Ezekiel 7:17-22

7:17 All of their hands will hang limp; their knees will be wet with urine. ¹  7:18 They will wear sackcloth, terror will cover them; shame will be on all their faces, and all of their heads will be shaved bald. ²  7:19 They will discard their silver in the streets, and their gold will be treated like filth. ³  Their silver and gold will not be able to deliver them on the day of the Lord’s fury. ⁴  They will not satisfy their hunger or fill their stomachs because their wealth ⁵  was the obstacle leading to their iniquity. ⁶  7:20 They rendered the beauty of his ornaments into pride, ⁷  and with it they made their abominable images – their detestable idols. Therefore I will render it filthy to them. 7:21 I will give it to foreigners as loot, to the world’s wicked ones as plunder, and they will desecrate it. 7:22 I will turn my face away from them and they will desecrate my treasured place. ⁸  Vandals will enter it and desecrate it. ⁹ 

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¹ tn Heb “their knees will run with water.” The expression probably refers to urination caused by fright, which is how the LXX renders the phrase. More colloquial English would simply be “they will wet their pants,” but as D. I. Block (Ezekiel [NICOT], 1:261, n. 98) notes, the men likely wore skirts which were short enough to expose urine on the knees.

² tn Heb “baldness will be on their heads.”

³ tn The Hebrew term can refer to menstrual impurity. The term also occurs at the end of v. 20.

⁴ sn Compare Zeph 1:18.

⁵ tn Heb “it.” Apparently the subject is the silver and gold mentioned earlier (see L. C. Allen, Ezekiel [WBC], 1:102).

⁶ tn The “stumbling block of their iniquity” is a unique phrase of the prophet Ezekiel (Ezek 14:3, 4, 7; 18:30; 44:12).

⁷ tc The MT reads “he set up the beauty of his ornament as pride.” The verb may be repointed as plural without changing the consonantal text. The Syriac reads “their ornaments” (plural), implying עֶדְיָם (’edyam) rather than עֶדְיוֹ (’edyo) and meaning “they were proud of their beautiful ornaments.” This understands “ornaments” in the common sense of women’s jewelry, which then were used to make idols. The singular suffix “his ornaments” would refer to using items from the temple treasury to make idols. D. I. Block points out the foreshadowing of Ezek 16:17 which, with Rashi and the Targum, supports the understanding that this is a reference to temple items. See D. I. Block, Ezekiel (NICOT), 1:265.

⁸ sn My treasured place probably refers to the temple (however, cf. NLT “my treasured land”).

⁹ sn Since the pronouns “it” are both feminine, they do not refer to the masculine “my treasured place”; instead they probably refer to Jerusalem or the land, both of which are feminine in Hebrew.