Ancient Hebrew Poetry

Whose Crime? Whose Punishment? Suicide as Social Drama

    One of the characteristics of both Judaism and Christianity is the high regard accorded to the individual with the expectation that the individual is to exercise his or her moral agency in the face of general indifference and/or active opposition. Biblical passages addressed to a “you plural” in which the collective addressee is constituted as a moral agent are commonplace, but so are passages, such as Psalms 1, 15, 112 and Ezekiel 18, in which the individual is the moral agent constituted in discourse.

The slam poetry of Ezekiel 33:30-33

I really don’t know if what I call Ezekiel’s slam_poetry is poetry in the strict sense. I parse it as if it were. It is bitter, raw, unnerving speech. Here is the underlying Hebrew text, and a fresh translation.

The bawdy speech of an angry, loving God: Ezekiel’s dilemma

The prophet Ezekiel reports the words of an angry, loving God who repetitively communicates “lamentations, mourning, and woe,” the taste of which is – this is the kicker - “as sweet as honey” (Ezek 2:10). How can the taste of anticipatory lament be as sweet as honey? In the answer to that question lies the mystery of the book of Ezekiel’s power.