Ezekiel - Lesson 48

48, the gift of land, rethinking and reconfiguring the Holy Land of Israel, 47 13 to 48 7 and 23 to 29. The expression Holy Land occurs in English translations of the Hebrew Bible only twice. Psalm 78 54 speaks of Yahweh bringing his redeemed people to his Holy Land, Gevul Kod Sho, territory really, his holy border or territory.Defined geographically as the highland that his right hand had claimed. And then there's Zechariah 2 12, which declares Yahweh will own Judah as his allotment in the Holy Land at Mathakodesh and will again choose Jerusalem. Like the former, which associates the holiness of the land with Yahweh's taking it as his possession.In context, the latter links the holiness of the land to Yahweh's presence there. Verses 10 to 11. We shouldn't be surprised by that after seeing God, hearing God tell Moses to take off your sandals, you're standing on holy ground.Ezekiel never spoke explicitly of the land of Israel as the Holy Land, either Eretz HaKodesh or Admath HaKodesh, but in his final vision, he developed the concept more fully and concretely than we find anywhere in scripture. To be sure, in 43 12, Yahweh declared the primary focus of the closing vision as the holy house in the holy city and on the holy mountain in the land of Israel. That's what we heard.This is the Torah of the house. All its surrounding territory at the top of the mountain shall be absolutely holy. This is the Torah of the house.The final vision, 40 to 48, and the book as a whole, conclude with an emphatic return to the heart of this vision. The name of the citadel from that time on shall be Yahweh Shammah, meaning Yahweh is there, 48 35. If the Zechariah text mentioned above intimates that the restored land of Israel ultimately derives its holiness from the sanctity of the divine resident, Ezekiel 35 to 48 functions as an essay on this theme.The record of Ezekiel's final vision matches the course of the sacred river proceeding from the source and heart of the geographic sanctity in the temple outward to the symbolic heart of death, the Dead Sea, bringing life and flourishing to all the territory through which it flows. Adapting the rabbinic rhetorical method of Kal Vachomer, light and heavy, often meaning greater and lesser, this metaphor declares in reverse order that if Yahweh's presence in the land among his people can yield blessing and life to the environs of the Dead Sea, of the Dead Sea, it can certainly do that throughout the land. The principle applies both to material well-being and to sacred space, yielding both a holy people and a holy land.Ezekiel began proclaiming this message of hope and restoration for people and land in earnest after he heard the fateful news, the city has fallen, 3321. However, he would not receive the detailed sketch of Israel's spiritual restoration until at least a decade later, compare 40 verse 1 where we have the date. From beginning to end, Ezekiel's radically theocentric vision of Israel's future focused on the sacred space occupied by the temple.As we have seen, the vision opened with a detailed description of the footprint of this new sacred space, 40 verse 1 to 43 11, climaxing in Yahweh's return to the temple, 43 1 to 9, and concluding with a charge to Ezekiel to relay the measurements of the temple to his exiled countrymen. A new Torah followed, 43 12, instructing the people on the operation of the complex and establishing boundaries for its rituals and its personnel in the following order, the altar at the heart of the temple compound, 43 13 to 27, regulations regarding the outer east gate, 44 1 to 3, regulations regarding temple service, 44 4 to 31, priestly and princely lands, 45 1 to 8, miscellaneous regulations, 45 8 to 17, regulations concerning national festivals, 45 18 to 46 15, and the management of royal lands, 46 16 to 18, and the operation of the temple kitchens, 46 19 to 24. Ezekiel's prophecies concluded with a vision of the new land of Israel, beginning with a presentation of the temple as the source of its healing, 47 1 to 12, then locating the temple and its sacred reserve, the Terumah, in the midst of the tribal allotments, 47 13 to 48 35.Our concern in the last session will be to establish how the portrayal of the Terumah, the central reserve, in 45 1 to 8, and these last two chapters contribute to a portrayal of the land as a holy land, with a temple at the center as the key to Ezekiel's theology of land. Here our concern begins with the tribal lands as a whole, but before we talk about the, shall we say, renewal of the tribal lands, we need to talk about the tribal lands' desecration and sanctification. In Ezekiel 37 11 to 12, Yahweh had declared that the vision of the future resuscitation of the dry bones in verses 1 to 10 applied to the whole house of Israel called Beth Yisrael.In 37 15 to 26, he had built on this vision of the future with a sign action emphasizing that it would involve all the tribes of Israel, verse 10, and that the historical division into north and south would dissolve. Yahweh would gather all the tribes and bring them into their land, verse 21, where they would be governed by a single shepherd king, my servant David, verse 22 and 24 to 25. For our purposes, verse 25 is crucial.They will follow my covenant stipulations and observe my ordinances. They will put them into practice. They will occupy the land I gave to my servant Jacob, in which your ancestors lived.They and their children and their grandchildren will occupy it forever, and David, my servant, will be their prince forever. I will make with them a covenant of peace. It will be an eternal covenant with them.I will give them the land of Israel and multiply them. The land of Israel is not in the text, but in this kind