Ezekiel 9:6: “Do Not Spare Anyone”: Literal or Hyperbolic or ____?
By Paul Copan
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In this Worldview Bulletin Roundtable, we contributors are responding to a question we were recently asked.
I received an email from a woman in Germany, which I have included below. For the sake of smoothness, I’ve slightly adjusted the phrasing. The question concerns a verse in Ezekiel 9, which is a vision about the seeming annihilation of Jerusalem via the Babylonian invasion and how this squares with divine justice.
Dear Prof. Copan,
Warm regards from Germany. I appreciate your work on the Old Testament very much. Someone sent me a verse from Ezekiel 9:6:
Do not show pity or spare anyone! Slaughter the old men, the young men and maidens, the women and children. Defile the temple and fill the courts with the slain.
Of course, the person left out that the people were incredibly evil and murderers and that the people who had not participated in the evil shouldn't be touched.
Nevertheless, the command to kill women and children is hard to understand. I have read that this text is about a vision of Ezekiel, resembling the book of Revelation, where God withdrew Himself so that evil forces rose up, so to speak. But the text seems to say that God gave the command to his agents to kill absolutely everyone.
I would appreciate any help.
God bless,
J.
-------------------
I sent her a reply, though I have added a bit more material to fill out the response to this question—and to structure it as a Worldview Bulletin article! Although I don’t deal with this specific Ezekiel text in my books Is God a Moral Monster? or Is God a Vindictive Bully?, material in the Vindictive Bully book would especially help clarify the meaning of this text.
Dear J,
Thank you very much for your email with the excellent question about Ezekiel 9. Perhaps the following points to keep in mind as we navigate this and similar texts.
1. Prophetic visions and oracles throughout the book—and other prophetic books—often send potent, jarring messages that are left in tension with others. Sometimes we find we just have to live with certain tensions or no tidy resolution to our questions about these prophetic books. And very often the drama and power of what is being expressed—just like when we are taking in a work of art presented to us—we are to let “sit” before us to contemplate it, to receive it into our minds and imaginations, without trying to categorize or reduce what we see to a set of propositions.
We see this phenomenon especially in apocalyptic texts found in, say, Ezekiel, Daniel, Habakkuk, Zechariah, and later on in Revelation. One common tension is between imminence/immediacy and delay.[1] There is an expectation of God’s breaking into history, but there is also room for delay.
Habakkuk 2:3 (a text often alluded to in apocalyptic literature): “For the revelation awaits an appointed time; it speaks of the end and will not prove false. Though it linger, wait for it; it will certainly come and will not delay.” Delay doesn’t discredit or diminish apocalyptic hope.[2]
Daniel 9:19: “Do not delay!”—with “How long?” (Daniel 12:6).
Here Ezekiel makes no attempt to reconcile or explain conflicting messages in chapter 9 with those elsewhere.
2. Other visions in Ezekiel include a different picture of what will happen to Jerusalem in judgment—not total obliteration. For one thing, Ezekiel’s text includes God’s promise not to judge someone for another’s sin (18:4, 20: “the soul that sins will die”). Furthermore, elsewhere in the book, the coming judgment on Jerusalem is not so sweeping or totalistic. For example, in Ezekiel 5:12, God promises that a third of the city would be scattered among the nations in exile. Later on, Ezekiel 12:11 likewise threatens that Judah will go into exile, which assumes that universal slaughter isn’t in view.
3. Ezekiel 9 presents a graphic, shocking picture of the profound and comprehensive wickedness that has pervaded the city of Jerusalem. The vision presents two waves of action by God’s agents—the “executioners of the city,” each of whom has a “destroying weapon” in his hand (v. 1). In this first “passing over” of the city, those who have lamented and mourned or repented over the sorry spiritual state of Jerusalem were to be marked on their foreheads and spared from destruction (v. 4). Then for those who show no sorrow for sin, the second “wave” brings unsparing widespread judgment. The point of this vision is that in Jerusalem, there is none righteous, not even one! It seems that only Ezekiel is spared (v. 8).
