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Ezekiel 20:25-26 is one of the most infamous interpretive cruxes of the book of Ezekiel. As Hartmut Gese put it, "Die Auslegung von Ez 20,25f.,... ist schon seit den Anfangen alttestamentlicher Wissenschaft als besonders schwieriges Problem empfunden worden."1 In these two verses, the writer of the book, whom we will call "Ezekiel" without prejudice toward debates about authorship, makes the shocking claim that the LORD gave Israel "laws that were not good," which not only failed to give the people life but actually defiled them:
25 Moreover, I gave them laws that were not good and rules by which they could not live: 26 When they set aside every first issue of the womb, I defiled them by their very gifts-that I might render them desolate, that they might know that I am the Lord. [NJPS]2
What were these "not good" laws to which Ezekiel refers? There has been no lack of proposals, as Daniel I. Block has shown in his recent commentary, where over a half-dozen interpretive options are ably summarized.3 On the one hand, some interpreters opt to emend the text, like Johann Lust, who would delete most of v. 26 as a later (erroneous) interpolation. Similarly, julius A. Bewer reverses w. 25-26 and v. 27, so that Ezekiel's shocking claim merely echoes Israel's blasphemous misconstrual of the LORD'S demands.4 On the other hand, most scholars accept the text in its present form and explain it in terms of Ezekiel's ongoing prophetic revision of older Exodus traditions,5 regarding either Israel's moral condition6 or its deity.7
In this article we wish to suggest a new solution, which identifies Ezekiel's "not good" laws with the Deuteronomic law code. Our approach is primarily synchronie, based on a literary reading of Ezekiel in its final form and canonical setting; but we will also draw on recent historical-critical and literary-critical scholarship on Ezekiel's use of Priestly and Deuteronomic traditions in ch. 20.
In the following, we will first establish the correspondence of the laws with the Deuteronomic code through an analysis of the literary structure and narrative sequence of ch. 20. second, we will attempt to explain why Ezekiel, who thinks and writes from a Priestly perspective, would consider at least certain laws of the Deuteronomic code to...