Ezekiel 47:11

These verses come near the end of Ezekiel’s long vision of a new temple and a restored land (Ezekiel 40–48). He received it among the exiles in Babylon, after Jerusalem and its temple had been destroyed. The people had lost their land, their king and the house where God had dwelt among them, and they wondered whether he had cast them off for good. God answered them with a temple measured to the last cubit. The plan of the house fills Ezekiel 40–43, and the laws of its worship and priesthood fill Ezekiel 44–46. Then the vision begins to move, as water flows out of the house into the land. The whole vision ends with the new name of the city: “The LORD is there” (Ezekiel 48:35).

“Waters issued out from under the threshold of the house.” The verb yâtsâʼ is the everyday word for going or coming out, and in another form for bringing out. It runs all through this passage. The guide brings Ezekiel out in verse 2, the man goes forth in verse 3, and the waters issue out toward the east in verse 8 and out of the sanctuary in verse 12. The word for waters, mayim, is plural in form and is the ordinary word for water. The threshold, miphtân, is the sill of a doorway. So the water rises at the very entrance of God’s house. Its source is the place where he dwells, and from there it goes out into the world.

The house faces east, and the water runs east. That direction carries weight in Ezekiel. He watched the glory of the LORD leave the temple and stand at the door of its east gate (Ezekiel 10:18–19), and later he saw the glory come back “from the way of the east” and fill the house (Ezekiel 43:1–5). The water now goes out by the road the glory came in. Where God has come back to dwell, life flows out from him.

The water comes down “from the right side of the house, at the south side of the altar.” To someone facing east the right hand is the south, so the right side (yᵉmânîy) and the south (negeb) name the same side here. The stream passes beside the altar, where sacrifice was offered for sin, and it is fitting that the water of life runs out beside the place of atonement.

In verse 2 the guide takes Ezekiel out through the north gate and round the outside of the walls to the “utter gate”, the outermost gate on the east. The word “way”, derek, means a road or path, and it comes three times in the verse as he is led along a set route. From outside the gate Ezekiel sees again what he saw from within, water running out “on the right side”, and now he can follow where it goes.

Other prophets speak of the same water. Joel foretold that “a fountain shall come forth of the house of the LORD, and shall water the valley of Shittim” (Joel 3:18), and Zechariah that “living waters shall go out from Jerusalem” (Zechariah 14:8). A psalm sings, “There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God” (Psalm 46:4). Through Isaiah God said, “I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert” (Isaiah 43:19). Behind them all stands the first garden, where “a river went out of Eden to water the garden” (Genesis 2:10).

The guide is “the man that had the line in his hand”. The word for man, ʼîysh, is the ordinary word for a man, and his line is a measuring cord. He measures, mâdad, the verb for stretching out a line to measure, and he counts off a thousand cubits, about 1,500 feet or 450 metres. Each time he brings Ezekiel through the water, and that verb, ʻâbar, means to cross over or pass through. At the first mark the water is “to the ankles”. At the second it is “to the knees”, and at the third “to the loins”, the waist. At the fourth mark Ezekiel says, “it was a river that I could not pass over: for the waters were risen, waters to swim in”. There “could” is yâkôl, to be able, joined again to ʻâbar. The word for risen, gâʼâh, means to rise or mount up, and it is also used for being majestic. The phrase “waters to swim in” uses sâchûw, swimming: the water is deep enough that a man must swim.

In about four thousand cubits, roughly a mile, a stream that came out under a doorway has become a river a man must swim. The measuring shows that its growth comes in order, under God’s hand, and it shows how far his gift reaches. What begins small at God’s door becomes a flood too deep for any man to wade or hold back. The psalmist knew this abundance: “thou shalt make them drink of the river of thy pleasures. For with thee is the fountain of life” (Psalm 36:8–9).

Ezekiel goes into the water each time with his guide. “He brought me through” comes again and again, and at the end it is the guide who brings him back. So it is with God’s people, for “as many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the sons of God” (Romans 8:14).

The stages also give us a picture of life with God. Ankle-deep water is easy to step into. Knee-deep water takes more effort to walk through, at the waist a man’s footing starts to go, and in deep water the current carries him. God’s grace keeps rising past what we have known, and he leads us further in until we rest our whole weight on him.

