Ezekiel 28 ???

Ezekiel 28:11-19

The word of the LORD came to me: “Son of man, take up a lament concerning the king of Tyre and say to him: ‘This is what the Sovereign LORD says:
“‘You were the model of perfection,
full of wisdom and perfect in beauty.
You were in Eden,
the garden of God; every precious stone adorned you:
ruby, topaz and emerald,
chrysolite, onyx and jasper,
sapphire, turquoise and beryl.
Your settings and mountings were made of gold;
on the day you were created they were prepared.
You were anointed as a guardian cherub,
for so I ordained you.
You were on the holy mount of God;
you walked among the fiery stones.
You were blameless in your ways
from the day you were created
till wickedness was found in you.
Through your widespread trade
you were filled with violence,
and you sinned.
So I drove you in disgrace from the mount of God,
and I expelled you, O guardian cherub,
from among the fiery stones.
Your heart became proud
on account of your beauty,
and you corrupted your wisdom
because of your splendor.
So I threw you to the earth;
I made a spectacle of you before kings.
By your many sins and dishonest trade
you have desecrated your sanctuaries.
So I made a fire come out from you,
and it consumed you,
and I reduced you to ashes on the ground
in the sight of all who were watching.
All the nations who knew you
are appalled at you;
you have come to a horrible end
and will be no more.’”

Questions, which naturally arise here are…


(1) Which character is this passage referring to in the Garden of Eden?

And

(2) Which parts in the passage are referring to details specific to the time of the Garden of Eden, and which are referring to the time of king of Tyre?




The verse Ezekiel 28, was highlighted in a recent documentary…entitled The Bible’s buried secrets – “The Real Garden of Eden”

It was suggested in the documentary, that this verse hints towards a very different portrayal of the Garden of Eden story; to the extent that the presenter concluded that the "Adam and Eve" story was originally about a King who worked in the Garden of Eden or Gods garden, and was later banished.

Christian theologians however suggest that Ezekiel 28, both compares Satan and the “king of Tyre”, at various interchanging points in the passage. Although having said that, this doesn’t make much sense to me, because Satan is not supposed to be destroyed with fire, until the end times.


Still not sure to make of all this…


Opinions…


Thoughts….


Epiphanies…


Christian theological insight…


- JC

Lucifer had a life before the garden of eden ,or the earth for that matter, existed. He is within a very powerful man on earth right now. He always has been. He's "a real fan of man".

According to some scholars it is similar to a taunt song addressed to the King of Tyre.

Imo, the fall of Satan. Anointed cherub who covers indicates "high office" with authority & responsibility to protect & defend the Holy Mountain of God, an allusion to God's throne. Of course, Lucifer's fall was occasioned by seeking to have glory for himself.

In a sense one can also see Satan's fall for the fall of any proud person, aka all of us.

If you want further explinations of passages and what not found in the bible, go to biblecommenter.com...

Select your part of text, and then after you have chosen which section you are to be researching... Click the 'Comment' tab, it will give you the thoughts and opinions of scholars on the particular text in which you are looking at.

I stay out of Ezekiel personally, for I have found the book of Matthew to be more enlightening.

reply to post by Joecroft

I think more than anything else, this pronouncing of doom upon Tyre, shows just how ate up with venom and hate Ezekiel really was. Rather than concluding like the woman in the documentary, that Eden story was invented to explain the destruction of Jerusalem temple, it's much more likely that Ezekiel was using an older story as hyperbole against Tyre.

Ezekiel was in Babylon as a hostage taken in an earlier deportation, previous to Jerusalem's destruction. After the destruction, he figured that all the other major cities were laughing about it (probably delusion). In a fit of rage against the imagined insult, Ezekiel pronounced total annihilation against Tyre (Chapter 26) by Nebuchadnezzar. This total annihilation didn't happen as Ezekiel pronounced it. He's a false prophet, and a mean and vindictive one at that.

Tyre is so much older than Jerusalem that it isn't funny. It's more likely that the king's garden in Tyre is Eden than that the temple in Jerusalem is. Most likely Eden is in Georgia close to the Black Sea.

Originally posted by pthena
After the destruction, he figured that all the other major cities were laughing about it (probably delusion). In a fit of rage against the imagined insult,

There's a more tangible motive for hostility in Joel ch3 v6 (speaking about Tyre);
"You have sold the people of Judah and Jerusalem to the Greeks, removing them far from their own border"

It makes historical sense that surrounding nations would be cynically exploiting the new weakness of Judah, by seizing people as slaves, and by moving into their territories.
That would be how Edom expanded into what used to be southern Judah, and got criticised for it by various prophets.
It seems that the Jews suffered much more than loss of face at this time.

