To say Ezekiel is a difficult text is the understatement of the year.  My go-to scholar ** you do not have permission to see this link ** generally agrees with Moshe Greenberg in this spot, calculating the 390 “days” from the erection of the Temple and the “House of Judah forty days” being an interpolation. 

Alter opens his fine introduction to his translation of Ezekiel with these words.   Ezekiel is surely the strangest of all the prophets.  And concludes,

Ezekiel clearly was not a stable person. The states of disturbance exhibited in his writing led him to a series of remarkable visionary experiences, at least several of which would be deeply inscribed in the Western imagination, engendering profound responses in later poetry and in mystical literature.  At the same time there is much in these visions that reminds us of the dangerous dark side of prophecy.  To announce authoritatively that the words one speaks are the words of God is an audacious act.  Inevitably what is reported as divine speech reaches us through the prism of the prophet’s sensibility and psychology, and the words and images represented as God’s urgent message may sometimes be distorted in eerie ways. 

Of course we moderns may be tempted to ask if we are really dealing here with anything other than Ezekiel’s eerie psychology.  I think it’s an important point that Ezekiel retains that visionary sensibility redolent of the earlier pre-literary prophets who were subject to ecstatic fits and spells.  We can appreciate him purely on that level.  The religious mystical imagination at work.  

That’s a good point. If you are convinced that a text is sacred scripture just how far will you go?   I have heard otherwise sensible Christian apologists defend the genocide of the Amalekites on the basis of Divine Command Theory.  If God says it, do it.  I even heard one guy (who at least claimed to be a Christian) say that if we could determine that any descendants of the Amalekites still survived it would be our duty to track them down and exterminate them!  

I don’t recall too many sermons from Ezekiel growing up in the rural Georgia fundamentalist church that I did.  I don’t suppose they really knew what to do with it.  The sonorous rhythms of the KJV covered a multitude of sins and it was easy to lose the real sense of the text in all that fine prose.   I’m told the Rabbis forbade the text to any male under thirty years of age and to all women whosoever.   I can believe it.  Ezekiel’s most despicable quality is his fervid misogyny.  He is obsessed with the idea of a woman’s body but utterly repulsed by it.  I suspect what really freaked out the Rabbis though was that in several places Ezekiel’s pronouncements directly contradict the proscriptions in the Torah. 

Deep calls unto deep of course and I can remember ** you do not have permission to see this link ** seized on the passages about Gog and Magog who turned out to be the Soviet Union and its allies.  Go read Late Great Planet Earth or get yourself a Scofield Reference Bible.  They explain everything!  You can’t ask for any more than that. 

Vesa, you mean Paul Boyer’s ** you do not have permission to see this link **?  Yep that’s a good one.

I was a kid in a fundamentalist Baptist church in the 70s when the whole Late Great Planet Earth phenomenon swept through the churches.  I remember Bible “studies” where the teacher breathlessly pored over the relevant passages looking for the clues to the time of the coming Rapture.    I forget the logic of identifying Gog and Magog as the Soviet Union other than they come from the “far reaches of the north” and we were in the Cold War.  I was out of the church when the Soviet Union actually fell so I can only imagine the consternation among the proponents of the End Times mythology.  

From Robert Alter’s commentary-

Chapter 38 Gog in the Land of Magog.  The Hebrew syntax could also be construed as “Gog of the land of Magog”.  Both names, which look quite foreign in the Hebrew, are mystifying and as such have encouraged the mythological readings of this prophecy prevalent in both Christian and Jewish tradition.   Gog is sometimes linked by scholars with a King Gugu of Lydia in Asia Minor.  Ezekiel does not appear to be referring to a historical figure – in contrast , for example, to Second Isaiah’s references to Cyrus – and may have embraced the name for its sheer strangeness. What is important is that Gog comes from the far north, the direction from which destruction traditionally descends upon Israel, as is repeatedly evident in Jeremiah.   

As Alter points out, in Ezekiel’s time they would have had little consciousness of anything further “north” than what is modern day Turkey, i.e., Asia Minor.