Ezekiel 37 Footnotes

37:1-14 This passage, among the best known of Ezekiel’s writings today, consists of his dramatic vision for the restoration of Israel’s life as a community. The restoration of Israel as a people is a fundamental component of the biblical doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. Christian interpretation views this text as part of the “buildup” to the resurrection of Jesus (the passage is read, for example, in the Easter Vigil service of many churches). The distinction sometimes drawn between national restoration (as here) and individual resurrection (as in the NT) is a distinction foreign to biblical thought with its understanding of “corporate solidarity.” What happens to the head, or representative, of a community happens to all its members, so that Jesus’s resurrection is also the resurrection of all who belong to him (1Co 15:22-23), who are the “Israel of God” (Gl 6:16). While Ezekiel’s primary purpose may not have been to teach a doctrine of the resurrection, he was not alone among OT writers in being given insight into this concept. Some interpreters deny that either Ezekiel or his hearers had any developed concept about the resurrection of human life, but many OT passages suggest that there was some understanding of resurrection before and after the sixth century BC (e.g., Gn 22:5; Jb 19:25-29; Ps 16:10-11; 49:15; Is 26:19; Dn 12:2-3; Hs 13:14). Ezekiel’s statement, “I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them” (Ezk 37:12) is a direct resurrection analogy. If the Judeans had no idea of the possibility of the resurrection of human life, the analogy would have made no sense.