Yhwh’s Flexibility
Yhwh’s freedom extends to doing that with some flexibility. Jehoiakim,
Jeremiah says, is to die in such a way as to be unlamented and humiliated,
buried like a donkey (that is, unburied); his corpse dragged out of the city
and abandoned (Jer 22:18–19). And none of his descendants is to sit on David’s
throne (Jer 36:30). In the event, he simply “slept with his ancestors,” like
someone such as David or Hezekiah (1 Kings 2:10; 2 Kings 20:21), and his son
succeeded him (2 Kings 24:6). On these occasions, at least, the implication is
not that we should reckon that in some way Jeremiah’s prophecies actually were
literally fulfilled, or that the power of the lines lies in the utterance
rather than the fulfillment, or that the prophecy allows for God’s openness to
change in view of the human response. The utterance has power only insofar as
it finds fulfillment, but the fulfillment can be of another kind than one that
corresponds to the literal imagery. Jehoiakim certainly dies ignominiously and
unmourned, not least because of Jeremiah’s own words that still heap ignominy
on him, and in this sense their power does lie in their utterance. And his son
reigns only three months before being deposed by the Babylonians.
Conversely, during the siege of Jerusalem Yhwh tells Zedekiah, “You
will not die by the sword. You will die in peace. Like the burning of incense
for your ancestors, the previous kings who came before you, so people will burn
incense for you and say in lament for you, ‘Oh, sovereign!’ ” (Jer
34:4–5). In the event, soon afterward Zedekiah was captured by Nebuchadnezzar,
blinded, taken to Babylon, and put in prison there until his death (Jer
52:4–11).
In Ezekiel 26–28 Yhwh declares at some length that Tyre will fall. The
first of these declarations is dated just after the fall of Jerusalem in 587.
As part of their campaign in the west, the Babylonians indeed laid siege to
Tyre, but the old city of Tyre is an offshore island and a hard nut to crack.
In 574 the siege ended (the city was not conquered until Alexander the Great
laid more effective siege to it in 332, building a causeway from the mainland).
In some sense Tyre seems to have passed into Babylonian control, but nowhere
near as decisively as Ezekiel had implied, and apparently without covering
expenses. So in 571 Yhwh makes a new decision, to give Egypt to Nebuchadnezzar
to make up for all the vain effort he had expended on Yhwh’s behalf on Tyre
(Ezek 29:17–20).
Ezekiel, Yhwh and the people who kept hold of Ezekiel’s oracles seem
quite relaxed about the fact that Ezekiel’s oracle about Tyre has not come
true. They do not fear that events imply that Ezekiel is a false prophet or
that Yhwh is not really God because both have failed the tests that prophets
and Yhwh set for such recognition. Perhaps they accept the dialectic between
divine intention and human resourcefulness, like a father grinning when one of
his children “defeats” him. Perhaps
they are relaxed because they know that Yhwh and Ezekiel feel quite secure on
the basis of being manifestly right much of the time (not least over the
crucial example of the fall of Jerusalem), like a professor grinning when a
student asks something to which the professor does not know the answer. On that
basis, perhaps they are relaxed because they know things will come right in due
course; Tyre will eventually get its comeuppance. It will indeed do so, in
Alexander’s day, though that seems to fail Ezekiel’s own test about his
prophecies being significant for the present and the foreseeable future, not
the future beyond the concerns of anyone currently alive (cf. Ezek 12:21–28).
Further, neither does Yhwh ever give Egypt to Nebuchadnezzar or to Babylon, yet
Yhwh, Ezekiel and the people who kept hold of Ezekiel’s oracles also preserved
this second oracle that did not come true.
Ezekiel’s relaxedness seems to come more from an acceptance of that
dialectic between divine will and human will. It is particularly striking that
Ezekiel should be relaxed about this, given his strong emphasis elsewhere on
the divine will and on divine sovereignty. He also recognizes that human beings
exercise real freedom in the world and do not have to cooperate with God’s
will. When Tyre declines
to lie down and die because that is what Yhwh intends for them to do, like
Moses declining to die when Yhwh tries to kill him (Ex 4:24), Yhwh’s response
is not to overwhelm it by a literal hurricane or a tidal wave of the kind that
Ezekiel poetically describes and Yhwh could certainly send, if Nebuchadnezzar’s
army is not enough. It is rather to rework the plan. Yhwh is still Lord. (John
Goldingay, Old Testament Theology, 3 vols. [Westmont, Ill.: IVP Academic,
2006], 2:83-84, emphasis in bold added)
