King David so pleased the Lord that his lineage was promised a throne forever:
When your days [David] are fulfilled and you lie down with your fathers, I [the Lord] will raise up your offspring after you, who shall come from your body, and I will establish his kingdom. He shall build a house for my name, and I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever (2 Sam 7:12-13, ESV).1
Yet despite this eternal promise, the Golden Age of David and Solomon was short-lived. Under Rehoboam and Jeroboam I, the kingdom fractured—a division that persisted until the Northern Kingdom fell to the Assyrians and the Southern Kingdom to the Babylonians. Where was the throne then?
Make no mistake, Israel’s destruction was nothing short of apocalyptic: its kingdom, cities, temple, and social structures were utterly destroyed, and its choicest people deported—all while their conquerors flourished. This raises an essential question: Why did God allow such devastation? And what type of iniquity warranted such an apocalyptic scenario? These questions bear not only on Israel’s history but also on how we understand our own failures and those of the Church, which Israel so often typifies.
One common answer is given on the heels of the above passage:
I will be to him a father, and he shall be to me a son. When he commits iniquity, I will discipline him with the rod of men, with the stripes of the sons of men (2 Sam 7:14, ESV).
Acknowledged by Catholic and Protestant alike, Israel’s iniquity prompted national conquest, but what type of iniquity? If God may not withhold an apocalyptic disciplinary scenario from Israel, why should he withhold it from the Church? After all, as many ancient and modern theologians from many traditions have recognized, Israel is an archetype of the soul of the believer and the Church.
The prophets tell us that Israel’s iniquity involved idolatry (choosing another shepherd), but it is commonly missed that it also involved Israel’s disunity (choosing rival flocks). In other words, the disobedience of Israel took on the form of division.
In Israel, to be a leader was to be a shepherd, and to be the king was to be the highest shepherd over all of Israel. David, the quintessential king and shepherd, was told of this shepherding role before he was king (cf. 1 Chr. 11:2), and he fully embraced this role (cf. 1 Chr. 21:17), extolled unity in Psalm 133, and associated it with great benefits.
Good shepherds were responsible not only for feeding the flock but for keeping it together. The flock would roam together, eat and drink together, and enjoy the protection of the group and nearby shepherd. Jesus reiterates these concepts in the New Testament as well, saying, “I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also . . . so there will be one flock, one shepherd.”2 In fact, the good shepherd precisely seeks out the restoration to a unified flock.
What do you think? If a man has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly, I say to you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray (Matthew 18:12-13, ESV).
Jesus appeals to what his audience already knows about the good shepherd. He leaves the ninety-nine to bring back one. Although the focus sometimes remains exclusively upon the shepherd’s pursuit of the one, the image is not complete until that one is brought back into the fold.
Thus, a good shepherd preserved unity, while a bad or absent shepherd catalyzed division, leading to disaster for the sheep. This principle is vividly illustrated in Zechariah 11. God commands Zechariah to shepherd Israel with two staffs: Favor, symbolizing care for the flock, and Union, symbolizing their brotherhood. When Zechariah abdicates his responsibility, he breaks Favor, representing the refusal to care for the sheep, and Union, representing the collapse of Israel’s unity (vv. 9, 14). The result is disastrous: the flock scatters and is devoured. This theme reverberates throughout Scripture.3 Jeremiah describes the shepherds’ failure as causing the people to ‘wander over mountain and hill’ and ‘forget their resting place’ (Jer. 50:6). Ezekiel laments shepherds who allow sheep to ‘scatter over the face of the earth, with none to search or seek for them’ (Ezek. 34:6). In the New Testament, Jesus echoes Zechariah: ‘Strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered’ (Mark 14:27; cf. Zech. 13:7). These passages highlight the profound importance of shepherds maintaining unity within the flock.
Moreover, failing to preserve unity is a punishable offense:
Woe to the shepherds [of My people] who are destroying and scattering the sheep of my pasture! . . . Because you have scattered my flock and driven them away and have not bestowed care on them, I will bestow punishment on you for the evil you have done! (Jeremiah 23:1-2, ESV)
Now that we’ve established the principle of good and bad shepherds, we must understand that Jeremiah is here framing the Exile in these terms: bad shepherds had for too long been scattering the flock. Punishment was to follow. That punishment was the complete fall of Israel’s divided kingdoms, and from this utterly terrible position the Lord’s people cried out with the question: Will you forget us forever?
