Today’s
Scripture Reading (May 25, 2017): Ezekiel 29
Hermann Goering, German
politician, military leader, and a leading member of the Nazi Party, once
commented that “we (Adolf Hitler’s Nazis) will go down in history either as the world's
greatest statesmen or its worst villains.” From our point in the timeline, we
know the judgment of history on Goering and his Nazi compatriots. At his trial,
Goering requested that the courts allow him to be executed by firing squad as a
soldier. The court declined the request. Maybe they felt that the worst of villains
didn’t deserve to be treated like soldiers. Goering was sentenced to be executed on October 16, 1946, by hanging. He would end up committing
suicide by poison the night on October 15. The thought of being hanged was not something that Goering could
allow.
Goering was right. The men that he saw as statesmen,
we now consider to be some of the most evil men who have ever lived on the
planet. And those who followed their lead during World War II are still paying
the price. But, if Germany had won the war, history would have recorded events
much differently. Many writers over time have set out to write that story, that
alternate timeline, where Hitler rules all of Europe and eventually the rest of
the world. It is a horrifying thought, and a story through which, luckily, none
of us have been forced to live.
We have a few struggles with the book of Ezekiel. Ezekiel’s vision of the
Temple to replace the one that had been
destroyed is one of the problems. That Temple, which is really allegorical instead of literal, has
never been built. But we also struggle with the things that he writes about
Egypt because, at least with the history that we hold in our hands, his
predicted events did not happen. Ezekiel speaks of a time when Egypt would be a
barren wasteland, when Nebuchadnezzar
would defeat Egypt the same way that he had defeated Judah. Our problem is
that, at least according to our history, those events simply did not happen.
Nebuchadnezzar fought his way into Egypt and possibly even stood at the throne
of power, but he did not stay, and there
was no exile and barren wasteland that used to be Egypt.
All of this leaves us wondering what it was that Ezekiel was reporting in
his prophecy. Was his prophecies of Egypt meant to be allegorical? Or is it
possible that history has been written in
such a way as to minimize the events that took place in Egypt during the reign
of Nebuchadnezzar, possibly to give more glory to the Persians who defeated
Babylon and were able to wrest control of Egypt away from the Egyptians.
The bottom line is that we don’t know the answer. What we do know is that
soon after Ezekiel makes this prophecy, the last great Pharaoh before the
advent of the Persian Empire takes the stage in Egypt. Amasis II reigned in Egypt for the
forty year period (actually forty-four years from 570 B.C.E until 526 B.C.E.) about
which Ezekiel seems to be speaking. He was of common origins according to the
Greek historian Herodotus. His son, Psamtik III, would ascend to the throne
after his death and would reign for six months before he would lose the empire
to the Persians. It was at that moment that this part of the prophecy was fulfilled – the people of Israel could no
longer look to Egypt for help, which Ezekiel says should serve as a reminder
that they should never have been looking there for help in the first place.
Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 30
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