of formulation, we assume. I will give to them the land and multiply them.That is the natural sense here. According to the images portrayed in the Gog oracle, the whole world may try to invade Israel's land, taking advantage of the nation, living securely in it without any defensive structures, 38, 10 to 23. However, to preserve the integrity of his reputation as a deity who keeps his word, Yahweh will intervene.He will never abandon them again, nor let Israel experience exile from their land again, because he will have poured out his spirit on them, 39, 5 to 29. That's a ending to the Gog-Megog oracle. But what will the geography of Israel in this new order look like? Yahweh answered that question with a remarkably detailed verbal map in 31, 47 to 48, 35.But before we look there, we need to consider what sort of transformation the land needed. In the past, Ezekiel had spoken of the land of Israel being defiled, tamay, by the people's idolatry, gilolim, dung pellets, piles of manure, sheep and goat feces, and ethical crimes, especially bloodshed and the need of cleansing on the day of indignation. Presumably, by pouring out his fury on the people and exiling them to the foreign lands, the homeland would be purged of the defilers and the defilement itself, 36, 18 to 19, in preparation for the eventual return and cleansing of his people.Yahweh would be driven to these restorative actions by his irrevocable covenant commitment to his people and by his passion for the sanctity of his holy name, verses 20 to 28. Although Yahweh did not apply the language of sanctity, kadosh, kadash, kidash, and cleansing, teher, to the land in the Edenic portrayal of the land's restoration, we may take the land's yielding its fruit in abundance as evidence that this image assumed that had, in fact, happened, verses 28 to 30, and then 34, 25 to 31. According to the sequence of oracles in the book of Ezekiel, one more threat to the land's sanctity could emerge in the distant future.Foreigners would threaten the people living securely in unwalled cities and restored mountains of Israel. However, in defense of his people and his holy name, Yahweh, the Holy One of Israel, actually the Holy One in Israel, would intervene and defeat the foreign hordes in the mountains of Israel, 39, 1 to 10. But the blood of these unburied victims of Yahweh's fury would defile the land again, precipitating a thorough process whereby every last bone remaining from the carcasses picked clean by vultures and jackals would be gathered and buried in Hamon Gog, 39, 11 to 16.Thus the land would be cleansed, Teher, verses 12 and 14 and 16. That is, sanctified. This set the stage for the final vision.Let's begin by talking about the boundaries of the new holy land. Thus has the Lord Yahweh declared, this is the boundary according to which you shall divide up the land as a special grant among the twelve tribes of Israel. Joseph shall receive two allotments.The land that I swore to give to your ancestor, you shall receive as a special grant, equally apportioned. This land shall fall to you as a special grant. This shall be the border of the land.In the north it shall run from the Mediterranean Sea through Hethlon and Levohamath to Zidad, Beretha and Sibraim, which is located between the territories of Damascus and Hamath, as far as Hazar-chatechon, which is on the border of Hauran. So the border shall run from the sea to Hazar-anon, that is, the northern border of Damascus with a territory of Hamath to the north. This shall be the north side.On the east side, the border shall run from a point between Hauran and Damascus, between Gilead and the land of Israel, with the Jordan forming the border as far as the eastern sea, to Tamar. This shall be the east side. On the south side, the border shall run from Tamar, as far as the waters of Meribath-kadesh, to the Brook and the Mediterranean Sea.This shall be the south side. On the west side, the Mediterranean Sea shall form the boundary as far as a point opposite Levohamath. This shall be the west side.Having declared in 3725 that they will occupy the land I gave to my servant Jacob, and in which your ancestor lived, 3725, we expect some correlation between the boundaries of restored Israel, Ezekiel 47, 13 to 20, and the boundaries specified prior to the original occupation of the land with numbers 34, 1 to 15, that God had prescribed there. The links between Ezekiel 47, 13 to 20, and numbers 34, 1 to 15 are obvious. In both, Yahweh specifies the boundaries.In the preamble, both identified the allotted territory as Yahweh, the divine suzerain's grant, nachhalah, usually translated inheritance, but that's a little off track, but grant to Israel his vassal and speak of the grant as falling to them, an allusion to the lot. Three, both refer to the external boundaries as the border. They use the same language, numbers 34, 1 to 15.Both arrange the descriptions of the four borders in a clockwise direction. Yahweh's commencement of numbers 34 with the southern border and Ezekiel 47 with the northern border reflects the location of the mediators of the revelation. In the former, Moses had viewed the promised land from the plains of Moab to the east, but for him, the determinative moment had occurred four decades earlier, when the Israelites were poised to enter at Kedesh Barnea from Kedesh Barnea in the south, and so he goes south, west, north, east.But Ezekiel was in Babylon. Should he return, he would enter the land from the north. Hence, he starts with north, then east, south, and west sequence.Five, Ezekiel anchored each border with expressions borrowed from the original definition. North, Lebohemoth, Sadat, Hazor, Anan, East, Jordan River, South, the Brook of Egypt, and Kedesh Barnea, West, the