Now the guide explains where the river goes. “These waters issue out toward the east country, and go down into the desert, and go into the sea.” The east country (qadmôwn gᵉlîylâh) is the land east of Jerusalem, and the desert, ʻărâbâh, is the Arabah, the dry rift valley of the Jordan that runs down to the Dead Sea. The word for sea, yâm, is used for any sea or large body of water. Here it is the Dead Sea, called the salt sea in Genesis 14:3, whose water is too salty for fish to live in.

“The waters shall be healed.” The verb râphâʼ means to mend or cure. Scripture uses it for God healing his people and also for human physicians. Here the patient is a sea. What made it dead is cured, and it becomes water that can hold life. Only God can do this, and the reason given is the river: the water came out of his house.

Verse 9 spells out what the healing means. “Every thing that liveth, which moveth, whithersoever the rivers shall come, shall live.” Life comes up again and again in this one verse. Chay means living or alive, and it can also mean fresh. The verbs châyâh and châyay mean to live, and also to revive or be kept alive. The verse closes by saying it once more: “every thing shall live whither the river cometh.” In between comes a sight that would astonish anyone who knew the Dead Sea: “a very great multitude of fish”. The word for fish, dâgâh, stands for fish as a whole, and the words behind “very great”, mᵉʼôd and rab, mean very or exceedingly, and much, many or great. The cause is given plainly: “because these waters shall come thither: for they shall be healed.”

The Dead Sea is the picture of death in this vision, and God sends his river straight into it. The places that look most hopeless are where he shows his power to give life. Isaiah foresaw that “the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose” (Isaiah 35:1–2), and God had already promised through Ezekiel to renew both the land and its people (Ezekiel 36). The New Testament speaks of us in the same way. We “were dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1), and God made us alive, so that “if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature” (2 Corinthians 5:17).

“The fishers shall stand upon it from Engedi even unto Eneglaim.” The word for fishers, davvâg, is one spelling of the word for a fisherman. Engedi was an oasis with springs on the western shore of the Dead Sea, a green spot in a barren land. Eneglaim is harder to place, and it is usually taken to be another point on the western shore. By naming real places Ezekiel sets the vision on a shore his hearers knew, and he takes in a long stretch of it.

“They shall be a place to spread forth nets.” Mishṭôwach means a spreading place, from a root meaning to spread out, and here it is the shore where nets are laid out to dry or to be mended. A sea once empty of fish has a shore lined with working fishermen.

“Their fish shall be according to their kinds, as the fish of the great sea, exceeding many.” The word for kinds, mîyn, means a sort or species, so the sea will hold many kinds of fish as well as many fish. The great sea, gâdôwl (great) with yâm (sea), is the Mediterranean, the richest fishing water Israel knew, and the Dead Sea will be as full as that. “Exceeding many” uses mᵉʼôd and rab again.

When Jesus called fishermen to follow him, he said, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men” (Matthew 4:19). The great catch along the healed sea gives us a picture of the many people brought to God as the gospel goes out.

God sets a limit to the healing, and by his word the swamps and marshes by the sea stay salt. “But the miry places thereof and the marishes thereof shall not be healed; they shall be given to salt.” The miry places, bitstsâh, are swamps or bogs, low wet ground where water stands, and “marishes” is the old English word for marshes. The verb for healed is râphâʼ again, the same word used for the sea in verse 8.

To be given to salt is to be left barren. Salt, melach, ruins ground for growing. When Abimelech took Shechem he “beat down the city, and sowed it with salt” (Judges 9:45), and Moses warned that a land under God’s curse would be “brimstone, and salt, and burning”, like the overthrow of Sodom (Deuteronomy 29:23). Jeremiah sets side by side the same two pictures this chapter holds. The man who trusts in man shall “inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited”, while the man who trusts in the LORD “shall be as a tree planted by the waters” (Jeremiah 17:5–8).

The verse states the fact and leaves its reason unspoken, and we do well to keep to what it says. The river heals what it flows through, and the marshes are pockets of standing water left outside its current. The picture agrees with the rest of Scripture. The water of life is offered freely, those who stay apart from it remain in their barrenness, and Jesus speaks of a final parting from him at the end (Matthew 25:41). The marshes are a sober note in a joyful chapter, and they keep us from presuming on a grace we refuse.

When Ezekiel is brought back to the bank, he sees “very many trees on the one side and on the other”. “Very many” is mᵉʼôd rab, the words for very and many together, and the word for tree, ʻêts, also means wood. The bank is sâphâh, a lip, which by extension means the edge or shore of something. Both banks are lined with trees in a dry land where water meant life.

