This year was particularly special because Greenbelt had asked me to give two Bible studies, on this year's festival theme of 'Making Hope'. I was blown away by the response - over 500 people came along! The two studies were on Ezekiel 37 (the Valley of the Dry Bones) and Exodus 5 (Making Bricks without Straw).
These talks were recorded and can be downloaded for a small charge of £3 per talk, which all goes to Greenbelt to ensure the festival can keep going well into the future. (You can also download all the previous years talks from 2023 and before for free).
But if you'd prefer to read them, here are my notes for the talk I gave on Ezekiel 37:
Context
Ezekiel is a pretty depressing book overall, and its written in the context of an abject lack of hope.
Ezekiel seems pretty clearly to have been a real person, who lived through the period of the Babylonian exile start of 6th century BC. That’s when the Babylonian Empire invaded and took over Israel, and forced all the elite and educated members of Israelite society into exile. The book describes a series of visions and oracles which take place over this period, with the news of the destruction of the temple arriving in chapter 33.
The dominant emotion is one of trauma and loss. ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely’.
They’d lost home and country, but even more profoundly, the experience of exile, intensified by hearing of the destruction of the temple, has caused them to question everything they thought they knew about God and about their identity as a people.
Feminist scholars have suggested that some of the distasteful imagery of sexual violence in earlier chapters is there to represent very viscerally the experience of being emasculated – these were high caste leaders, for the first time experiencing things that they had always associated with feminity – loss of control, being done to rather than having agency, loss of the freedom to make deicisons and affect events, loss of bodily autonomy and agency.
In the context of being cut off from home, family, status, all familiar landmarks, and also being cut off from their sense of religious and cultural identity – how, in these circumstances, was it possible for them to regain, remake, their lost hope?
The first 35 chapters of Ezekiel don’t offer much help. Through a series of visions, oracles, and symbolic actions – a kind of performance art – the prophet Ezekiel declares God’s judgement on pretty much everyone and everything he can think of. The world is terrible, awful things have happened and continue to happen, and its hard to see how things can be any different, given the way people have behaved, and continue to behave. There is nothing that Ezekiel can see in how people are choosing to live life, that is going to be the change they want to see. It’s a pretty unrelenting series of misery and woe and lamentation.
But the tone begins to change in Chapter 36, when Ezekiel is told to prophesy to the mountains of Israel. A new note of hope, of future restoration, enters the narrative here. In language which surely deliberately evokes the stories of creation in Genesis, Ezekiel speaks ‘to the mountains and hills, to the watercourses and valleys’ – 8 ‘you, o mountains of Israel, shall shoot out your branches and yield your fruit to my people 9…you shall be tilled and sown 11…and I shall multiply humans and animals upon you. They shall increase and be fruiful…’ culminating in verse 35 – ‘they shall say, ‘this land that was desolate has become like the garden of Eden’.
That’s the immediate context for this vision that Ezekiel has next, of the valley of dry bones. Restoration, and re-creation, has been prophesied to the land – but is that sort of re-creation possible for a people who have gone through so much trauma and loss, who are saying, not without good reason, ‘our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely’.
Prophecy
The word ‘Prophesy’ is the most prominent word that jumps out through this passage, apart perhaps from the word ‘bones’. So let’s start by thinking a bit about prophecy was and wasn’t in the Old Testament.
Prophecy wasn’t magic, or fortunetelling, and it wasn’t soothsaying – it wasn’t, as we might use the word now, about simply predicting or foretelling the future. Prophets in the Israelite tradition were something quite distinctive among the seers and oracles and soothsayers of other ancient cultures. There are quite a few examples in the Old Testament of the powerful and wealthy getting extremely frustrated by the refusal of the prophets to play their expected part when they sent to them for an oracle, whether they were asking them to curse their enemies or to give them the answer they were hoping for in predicting the success of their ventures.
The word prophecy probably derived from 'to call'- it has a double or triple layer of meanings. The prophet is one who has been called by God, but also one who 'calls out' what is wrong, and one who is a speaker, a spokesperson.
