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 (July 25, 2026): Ezekiel 1

In 525, a Christian monk named Dionysius Exiguus proposed dating events by referring to a common point 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 how 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 off 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 even the Christian Era), but it was originally called Anno Domini, or in the Year of our Lord, usually shortened to AD. The system allows us to date historical events so we can compare events across cultures, something that was once much more difficult. The last Western European nation to switch to the common calendar was Portugal, which made the change in 1422. 

The idea of dating events back to a common point is an old one. In ancient times, it was often dated to a significant event or death. The problem was that each culture chose different starting dates, and those dates changed with every generation. 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. Ezekiel dates his prophecy to "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 were not celebrated. 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 to a common event, that event has been lost over time.

However, we can make some guesses. Ezekiel might have been dating back to the last year of Jubilee that had been celebrated in Judah. 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 dates back to the discovery of the law during the days of Josiah. Dating the events of his life to the discovery of the law during the Temple renovations is the solution suggested by the Jewish Targum. Hilkiah found the book of the law in 621 BCE, which means that Ezekiel's vision dates to around 591 BCE, or five years before the fall of Jerusalem.

All of this indicates that Ezekiel was among those taken before the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple in 586 BCE, and that it is in Babylon that his prophetic career begins. What is significant about this is that God finds Ezekiel far from home and the Temple dedicated to God 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 would structure his life, and the God who ruled in Jerusalem was still the God who ruled over Ezekiel and the exiles, even though they now found themselves living in a foreign land.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 2