Verse 12 tells what those trees are. “Shall grow all trees for meat.” In the KJV “meat” means food of any kind, and the Hebrew maʼăkâl is the word for food, so these are fruit trees of every sort. “Whose leaf shall not fade”: the leaf is ʻâleh, and to fade is nâbêl, to wilt or wither, a word that is also used figuratively for being foolish. “Neither shall the fruit thereof be consumed”: the fruit is pᵉrîy, and to be consumed is tâmam, to be finished or to come to an end, so the fruit lasts without end. “It shall bring forth new fruit according to his months”: bâkar means to bear early or first fruit, and chôdesh is the new moon or month, so each tree gives a fresh crop every month of the year.

Then comes the reason: “because their waters they issued out of the sanctuary”. The sanctuary, miqdâsh, is a consecrated or holy place. The word can be used of any shrine, even an idol’s, and here it is the LORD’s own house. The trees live because their water comes from him. “And the fruit thereof shall be for meat, and the leaf thereof for medicine.” The word for medicine, tᵉrûwphâh, means a remedy or healing. The trees feed people and heal them.

These trees answer to the trees of Eden, where God made “every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden” (Genesis 2:9). They answer to the blessed man of the first psalm: “he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither” (Psalm 1:3). And John saw them again at the end of the Bible: “a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb. In the midst of the street of it, and on either side of the river, was there the tree of life, which bare twelve manner of fruits, and yielded her fruit every month: and the leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations” (Revelation 22:1–2). The river from God, the trees on both banks, the fruit every month and the leaves for healing are all there, and in John’s vision the river flows from the throne of God and of the Lamb.

Believers differ on how this temple and its river are fulfilled. Some hold that God will build this temple on earth in a future millennial kingdom, that the river of Ezekiel 47 will flow from it, and that the Dead Sea will become fresh water with fishermen working its shore. They point to the careful measurements and to real places such as Engedi. Others hold that the vision shows, in the language of the temple, the life God gives by his Spirit, now in his people and fully in the new creation. They point to features only God could give a river, such as water that rises from ankle-deep to swimming depth within about a mile and trees that bear every month, and to John’s words about the holy city: “I saw no temple therein: for the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are the temple of it” (Revelation 21:22). Many hold both, receiving the spiritual truths now while leaving room for a future fulfillment on earth.

On every view the vision teaches the same things. Life comes from God’s presence, it overflows, and he will heal what is dead. The last chapter of the Bible (Revelation 22) shows where that river ends.

Jesus spoke of his own body as the temple: “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. … But he spake of the temple of his body” (John 2:19–21). God’s dwelling among us is Christ himself, and so the river comes from him. To the woman at the well he offered living water: “the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life” (John 4:10–14). At the feast in Jerusalem he stood and cried, “If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink. He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” John explains, “But this spake he of the Spirit, which they that believe on him should receive” (John 7:37–39). Ezekiel’s river is part of the Scripture Jesus pointed to.

The river reaches us through the Spirit. Believers are now “the temple of God”, with “the Spirit of God” dwelling in them (1 Corinthians 3:16), and the life that flows from Christ flows on through his people to others. He came “that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly” (John 10:10), and the river that keeps rising pictures that abundance. The trees that bear because they stand by the water are like those who abide in him: “He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit” (John 15:5). The fruit for meat points to the one who said, “I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger” (John 6:35). The water that ran past the altar points to “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), whose sacrifice opened the way for the Spirit to be poured out and for every curse to be lifted. At the very end the river flows “out of the throne of God and of the Lamb”.

The God who sent this river into the Dead Sea is the God you come to in Christ. His water can reach the most lifeless place, whether a life worn out by sin, a heart gone cold or a home that has run dry, because its source is God himself and it grows as it goes. Isaiah promised that the LORD would make his people “like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not” (Isaiah 58:11).

The trees bear because they stand by the river, and our fruit comes the same way, from staying near him in his word, in prayer and among his people, and drinking from him day by day. Their fruit and leaves are for others to eat and be healed by, and the life Christ gives us is meant to flow on to the people around us. The marshes stand as a quiet call to receive the water while it is offered.

The whole vision ends in hope. Its first hearers were exiles in a foreign land, far from a ruined city, and God showed them a river and a city named “The LORD is there”. We wait for that same city, where the river of the water of life flows from the throne and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.