Discovery BoxEzekiel 8:11-18 
Context8:11 Seventy men from the elders of the house of Israel 1 (with Jaazaniah son of Shaphan standing among them) were standing in front of them, each with a censer in his hand, and fragrant 2 vapors from a cloud of incense were swirling upward.
8:12 He said to me, “Do you see, son of man, what the elders of the house of Israel are doing in the dark, each in the chamber of his idolatrous images? 3 For they think, ‘The Lord does not see us! The Lord has abandoned the land!’” 8:13 He said to me, “You will see them practicing even greater abominations!”
8:14 Then he brought me to the entrance of the north gate of the Lord’s house. I noticed 4 women sitting there weeping for Tammuz. 5 8:15 He said to me, “Do you see this, son of man? You will see even greater abominations than these!”
8:16 Then he brought me to the inner court of the Lord’s house. Right there 6 at the entrance to the Lord’s temple, between the porch and the altar, 7 were about twenty-five 8 men with their backs to the Lord’s temple, 9 facing east – they were worshiping the sun 10 toward the east!
8:17 He said to me, “Do you see, son of man? Is it a trivial thing that the house of Judah commits these abominations they are practicing here? For they have filled the land with violence and provoked me to anger still further. Look, they are putting the branch to their nose! 11 8:18 Therefore I will act with fury! My eye will not pity them nor will I spare 12 them. When they have shouted in my ears, I will not listen to them.”
1 sn Note the contrast between these seventy men who represented Israel and the seventy elders who ate the covenant meal before God, inaugurating the covenant relationship (Exod 24:1, 9).
2 tn The Hebrew word occurs only here in the OT.
3 tn Heb “the room of his images.” The adjective “idolatrous” has been supplied in the translation for clarity.
sn This type of image is explicitly prohibited in the Mosaic law (Lev 26:1).
4 tn Given the context this could be understood as a shock, e.g., idiomatically “Good grief! I saw….”
5 sn The worship of Tammuz included the observation of the annual death and descent into the netherworld of the god Dumuzi. The practice was observed by women in the ancient Near East over a period of centuries.
6 tn The word הִנֵּה (hinneh, traditionally “behold”) indicates becoming aware of something.
7 sn The priests prayed to God between the porch and the altar on fast days (Joel 2:17). This is the location where Zechariah was murdered (Matt 23:35).
8 tc The LXX reads “twenty” instead of twenty-five, perhaps because of the association of the number twenty with the Mesopotamian sun god Shamash.
tn Or “exactly twenty-five.”
9 sn The temple faced east.
10 tn Or “the sun god.”
sn The worship of astral entities may have begun during the reign of Manasseh (2 Kgs 21:5).
11 tn It is not clear what the practice of “holding a branch to the nose” indicates. A possible parallel is the Syrian relief of a king holding a flower to his nose as he worships the stars (ANEP 281). See L. C. Allen, Ezekiel (WBC), 1:145-46. The LXX glosses the expression as “Behold, they are like mockers.”
12 tn The meaning of the Hebrew term is primarily emotional: “to pity,” which in context implies an action, as in being moved by pity in order to spare them from the horror of their punishment.