In part 4 of the video, at 4 min. you see this guy with grey hair and glasses and a blue striped shirt, sitting in a garden, This is Professor Nicolas Wyatt, and if you go on Amazon, you can find a book by him, called, There's Such Divinity Doth Hedge a King: Selected Essays Of Nicolas Wyatt On Royal Ideology In Ugaritic And Old Testament Literature.

One of these expensive academic works going for $130, but something I would like to have if I could afford it. There is a dissertation on the Marna Temple (mentioned in the video) you can find online which makes the exact point the video does, that a temple is a representation of a garden, which in turn is a representation of what god does, of course through the king. My point being, Wyatt is someone who does know what he is talking about, so makes total sense that they would go to him on this subject, plus BBC is probably already familiar with the man personally, through the Jesus project.
You have to think of the Bible as a lot of borrowed stories and practically none of them are that directly connected to their own history, but to an idealized history that they can say happened but of course they can not prove so why bother, because part of the story is how all the evidence has been destroyed.

Here's something I found while looking up the people connected, one way or another, to Wyatt's book, an article reviewing a book by one of these said people:

Mythology and Lament: Studies in the Oracles about the Nations. By John B. Geyer. Society for Old Testament Study Series. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004, xiii 214 pp., $99.95.

John Geyer offers the results of an intensive study of the Oracles against the Nations (or as he prefers, the Oracles about the Nations) in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel (abbreviated as ON-IJE). The present study incorporates an earlier article (1986) by the author devoted to the ON-IJE with further investigation building upon recent studies of lament passages in the Hebrew Bible set against their larger Near Eastern background.

Geyer holds that the ON-IJE must be investigated, somewhat like an archeological site, at two levels: the most recent is creation mythology, widespread in the ancient Near East; the underlying and foundational level, however, is the Sumerian psalms of lament (p. x). These, Geyer claims, are the key to understanding the intention and meaning of the ON-IJE. He advocates a myth and ritual approach to the OT and is deeply troubled by our modern world and its religious wars. If I have heard Geyer correctly, he wants to contribute to a safer, more humane world by heading off a misappropriation of ancient religious texts for political, nationalistic agendas, a laudable endeavor.

Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (my underlining)
For anyone who might want to do further research into the implications of the ideas that come from this video, that creation mythology comes from oracles against nations, but not in a political sense but something I would take as an attempt by religionists to say they are somehow more holy than other people.

reply to post by jmdewey60

Marna Temple (mentioned in the video) you can find online which makes the exact point the video does, that a temple is a representation of a garden, which in turn is a representation of what god does, of course through the king.

Books sure are expensive these days!

Some other temples to consider: the House of Yahweh on Elephantine(upper Nile), and another House of Yahweh south of the Dead Sea. The Elephantine temple was being rebuilt about the same time as the Jerusalem temple. Any mention of "that other temple" have been suppressed from Canonical text.

Wikipedia-Elephantine_papyri
The community also appealed for aid to Sanballat I, a Samaritan potentate, and his sons Delaiah and Shelemiah, as well as Johanan ben Eliashib. Both Sanballat and Johanan are mentioned in the Book of Nehemiah, 2:19, 12:23.[4]

The documentary showed a Syrian temple which was a prototype.

Did Solomon's Temple Have
a Syrian Prototype?
Hiram, king of Tyre, worked closely with Solomon in the work of building a temple in
Jerusalem (see 1 Kgs 5:1-18). Volkmar Fritz appeals to this fact in his effort to demonstrate that
the temple in Jerusalem had a Phoenician or Syrian prototype.

[Solomon] . . . looked not to available Israelite prototypes, but to Phoenician exemplars, which
in turn we can now trace back to long-room temples in northern Syria and eventually back to the
megaron house in Anatolia, nearly 2,000 years before Solomon built his House of the Lord.

Right now I'm reading a book by Stephan Grundy, Gilgamesh: A magnificent retelling of humankind's oldest epic adventure, a pretty good novelization. Uruk, at a later time actually had a garden fed by canals. see: en.wikipedia.org... and that dig that was shown in the documentary seems to have had a real garden. Old Babylon, before Assyrian rule had garden. The point is, that Jerusalem temple only had fake garden, engraved in gold over wood paneling.

Which came first, the making of engraved images "in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below" or the prohibition to these images?

reply to post by pthena

Books sure are expensive these days!

