Charles Ellicott Commentary Ezekiel 20:35

"and I will bring you into the wilderness of the peoples, and there will I enter into judgment with you face to face." — Ezekiel 20:35 (ASV)

Into the wilderness of the people. — As in the past there was a period of probation and discipline in the wilderness, so there shall also be in the future. The similarity is insisted upon in Ezekiel 20:36, and the phrase “face to face” is taken from Deuteronomy 5:4, not to show that the Lord will interpose again with the same perceptible manifestations, but will plead with them in ways equally adapted, in their more advanced condition, to show them His overruling hand.

As this phrase is plainly to be understood according to its sense, and not according to the letter, so it is quite idle to attempt to locate “the wilderness of the people” as any material wilderness, such as that of Arabia, or that between Babylonia and Palestine. The phrase must mean that wilderness condition of the people, scattered among the nations, in which the Lord will plead with them as He did with their fathers.

This might refer, as some commentators think, to the state of the Jews in the commentator's own time, dispersed among all nations. However, there is nothing in the connection to indicate so distant a future, and it may quite as well refer to the then-approaching condition of the people.

Already, many thousands of them had been carried captive to Babylon; others (Jeremiah 43:5) had been scattered among all the surrounding nations. The mass of the ten tribes had long before been carried by the king of Assyria to other regions; and the large remnant still left in Judæa, influenced by their own fears, soon afterwards went down to Egypt. In Ezekiel’s own lifetime, Israel was scattered widely among all the prominent nations of the earth and thus brought into “the wilderness of the people.”