verb yâdaʻ means to know, properly to know by seeing, and this knowing comes from living through what God does. Yᵉhôvâh is God’s covenant name, the LORD who is and who keeps his word.

The phrase runs through the whole of Ezekiel, over seventy times, in judgment and in mercy alike. God says of the nations, “the heathen shall know that I am the LORD, saith the Lord GOD, when I shall be sanctified in you before their eyes” (Ezekiel 36:23), and long before, he acted at the Red Sea so “that the Egyptians may know that I am the LORD” (Exodus 14:4). Verse 14 ends with “I the LORD have spoken it, and performed it, saith the LORD.” What God says and what God does are one, and his people learn it by seeing his promise come true.

The vision was given to Israel, and God’s own explanation keeps it there. The New Testament shows the same God giving the same Spirit through Jesus Christ, and so the valley speaks to every believer as well. Paul says that we were all “dead in trespasses and sins”, and that God “hath quickened us together with Christ” and “raised us up together” (Ephesians 2:1–6). That is the valley of dry bones in the life of each person God saves. Jesus says, “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live” (John 11:25), and “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing” (John 6:63). He is the Word who was with God and was God (John 1:1), made flesh to dwell among us (John 1:14), and his word raises the dead: “He that heareth my word, and believeth on him that sent me, hath everlasting life... but is passed from death unto life” (John 5:24).

The breath of the vision has its echo after the resurrection, when Jesus “breathed on them, and saith unto them, Receive ye the Holy Ghost” (John 20:22). At Pentecost the Spirit came with “a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind” (Acts 2:1–4). Jesus had promised that the Comforter would dwell with his disciples and be in them (John 14:16–17) and would teach them all things (John 14:26), and that they would receive power to be his witnesses (Acts 1:8). Paul calls the risen Christ “a quickening spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45), and writes that “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus hath made me free from the law of sin and death” (Romans 8:2).

Christ himself was “declared to be the Son of God with power... by the resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:4). At his empty tomb the angels said, “He is not here, but is risen” (Luke 24:6), and “Christ being raised from the dead dieth no more; death hath no more dominion over him” (Romans 6:9). He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), the way, the truth and the life (John 14:6), the one in whom we know the Father (John 14:7), and the one who came “that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). God has given him the name above every name, so that every tongue will confess that he is Lord (Philippians 2:9–11). Those raised with him “walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4), and “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

The army that stood up together has its likeness in the church. Believers from every nation are baptized by one Spirit into one body (1 Corinthians 12:13), “the whole body fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth” (Ephesians 4:16), built up as “lively stones... a spiritual house, an holy priesthood” (1 Peter 2:5). As the bones came together bone to his bone, God joins his people to one another, and his Spirit makes the body live.

This passage shows us a God who sees his people at their lowest and hears exactly what they say about themselves. He brings his prophet into the valley, leads him round every bone, and asks the question that only he can answer. He sends his word to the dead, and it does what it says. He gives life in order, frame and flesh and then breath, and the breath is his own Spirit. He calls a scattered and ashamed people “my people”, opens their graves and brings them home, so that they know him as the LORD who has spoken and performed it.

Ezekiel’s part is small and plain. He says “thou knowest” when the answer is hidden from him, and he speaks what he is told. Whatever lies dry before us, a heart, a home or a church, the answer to “can these bones live?” rests with the Lord GOD, and he has shown his answer in this valley and in the empty tomb of his Son.