This is the same emphasis in Jeremiah 5:1-5, where the prophet Jeremiah goes throughout the city and is told by the Lord: “If you can find a man, if there is one who does justice, who seeks truth, then I will pardon her” (v. 1). But, alas, all the people are hardened and resistant (v. 3).
4. This totalistic vision of destruction is tempered by the other texts related to Jerusalem’s fall. For one thing, Jeremiah 52 presents the righteous prophet Jeremiah as yet another survivor in Jerusalem’s destruction by Babylon. And we can look at 2 Kings 24:14 in an earlier wave of Babylon’s assault on Jerusalem: “Then Nebuchadnezzar led away into exile all Jerusalem and all the captains and all the mighty men of valor, ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and the smiths. None remained except the poorest people of the land.” So every last inhabitant of Jerusalem wasn’t literally slaughtered. Thus we have to be careful about pressing these visions too literally. They are meant to make a powerful and dramatic point.
5. The language of sweeping judgment here in Ezekiel is similar to the language concerning the Canaanites. The totalistic language of “man and woman, young and old” (what is called a “merism”) is common in ancient Near Eastern war texts, and non-combatants were typically not in view, even though mentioned. As I note in my book Is God a Vindictive Bully?, ancient Israel used the language of “total-kill” even when it involved only combatants. It was an ancient Near Eastern trash-talk akin to our sports trash-talk: “we totally annihilated that team” or “we slaughtered them.”
Consider Israel’s battles with the two Amorite kings:
“Do to [Og] what you did to Sihon king of the Amorites, who reigned in Heshbon.” So they struck him down, together with his sons and his whole army, leaving them no survivors. And they took possession of his land” (Num. 21:34–35 NIV)
When this is recounted in Deuteronomy, which typically intensifies the language of Exodus and Numbers (“show no mercy”; “leave alive nothing that breathes”; etc.).
“We completely destroyed them, as we had done with Sihon king of Heshbon, destroying every city—men, women and children” (Deut. 3:6 NIV).
Numbers gives us the on-the-ground report of only adult male combatants participating, even if the defeat is hyperbolized (“leaving no survivors”). In addition, King Sihon marched with his army and military gear about twenty miles—“from the Arnon [River] to the Jabbok [River]” up to Ammonite territory (vv. 23–24 NIV)—further reason to conclude that this excludes women, children, and the elderly.[3]
Concluding Remarks
Consider the sweeping or totalistic language in Ezekiel 21:3-4, where God’s sword is drawn, and he will cut off “the righteous and the wicked”—that is, the righteous and the unrighteous in Jerusalem will experience death. So if we take the vision of chapter 9 literally, then the righteous (those who mourned for the spiritual state of Jerusalem) should not be cut off with the unrighteous. But with the invasion, death came to all without distinction. We see that the message in these two chapters is emphasizing different themes.
Old Testament scholar Christopher Wright notes here: “This cannot mean that Yahweh sees no difference between the [righteous and the wicked], for such an idea would fly in the face of all the passionate preaching of Ezekiel elsewhere. Rather, it is probably a 'merism' . . . where two polar opposites [the righteous and the wicked] are expressed simultaneously as a graphic way of denoting the totality of something (e.g., ‘heaven and earth, ‘from head to toe,’ ‘land and sea,’ ‘root and branch’). The graphic poem evokes the horror of the total wiping out of Jerusalem.”[4]
Notes
[1] These ideas are taken from Richard Bauckham, “The Delay of the Parousia,” Tyndale Bulletin 31, 1980: 3-36.
[2] Bauckham, “Delay,” 6.
[3] William Webb and Gordon Oeste, Bloody, Brutal, and Barbaric? (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), 196–97.
[4] Christopher Wright, Ezekiel, Bible Speaks Today (InterVarsity Press, 2001), 114n59.
— Paul Copan is the Pledger Family Chair of Philosophy and Ethics at Palm Beach Atlantic University. Learn more about Paul and his work at paulcopan.com.
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