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Ezekiel 40:1-2
New Catholic Bible
Ezekiel 40:1-2
New Catholic Bible
The New Israel[a]
The Future Temple
Chapter 40
The Man with a Measuring Rod. 1 During the twenty-fifth year of our exile, at the beginning of the year, on the tenth day of the month, fourteen years after the fall of the city, on that very day the hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me there. 2 In divine visions, he brought me to the land of Israel and set me down on a very high mountain, to the south of which a city seemed to have been built.
Read full chapterFootnotes
- Ezekiel 40:1 Exactly forty years after the fall of Jerusalem in 587 B.C., Ezekiel unexpectedly resumes his prophetic activity.
He sees a city, the future city, in which the people of tomorrow, of the last times, will dwell. He sees and touches this city, which is reduced in size to the limited dimensions of the temple and its accessory buildings; he traverses it in every direction, he examines all its details and wants to show all of them to us. The story of this walk through the future city occupies chapters 40–48. It is difficult to understand the text of these final chapters of Ezekiel. In substance, they contain the account of what the prophet has seen in one or more visions. At a later date, however, Ezekiel and his disciples must have completed and extended the account with clarifications and details that now overload it to the point of making it at times incomprehensible. They express a burning faith in God, the holy God, who is present on earth, in his land, and in the temple of Jerusalem. This section has been called “the law of Ezekiel,” as if it stated anew the ancient law of the covenant that had been given to Moses.
St. John’s description, in his Apocalypse, of the heavenly Jerusalem, the definitive dwelling of God in humanity, is influenced by Ezekiel (see Rev 21:1—22:5).