Probably has to do with economy of scale.
Amazon has this feature when you pull up a book, below it is "People who bough this book also bought . . ."
Some of these $200 books, you look, and instead of 16 pages or something, there will be one, or maybe two, books people "who bought this book" also bought, meaning to me, maybe only one copy of that book was sold.
This is what I mean about academic works being expensive, while popular books that they make massive printings of go really cheap.
I have one book that is seriously a very small printing, it is a hard cover book, nicely bound but it is like a pamphlet in size and it is a list of names that are derived from god-names, taken from ancient inscriptions and things that date back to old testament times,You Shall Have No Other Gods: Israelite Religion in the Light of Hebrew Inscriptions, and I payed $21 (plus shipping) for it, which seemed very steep to me two years ago.

reply to post by DISRAELI

There's a more tangible motive for hostility in Joel ch3 v6 (speaking about Tyre);
"You have sold the people of Judah and Jerusalem to the Greeks, removing them far from their own border"

It makes historical sense that surrounding nations would be cynically exploiting the new weakness of Judah, by seizing people as slaves, and by moving into their territories.

Joel is another example of an amoral tribalist cheering the home team at the expense of all others. Is slavery bad? Only if someone does it to you, rather than you doing it to someone else, according to Joel.

7 Behold, I will stir them up out of the place where you have sold them,
and will return your repayment on your own head;

8 and I will sell your sons and your daughters into the hands of the children of Judah,
and they will sell them to the men of Sheba,
to a faraway nation,
for Yahweh has spoken it.”

So the prophecy is that Judah will be the slave traders, buying and selling. That's Joel's solution! This is an extreme amorality. And if Joel was truly possessed of the spirit of Yahweh, then this also reflects the personality of Yahweh.

Does Yahweh love and care for all people, or is he merely a tribal god who feeds his pet tribe on the backs of all other peoples and tribes?

reply to post by jmdewey60

Hopefully you don't spend a lot of money on that book without seeing the short comings. The article you linked to is quite critical against the book.

Mythology and Lament: Studies in the Oracles about the Nations
Geyer's approach reminds me of Origen's allegorical method. Like Origen, he knows what the texts are really about. As an exegete, he wants to show us what is really there behind and beneath the text. Origen, of course, discovered Christian truth everywhere embedded in the text of the OT; Geyer finds the primal myths and rituals that explain these ancient writings. In fact, he has explained nothing.

Geyer affirms that God is holy and desires for all to be restored and returned to Eden. Evangelicals affirm what Geyer affirms but lament what he does not. God's historic and eschatological judgments get short shrift because particularism is not Geyer's frame of reference. Universalism is clearly his preferred theological orientation. In short, the theological message of the ON-IJE has been neutered.

The reviewer points out the major pitfalls of "Christianizing the Old Testament and its god". Literal treatment shows a Bronze Age tyrant who is completely unable to actually save anyone, yet promises that he can.

Any historical act that happens he frames as "well that was punishment" or "that's what I promised" according to circumstances that he had zero control of. The only real control he has is the control of fanatics that he has possessed. If Christians can't find a better god, then God help us all!

I was a little freaked when the lady in the documentary decided that "everything is about Jerusalem". Jerusalem was merely a fraud of stealing traditions of all the surrounding culture and tradition, then tribalizing it all, "all for me! All about me".

reply to post by pthena

My only point was that Ezekiel's grievance about Tyre was not as trivial as being laughed at. There was more to it than that.

Since this is a thread about Ezekiel's comments on Tyre, I will stand by my point rather than be diverted into other discussions.

reply to post by pthena

No I was just saying, other people interested in what this video had to say should check out some related books, starting with one by a prominent expert actually in the video, probably the most authoritative on the overall theme.
I would be more inclined, if I was to pick one to buy, towards the Wyatt book, and not the Geyer book.
In defense of Geyer, looking at the preview pages, he just seems to be going with the latest trend in OT criticize, which is to not take the name Babylon, to make you think the book section is written by someone in the time of Babylon, when it could have been written earlier for Assyria, and later when it was appropriate, changed it to Babylon. His main thesis being they are adaptations of liturgical sayings, to be written out to fit whatever the situation was at that time.
The book I have been considering seriously is the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible. That runs $171, new but there are used ones for around $69.

reply to post by DISRAELI

Since this is a thread about Ezekiel's comments on Tyre, I will stand by my point rather than be diverted into other discussions.

Point taken. the OP asks:

(1) Which character is this passage referring to in the Garden of Eden?
And
(2) Which parts in the passage are referring to details specific to the time of the Garden of Eden, and which are referring to the time of king of Tyre?

Judaic execration against Tyre goes back to the time of Hezekiah, when Assyria was the major power. Just from the language of Ezekiel, I would gather that there may have been a multi city state alliance in which both Tyre and Judah were members. Sometimes Tyre was "good" and sometimes "bad" depending upon the status of the alliance.

You were anointed as a guardian cherub,
for so I ordained you.
You were on the holy mount of God;
you walked among the fiery stones.
You were blameless in your ways
from the day you were created

While alliance stood.

