"Often the prophets are inspired to compose attacks on the leadership of Israelite society. The reason for this phenomenon is clear enough: the nation could never have become sufficiently corrupt to merit the outpouring of God's destructive wrath unless the societal leadership had helped the process along."310
22:23-24 Using another figure, Ezekiel was to announce that Judah was a land that had not been cleansed with rain. God had withheld rain in punishment for covenant disobedience (cf. Deut. 28:24). Judah's moral uncleanness had accumulated because it had not benefited from God's periodic cleansing of the land through its leadership. It would receive no "rain"of blessing in the day when God poured out His indignation on the city (in 586 B.C.).
22:25 The Lord proceeded to indict three categories of leaders in Judah. False prophets had conspired to take advantage of the people like a wild lion tears its prey.311They had eaten up people's lives and had stolen their possessions. They had even been responsible for the deaths of many men and for many women becoming widows. They probably slew the men by assuring them that if they went into battle against the Babylonians they would succeed, and following this advice the men died in battle leaving many widows in the land. Jeremiah, on the other hand, had counseled submission to the Babylonians.
22:26 The priests had also abused the Mosaic Law and had made common what should have been set apart to the Lord. They had treated holy and profane things the same, and they had failed to teach the people the difference between clean and unclean things that the law distinguished. They had made the holy city and the holy land anything but holy. Furthermore they did not observe the Sabbath. In short, they did not hallow the name of the Lord.
22:27-28 Judah's princes (officials, nobles, Heb. sarim) also abused the people to get what the people had. They behaved like wild wolves. The false prophets evidently assisted the nobles in their wickedness by saying in the name of the Lord that what the officials were doing was right.
22:29 The people (ordinary citizens) also oppressed one another and stole from each other. They took advantage of the poor, the needy, and travelers illegally.
"One hardly could read such a list of crimes that so thoroughly pervaded society of Ezekiel's day without seeing the parallel to the Western world at the close of the twentieth century. The latter years of this century have been marked by decadence, moral and spiritual decay, loss of integrity, violence, and injustices that mirror what Ezekiel must have witnessed. Such a crisis calls for renewed spiritual and moral leadership that is the by-product of genuine spiritual renewal."312
22:30 Yahweh had looked for one of the Judahites who would lead a reformation that would defend the people from God's judgment, but He could not find anyone.313Building up the wall and standing in the gap formed by a breach in the wall were appropriate figures for fortifying the people in their hour of need.
In chapter 14 the Lord said that no righteous person could deliver the nation from judgment by his own righteousness, not even Noah, Daniel, or Job. Here He said that He could find no one who could lead the people back to God.
"Such a statement is hyperbole, purposeful exaggeration for effect. It hardly means that no one at all in Jerusalem in the early 580s was righteous. . . . It means rather that there were so few among the people who were righteous that the net effect was as if no one at all cared about God's Will."314
Obviously there were prophets who were faithful to the Lord in Judah during its last days, like Jeremiah, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah. Evidently the Lord did not mean that He was without any faithful representatives but that even these men were ineffective in stemming the tide of ungodliness. They did not fail because they were deficient but because the people were so thoroughly apostate. No one could return them to following the Mosaic Covenant faithfully as, for example, Hezekiah had done earlier and as Josiah had tried to do. Furthermore, Jeremiah and his fellow prophets lacked the political authority to lead Judah back from the brink of disaster.
Moses had been a "gap man"in his day (Exod. 32:11; cf. Gen. 20:7). He had turned aside the Lord's wrath from the Israelites with His intercessory prayers. God responded to Moses' pleas for mercy because the people were still malleable enough to repent. He did not respond to Jeremiah's prayers for mercy because the Judahites were now hardened in opposition to His will (Jer. 7:16-17; 14:11-12).
22:31 Therefore the Lord would send judgment like a flood and like a fire. He would bring the evil that they had done back on the heads of His violent and idolatrous people. The prophetic perfect tense describes the future action as already past to stress its certainty.