This is the turning point, where everything gets infinitely more interesting. On the heels of promising this discipline, the Lord also says that He will provide Israel with new shepherds, eventually raising up “a righteous branch”, a “King” who will save both Judah and Israel (vv. 23:3-6), bringing both groups back together to one place where “none will be missing”. This predicts the remaking of Israel’s unity, and typifies a future unity that would be even greater.
Now, we have two options. We can choose to see this reunification as something unrelated to the reasons for their exile and view all this talk about the failure of the shepherds to keep the sheep together as some tangential and nonessential element of the restoration. In this view, unity is merely an “extra cherry on top” of the main dish, say, the purging of communal idolatry. Or we can choose to see in the restoration of Israel’s unity the fulfillment of God’s purposes for the exile. In case you’ve missed it, the latter view represents a higher view of God’s planning and providence.
If God’s purpose for the exile was to restore a broken unity, might it not be the case that a primary cause for the exile was Israel’s persistent and unrepentant disunity? Purpose and cause are not identical, but they are often correlated and often overlap, and it is not obvious to me that non-modern Jews and Christians would have typically differentiated them from the perspective of God’s ultimate agency.4 We are here reckoning with the idea that God might just set in motion severe punishment in response to unreconciled and persistent division.
Ezekiel’s prophecies offer compelling support for understanding the exile as linked to disunity. In Ezekiel 4:4-5 the Lord commands Ezekiel to symbolically represent the house of Israel’s avon,5 lying on his left side for 390 days, each day signifying a year of the nation’s guilt. Although the northern kingdom was already conquered and no more, Ezekiel references the “house of Israel”(4:3) and the “house of Judah” (4:6). Whether he has in mind both the northern and southern kingdoms together or refers to the southern kingdom with both phrases may be settled by the fact that the instigating sin occurred 390 years prior–in a period long before the fall of the northern kingdom. Thus, it is likely on this consideration alone that Ezekiel refers to the shared experience and culpability of all the tribes of Israel, which will shortly be fully corroborated.6 Ezekiel’s vivid, visceral, and visual imagery of depiction and reenactment underscores the weight of Israel’s sin and invites reflection on the historical and theological significance of the 390 years.
The 390 years in Ezekiel’s prophecy symbolized the duration of Israel’s collective guilt, but guilt for what? We know that the Israelites “rejected my standards and failed to follow my rules” (5:6) and “defiled my sanctuary with . . . detestable objects of worship and with . . . other shocking practices” (5:11), but there is clear significance to this timeframe. At first glance our math seems befuddled. Ezekiel was writing this first set of prophesies in the seven year period prior to the fall of Jerusalem (cf. 1.2; 29.17), thus, ~593-586 BCE.7 The division of the Israel occurred ~930 BCE, amounting to ~345 years (~350 Jewish years).
Strangely, there are two ways to potentially reconcile this timeframe–from a Jewish perspective and from an historical one. With respect to the Jewish perspective, chronologies in Kings align this 390-year period with the time from Israel’s division to the fall of Jerusalem.8 With respect to an historical perspective, as Cooke (ICC) points out, “since elsewhere the restoration of Israel and Judah is imagined as taking place simultaneously (16:53; 36:10; 37:16f.; Jer. 3:18), the 390 years must include the 40 years of Judah’s exile (v. 6; 29:11).”9 In other words, if the guilt was to be carried for 390 years before unification (rather than before the disaster), and Judah had ~40 years ahead of her to be in exile, we add those 40 years of exile to the ~350.
Either way involves a direct reference to the division of Israel. Such a view also make sense of why all of Israel seems to be guilty, rather than, say, just the bad kings of either kingdom or the idolatrous Israelites. It also explains why the years of good kings aren’t subtracted out. The specific sin is not idolatry but division.