So I drove you in disgrace from the mount of God,
and I expelled you, O guardian cherub,
from among the fiery stones.
Your heart became proud
on account of your beauty,
and you corrupted your wisdom
because of your splendor.
So I threw you to the earth;

Instead of saying, you broke treaty and became bad, it's "I kicked you out", thus Yahweh, through the prophet, takes credit as being the one in control, as if nothing can happen without his say so. It was during this general time frame that Yahweh morphed from a god among gods with friendly relations with gods and their cities of men, into a monotheistic god who controlled everything in the world.

reply to post by Joecroft


Atypically one would think it being Lucifer. Lucifer was a "king" of the messengers in the regards that he was the highest ranked of the messengers, the gaurdian of the throne and the choir master of heaven.

It could also refer to Adam because Adam being the First was meant to be the King of the nations as Eve gave birth to the nations slowly over eternity but his children rejected him (because they were born from Satan as it is thought that Eve slept with satan and gave birth to Cain the first murderer) and went off to forge their own Kingdoms.

It is thought that "Adam" is actually our God and that Jesus Christ the "Son of Man" is his son and heir to his Kingdom. This ofcourse comes down throught the Egyptian creation stories as the creator god according to the egyptians was "Atum".

Notice Jesus has the titles of Son of Man and Son of God. Well how could it be that he is the Son of Man (Adam) and the Son of God? So if the Most High created the First Adam that makes Him Adam's creator and that First Adam (Man) created us that makes him our God.

I have often wondered at why it always seems like God has a duality in his nature, almost like theres not really one God but like there's actually two because in the Old Testament and New Testament (specifically Revelation ch, 2) God keeps talking to himself which leads me to think he either has multiple personality disorder or there really is 2 God's. This comes from a pure logical standpoint and is just what i have been wondering over the years. Ofcourse in Revelatoin he could also be talking to Yeshua ha Meshiach (Jesus Christ)but if there is only supposed to be one God then why is he even called the "Most High God"? Obviously logic states there must be another god or gods under him (word is elohim in hebrew which means god or gods in the plural or singular).

Not saying i believe any of this but it is a fascinating concept.

Joe

Thank you for the pointer to the BBC episode on YouTube.

The Hebrew word eden is simply a generic "pleaure place," or plausibly enough for desert dwellers, a garden. Capitalizing the E in the translation you use for Ezekiel 28: 13 is a translator's choice, not necessarily the prophet's intention.

In any case, Genesis 2 and 3 is a highly symbolic narrative. Its schema fits a wide variety of situations, both secular and sacred. Moreover, it has a density of symbolic detail that raises suspicion that it originated as a dream narrative (or a vision, if you prefer that as a vehicle for inspiration; dreams and visions have the same kind of contents).

And while the Hebrew Bible may not have been compiled until the post-exilic period, that story is both a lot older and a lot younger than that. It was dreamt anew easily a million times in the last month, and is being lived in the waking world (as the timeless "Daddy's little princess grows up") even as you read this.

It would be very strange, then, if there were any one single earthly Eden that was the unique "real" place where the story took place. The BBC presenter gives it away in her demonstration, when she says that the garden is where time and eternity meet.

Well, where is that? Where do time and eternity meet? In a temple, she says.

Yes, in a temple. But where else?

In a garden, she says, like at Al Hambra.

Yes, in a garden. But where else?

It's a trick question. Time and eternity meet everywhere.

If you need to hear that from a Christian writer, then read T.S. Eliot.

Nothing against junior academics on the make (and Francesca Stavrakopoulou has made full professor, congratulations), but taking a symbolic narrative as a literal narration is just a mistake. I liked the way she developed the symbolism, and maybe she needed to "dumb it down" and tie it up in some neat little package for ratings' sake, but... no, just no.

reply to post by pthena

. . . you walked among the fiery stones . . .

Molock.
The one who is in the fire, who purifies the first born, who are offered to God, by decree from God, as a sacrifice to Him.
You might think of the three friends of Daniel all being first born sons and having their purification ritual to Molock taking place in Babylon since the fiery stones of the temple got messed up.

reply to post by eight bits

Nothing against junior academics on the make (and Francesca Stavrakopoulou has made full professor, congratulations), . . .

That's funny because I did not even realize who she was, and I was just reading from her book, King Manasseh and Child Sacrifice: Biblical Distortions of Historical Realities, the night before I watched the video. I may have payed more attention to what she was saying instead of thinking about what she looked like in her hjiab.
I also notice in the Acknowledgements in her Land of the Fathers book, mention of a Nick Wyatt, who is the older professor in the video talking to her, so she seems to be on friendly terms with the man, calling him Nick, instead of Professor Nicolas Wyatt.

1. The anointed cherub is Adam

2. This is a lament to the King of Tyre. It is a recounting of why death "is" in the first place. Big sin, little sin.... it's still sin.

And the wages for all sin is death.