Prophecy in the OT isn’t about declaring timeless truths, its something that is always spoken into concrete historical times. So prophecy and history and intimately related. Prophecy as a Biblical genre arose in a period of particular political turbulence, where the Palestinian corridor was changing hands and being violently contested, first dominated by the Philistines, and in the is period by the Babylonian empire. So prophecy is intimately linked with the sort of questions of hope and hopelessness that we find ourselves wrestling with today.
The prophets very specifically addressed the particular events of the time, but interpreted them in the light of a much wider sense of history, calling people to set the specific political and economic circumstances of their day into a much bigger picture of God’s activity in and through human history; of creation and of the events of the exodus – the exodus itself, and most especially in the light of the establishment of the covenant at Sinai. That’s why I’ll be looking at a detail from the book of Exodus tomorrow.
Against the background of a belief that God has entered human history and calls people to follow the path to freedom even though it might lead through the wilderness, the prophets speak of what God has done, is now doing, and will do.
So they are not just agents of doom (though large parts of the prophets can read like that to us!) - also heralds of hope +redemption. To prophesy is to call attention to the bigger picture, to hold out a promise of a better future by recalling us to a sense of history as the sphere of Gods redemptive action.
The text
So lets turn to the text in some more detail.
The first thing to notice is how Ezekiel describes this vision. ‘The hand of the Lord came upon me, and brought me out by the Spirit of the lord, and set me down in the middle of a valley’.
Let’s be quite clear that this is not describing a real place or an actual historical event. There is no ‘literal’ sense in which the valley of the dry bones actually took place as a real event. Ezekiel is describing a prayer-vision.
It might sound esoteric, but it reminds me of the sort of very visceral, dream-like prayer experiences that I’ve had when I’ve been practicing Ignatian imaginative prayer. When Ezekiel describes being ‘brought out by the spirit of the Lord’, he’s describing a very real experience that he had in prayer. So often when people argue about whether the bible is literally true or not, this is some of the complexity that we are dealing with. Was the Valley of the Dry Bones real? Well, no, not in the sense that you could go back in a time machine and watch it happen. But absolutely yes, I think, in that it reads to me as Ezekiel describing faithfully an experience that he had in prayer.
And what an amazing prayer experience that must have been.
Then notice that this is a valley. In the previous chapter, chapter 36, Ezekiel has been called to prophesy to the mountains of Israel. Now he is placed in a valley. There’s something here, I think, about the whole of the land being included in God’s vision of a renewed creation – this isn’t just a mountain top experience, it includes the low places too. Perhaps there’s also a deliberate echo of the ‘Valley of the shadow of death’ from Psalm 23.
And the most glaring, horrific feature of this valley is that it is full of bones. It is very much a valley of death. Ezekiel isn’t allowed to stay on the sidelines overlooking this valley as a spectator; he is led all around it, among the bones, noticing that there are very many of them – this is a horrific scene of mass slaughter.
He also notices the details of their texture – they are very dry. You might imagine picking up a bone, perhaps a bird’s skull, on a walk through a desert or a fellside. Imagine running your fingers over hat slightly porous texture that dry bone has, the warm, bleached ivory colour of it. It’s important that these aren’t fresh bones – they are old, skeletal, residual.
There’s also something in the dryness, I think, that is a deliberate contrast with wetness, water, which is such a powerful symbol of life in that desert culture. When the word dry is used in the Bible its almost always used to emphasise death. Roots, shoots, trees, river beds that are dried up, dead. By contrast, water gushing forth – in springs, in rivers, from rocks – is a symbol of life, closely connected with the imagery of waters breaking in the act of giving birth. And its worth noting that at the end of Ezekiel theres a powerful image of a river flowing from the temple, giving new birth to the land, an image that is more famous in the way it is later picked up in the book of Revelation.
