Charles Ellicott Commentary Ezekiel 6

Toward the mountains of Israel. —It is not uncommon to address prophetic utterances to inanimate objects as a poetic way of representing the people. (Micah 6:2, and others.) The mountains are especially mentioned as being the chosen places of idolatrous worship. (2 Kings 17:10–11; Jeremiah 2:20; Jeremiah 3:6; Hosea 4:13.) Baal, the sun-god, was the idol especially worshipped on the hills.

To the rivers, and to the valleys. These words stand to each other in the same relation as “mountains and hills,” that is, they are specifications of the same general character. The word, frequently occurring, and uniformly translated in Ezekiel as rivers, would be better rendered ravines. It is a deep sort of valley, along which, at times, a stream might run. Such places were also favorite places for idolatrous rites (see 2 Kings 23:10; Isaiah 57:5–6; Jeremiah 7:31; Jeremiah 32:35), especially for the worship of the Phoenician Astaroth, the female divinity worshipped in conjunction with Baal.

The same grouping of mountains and hills, valleys and ravines, occurs again in Ezekiel 35:8; Ezekiel 36:4; Ezekiel 36:6. By the expression I, even I, strong emphasis is placed on the fact that these judgments are from God. Since, like most other events in the world, these judgments were to be brought about by human agency, attention might easily be focused on the secondary causes; but by thus declaring them beforehand, and claiming them as His own work, God would make it evident that everything was from Him.

Your images. —The original word indicates, as the margin shows, that these were images used in connection with the worship of the sun. The whole verse is taken from Leviticus 26:30. The same woes were foretold there by Moses in the contingency of the people’s disobedience; that contingency had now come to pass, the promised judgments had already begun, and Ezekiel declares that their fulfillment was close at hand.

Your slain men before your idols. —Their idols should no longer be worshipped by the living, but by the prostrate bodies of their dead worshippers. In this and the following verse, a kind of poetic justice is described. There was nothing so utterly defiling under the Mosaic law as the touch of a dead body (2 Kings 23:14; 2 Kings 23:16). The Israelites had defiled the land with idols; now the idols themselves should be defiled with their dead bodies.

May be abolished. —The word abolished is a strong one, meaning utterly obliterated, wiped out. This was what Israel should have done to the nations who inhabited Canaan before them; they and their works should have been so utterly blotted out that no temptations from them should have remained. But Israel had failed to observe the Divine command, and now in turn their works, done in imitation of the guilty nations they had supplanted, must be blotted out.

And you shall know. —As this prophecy began in Ezekiel 6:2 with an address to the mountains, many consider that, by a strong poetic figure, they are still referred to by the pronoun you. It is better, however, to consider that as the discourse has gone on, the figure has gradually been dropped, and the people are spoken to directly. In the same way, the change of the pronoun from the third to the second person, as in Ezekiel 6:5, is very frequent in Ezekiel.