This key insight from early Ezekiel is vividly illustrated in the famous Valley of Dry Bones passage later in Ezekiel, allowing us to make a critical connection between the national sin of division and the resurrected unity of Israel which God will bring back through upheaval, death, and re-enfleshment:
Prophesy over these bones, and say to them, “O dry bones, hear the word of the LORD. . . Behold, I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and will cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the LORD.” (Ezek 37:4a-6, ESV)
A common evangelical view is that the above passage refers to the Lord’s ability to make an individual’s bad circumstances into good ones, symbolized by bringing life back from the dead. However, it is the Israelite community–dead by virtue of their exile in Babylon–that is the target. Moreover, the specific goal of this miraculous re-enfleshment is quite clearly the reestablishment of a united Israel:
The word of the Lord came to me: “Son of man, take a stick of wood and write on it, ‘Belonging to Judah and the Israelites associated with him.’ Then take another stick of wood, and write on it, ‘Belonging to Joseph (that is, to Ephraim) and all the Israelites associated with him.’ Join them together into one stick so that they will become one in your hand. When your people ask you, ‘Won’t you tell us what you mean by this?’ say to them, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I am going to take the stick of Joseph—which is in Ephraim’s hand—and of the Israelite tribes associated with him, and join it to Judah’s stick. I will make them into a single stick of wood, and they will become one in my hand.’ Hold before their eyes the sticks you have written on and say to them, ‘This is what the Sovereign Lord says: I will take the Israelites out of the nations where they have gone. I will gather them from all around and bring them back into their own land. I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel. There will be one king over all of them and they will never again be two nations or be divided into two kingdoms. . . they shall all have one shepherd. . .(Ezek 37:15-24, ESV)
In view of this, the most fitting application of Ezekiel’s prophecy would be to associate divided Israel with the divided Church, persisting century after century in this state, if not become entirely apathetic, then awaiting the Lord to fix it someday. But we are too quick to assume that the fix or the pain of the fix is somebody’s else’s problem. The question we should be asking ourselves is: if we cannot find a way to mend our disunity, what choice is left but a Valley of Dry Bones cataclysm?
Summary
The biblical evidence strongly suggests a connection between bad shepherds, disunity, and Israel’s exile. If Israel’s unity was a purpose for the Exile, one must wonder what role persistent and unrepentant complacency about her disunity played in her story.
If Israel represents the Church, and if God was willing to wield apocalyptic distress to purge her of disunity, might He not also be willing to do the same to His Church—one that ought to possess a far deeper understanding of the basis and mandate for unity? In light of our widespread, persistent, and unrepentant ecclesiastical divisions today, paired with the apocalyptic scenarios facing us, it seems deeply misguided to mollify our concerns by merely reiterating confidence in God’s sovereignty or salvific promises. Such assurances, when used to justify complacency with the fractured state of the Church, ring hollow in light of Israel’s experience.
To presume that God will overlook our lackluster pursuit of unity ignores the lessons of Israel’s Exile. Scripture frames her cataclysmic judgment as both deserved and redemptive. To expect that God will save us from similar scenarios, rather than send us directly into them, is unwarranted and naïve. It reflects a perspective entirely at odds with everything we have just considered. Let us, then, pursue unity with everything we have, and may God forgive us when we lack the insight, penitence, and obedience needed to respond rightly to the Good Shepherd’s call to one fold.
- Cf. Ps 89:3-4, 28-37; 1 Chr 17:11-14; Isa 9:6-7. ↩︎
- John 10:16. ↩︎
- See Jer 50:4b-6; Ezek 34:5-6, 11-13; Zech 13:7; Is 53:6; Micah 2:12-13. Some of these are mentioned in more detail. ↩︎
- Nor do we always separate them. For example, when we say that Christ was crucified for the purpose of forgiving sin, we often claim that our sin was the theological cause (or among the causes) of his crucifixion. ↩︎
- Hebrew avon may be rendered “sin” or “iniquity” (NASB, NIV, KJV), “guilt” (NJB), or “punishment” (ESV, NRSV). In context, “punishment” seems unlikely. ↩︎
- That all of Israel is in view may be corroborated by what the pronouns between v. 3 and v. 17 obscure. For example, the Hebrew underlying “they” in v. 17 is literally “a man and his countrymen”. ↩︎
- Leslie Allen, Ezekiel 1-19, Word Biblical Commentary, vol. 28 (Dallas: Word Books, 1994), xxiv-xxv. ↩︎
- G. A. Cooke, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Ezekiel, International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1985), 52-53. In the respected Word Biblical Commentary series, Allen concurs, “the Deuteronomist reckoned 393 ½ years, or 390 in round numbers, for the period from the division of the kingdom till the fall of Jerusalem” (Allen, Ezekiel, 66-67). ↩︎
- Cooke, Ezekiel, 53. ↩︎
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