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Ezekiel 47 continues Ezekiel’s eschatological vision.\u00a0 This vision features a renewed Temple, with impossible dimensions, suggesting that the Temple is a figure for God’s presence.\u00a0 Ezekiel sees a river flowing from under the Temple and is led by his guide into the water.\u00a0 The water gets progressively deeper until it became “deep enough to swim in, a river that could not be crossed.”\u00a0 (Ez. 47:5, NRSV).\u00a0 Back on the riverbank, Ezekiel’s guide tells him that<\/p>\n
This water flows toward the eastern region and goes down into the Arabah; and when it enters the sea, the sea of stagnant waters, the water will become fresh.\u00a0<\/span>Wherever the river goes, every living creature that swarms will live, and there will be very many fish, once these waters reach there. It will become fresh; and everything will live where the river goes.\u00a0<\/span>People will stand fishing beside the sea from En-gedi to En-eglaim; it will be a place for the spreading of nets; its fish will be of a great many kinds, like the fish of the Great Sea.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/span>But its swamps and marshes will not become fresh; they are to be left for salt.\u00a0<\/span>On the banks, on both sides of the river, there will grow all kinds of trees for food. Their leaves will not wither nor their fruit fail, but they will bear fresh fruit every month, because the water for them flows from the sanctuary. Their fruit will be for food, and their leaves for healing.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
(Ez. 47:8-12.)\u00a0 This amazing vision of a river teeming with living creatures and fish, and trees laden with fruit and healing leaves, echoes the creation creation narratives in Genesis 1 and 2 and is picked up again in Revelation 21-22.\u00a0 As a fisherman, I love this image of people spreading nets and enjoying abundance all along the banks of the river or sea.\u00a0 Here, the locations Ezekiel mentions are along the Dead Sea, so the image seems to reflect a change in at least part of that hyper-salty basin so that fish and other wildlife can thrive.\u00a0 Since the Temple Ezekiel describes seems metaphorical, we probably can assume this is also a metaphor for a broader renewal of creation.\u00a0 But the eschatological picture is not ethereal or abstracted from created reality.\u00a0 It is of regular people, doing regular things, in a real world.<\/p>\n