The dryness of the bones, then, isn’t just emphasising how very dead these bones are – not just dead, but dead- dead! It’s also drawing us into contemplating the stark dualism of life and death, a dualism that is taken for granted, but a dualism that is about to be dramatically challenged.
Then Ezekiel is called to prophesy to the bones. We’ve already seen that this isn’t the first time Ezekiel has been called to prophesy to inanimate objects. But clearly there can be no human expectation that these bones can hear – they don’t, in a common Biblical phrase, have ‘ears to hear’. But that phrase is usually addressed to actual human people, who do have literal ears. Surely there is a deliberate dramatic irony here in the dry bones hearing and responding to the words of the prophet, when so much of what they have said so far seems not to have been responded to by those who have literally heard it.
‘Hearing’ is not simply about the literal sense of hearing, but about action in response. Notice the final words of this passage – where God says not just ‘I have spoken’ but ‘I have spoken and will act’. This vision is at least partly a very dramatic image of how God’s word, and our hearing of God’s word is not meant simply to be a passive matter of the broadcast and reception of information, but is meant to galvanise the world into action.
Its perhaps a bit of an aside, but lets notice too how the coming of life is described in these two paragraphs. It isn’t a once for all thing, but comes in stages – a foundation of bone, the laying of sinews, the growth of flesh, the covering of skin, and finally the taking in of breath. I don’t think I’ve ever heard this passage referred to in the context of debates about when life enters into a foetus. Now clearly this isn’t intended to be a technical medical description, but it does imply an understanding of life which is gradually more and more inhabited and which becomes fully real with the taking of a first breath. Not only the simple image of the bones coming to life again, but even more this staged process of coming to life, challenges the simplistic duality of life and death. At a time when so many of our theological debates still seem to come down to whether we believe in a dualistic, either/or world, of night and day, black and white, pure or evil, these passages which challenge that dualistic way of thinking about the world are doubly important in giving us hope that there is a way through.
‘You shall live, and you shall know that I am the LORD’. Note that when the word Lord is captialised in the text as LORD this is a translation convention representing the Hebrew characters YHWH. This refers to the revelation to Moses from the burning bush of God's self, in Exodus 3, as 'I am who I am' or 'I will be what I will be'. This refers, then, to God as being itself, not one object or person among many to be named. It is not a male title.
That you shall know that I am God’ is a refrain throughout Ezekiel, at the end of each oracle – it occurs 54 times in total in the book of Ezekiel. It’s not as simple as just that the miracle will be intellectual proof that God is real, as we might read it today. These aren’t two separate things – coming to life and then, hopefully, coming to have knowledge. Rather, living and knowing God are intimately connected for the prophets. Real living, being fully alive, for the people of God, is to live in relationship with God, to live out the covenant established at Sinai.
And so the bones are reanimated – first as complete bodies, not dead but not yet breathing, and then fully alive. ‘The breath came into them, and they lived, and stood on their feet, a vast multitude.’
Notice how even at this point, there are still stages of coming to full life being described. Breath, life, standing, being in community. This isn’t about individual salvation or resurrection, but about people in community; being part of a vast multitude is the culmination of the process of bringing the bones to life. The people who are hearing this vision are themselves physically alive already, but they are experiencing the psychological death of collective trauma. This vision, as interpreted in the final section, isn’t ultimately about physical life, but about the metaphorical life and identity of a community.
This is perhaps one of the aspects of ancient sprituality that is most distant from our modern world view. Its almost impossible for us to fully enter into that ancient worldview that sees the basic unit of humanity not as the individual but the collective. Perhaps the closest we can get is through this kind of festival experience? Perhaps that’s why we feel the strange pull to gather together like this, despite the discomforts and disruption of making a temporary life in a field for a few days.
Our hope is in God who can make life out of even the deadest of deaths. But making that hope is not simply about having correct intellectual beliefs about God; its about choosing to live in community which is itself trying to work out what it means to live in right relationship with God and with the world. Challenged and inspired by these strange stories that have been handed down to us, and still choosing to believe that hope is something worth making together.
