In my thirtieth year, in the fourth month on the fifth day, while I was among the exiles by the Kebar River, the heavens were opened and I saw visions of God. – Ezekiel 1:1

Today’s Scripture Reading (April 24, 2014): Ezekiel 1

In 525, a Christian monk by the name of Dionysius Exiguus came up with the idea of dating events by going back to a common place in time. For Dionysius, because of his commitment to the Christian faith, that moment in time was the birth of Jesus Christ. Dionysius made a few mistakes in the way that he counted the five centuries that had passed between the birth of Jesus and his own life, and because of those mistakes his dating is out by somewhere between four and seven years, yet the idea itself has stuck. Today we still date back to the same point in time. We call it the Common Era (or the Current Era or the Christian Era – what we formerly knew as A.D., Anno Domini or in the year of our Lord.) The system allows for us to be able to date historical events in such a way that we can compare events between cultures – something that was once impossible to do. The last Western European nation to make a switch to the common calendar was Portugal who made the change in 1422. 

But the idea of dating events back to a common point is an old one. In ancient times it was often dated from some significant event – or death. So Ezekiel starts his account with a dating system, a common point in time that his readers would have understood. The NIV translates the dating very personally – in my thirtieth year – but it is unlikely that Ezekiel was counting the years of his own life. For one thing, the idea of celebrating birthdays is more of a current practice. The dates of birth in ancient times was not something that was celebrated. So a better translation of the verse might be “in the thirtieth year,” dating back to some common event. The problem is that while his first readers understood the connection, over time that connection has been lost.

If that is true in this case, Ezekiel might have been dating back to the last year of Jubilee that had been celebrate in Judah. But the problem with that idea is that the Jubilee celebrations in Israel were sporadic, if they were ever really celebrated at all.  Another possibility is that Ezekiel is dating back to the finding of the law during the days of Josiah. And this is the solution that the Jewish Targum takes - it assumes that the dating of Ezekiel is focussed back on the finding of the law by the priest Hilkiah during the reign of King Josiah. That dates this writing to a period five years into the exile of Judah.

So Ezekiel places himself as one of the first to be taken from Judah into exile. And it is there that his prophetic career begins. What is significant about this is that God finds Ezekiel far from home and the temple dedicated to him by the Jews. Here, by a river in Babylon, Ezekiel hears the instructions of God and is compelled to follow them. The law found in the Temple thirty years earlier was still the instruction by which Ezekiel was going to structure his life – the God that ruled in Jerusalem was still the God that ruled over Ezekiel and the exiles – even though they now found themselves living in a foreign land

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 2