Great Sea, also found in numbers. Most significantly, number six, both identified the Jordan River between the Sea of Galilee, Kinnereth, the Dead Sea, as the eastern border.This reinforces the conviction that the allotment of the Transjordanian territories in Deuteronomy 3, 12 to 17, to Reuben, Gad, and the half-tribe of Manasseh was illegitimate from the beginning. Ezekiel's map made no effort to legitimize Moses' decision on that event. These links with numbers are significant.For Ezekiel and the exiles, Israel's geographic hope was irrevocably tied to the land Yahweh had promised the ancestors and the Exodus generation. The restoration of the covenant required the full restoration of the triangular deity-nation-land relationship. But just as there could be no other chosen nation to replace Israel, so there could be, apparently, no other chosen land to replace the land of Canaan.Those are the boundaries. Let's look, then, at the tribal allotments of the Holy Land. Verse 48.These are the names of the tribes. First, beginning at the northern extreme, adjacent to Hethlon Road, Lebohamath, and Hazar Anan, which is the border of Damascus with Hamath to the north, running from east to west, the tribe of Dan. Second, adjacent to the territory of Dan, from east to west, the tribe of Asher.Third, adjacent to the territory of Asher, from east to west, the tribe of Naphtali. Fourth, adjacent to the territory of Naphtali, from east to west, the tribe of Manasseh. Fifth, adjacent to the territory of Manasseh, from east to west, the tribe of Ephraim.Sixth, adjacent to the territory of Ephraim, from east to west, the tribe of Reuben. Seventh, adjacent to the territory of Reuben, from east to west, the tribe of Judah. There is an interruption, then, in the listing of the tribes, and he picks it up again with further tribal allotments in 4823.As for the rest of the tribes, eighth from east to west, the tribe of Benjamin. Ninth, adjacent to the territory of Benjamin, from east to west, the tribe of Simeon. Tenth, adjacent to the territory of Simeon, from east to west, the tribe of Zebulun.Twelfth, adjacent to the territory of Zebulun, from east to west, the tribe of Gad. And adjacent to the territory of Gad, at the southern end, the border shall run from Tamar, as far as the waters of Meribath-Kedesh, to the wadi of Egypt, and the Mediterranean Sea. This is the land that you shall apportion by lot as a special grant for the tribes of Israel.These are their respective allotments, the declaration of the Lord Yahweh." Isn't that an inspiring text? But now we have to ask ourselves several questions. We turn our attention to Ezekiel's tribal allotments, and for this we have a map. Apart from the inserted description of the Terumah in chapter 48, verses 8 to 22, the list appears as a separate, formally constructed document.It has its own title. These are the names of the tribes and colophonic conclusions. This is the land that you shall apportion by lot as a special grant for the tribes of Israel.These are their respective allotments. And then it's followed by the signatory formula, the declaration of the Lord Yahweh, verse 29. A narrative frame adding geographical detail following the first and preceding the last allotments reinforces the impression of a formal, independent literary unit that has been embedded here.Well, beginning at the northern extreme, adjacent to the Hathlon Road, Lebo Hamath and Hazer Anan, which is the border of Dabascus with Hamath to the north, running from east to west, the tribe of Dan. And then at the end, we have an explanation of the southern, corresponding southernmost tribe, with a comment again reinforcing the name of the tribe and the location of the boundary of the land. With the exception of the opening Danite and concluding Gadite notes, as well as the resumptive as for the rest of the tribes that we find in verse 23, after the interruptive description of the Terumah and the Prince's land, the listed entries are monotonously formulaic and adjacent to the territory of Tribal A from east to west, Tribal B one territory.Reading this for spiritual nurture is like having devotions in the index of a Bible atlas. However, like the monotonous descriptions of Joshua's allotment of the tribal lands of Joshua 13 to 19, coming at the end of a lengthy vision report encompassing chapters 40 to 48, this description of the land represents the geographic coda for the book of Ezekiel. This is the climax.The map concretized Yahweh's eternal commitment to his people and his land, all his tribes of Jacob. Because Ezekiel's prophecies became increasingly theological and ideational as we move through the restoration oracles, we should not be surprised that his map of the tribal allotments of the nation exhibited little concern to respect past historical or geographic realities. In some ways, it makes no sense.This was a profoundly theological rather than geopolitical document. A closer examination of the map yields several significant additional observations. First, whereas most of Ezekiel's prophecies have involved primarily the tribe of Judah, and his earlier oracles of the restored nation involved primarily the return of Judeans from the Babylonian exile, in fulfillment of earlier prophecies, 3610, 3711, and 1625, 3925, and 456, his map of the restored nation involved descendants of all the original sons of Jacob, with a Joseph tribe divided into two.That's historically appropriate. Ephraim and Manasseh, precisely as had been the case when Joshua had allotted the tribal territories after the conquest of Canaan. Ezekiel identifies all the tribes by name.None is missing. 48, 1 to 7, and 23 to 29. Second, in contrast to a minimalist definition of the promised land, followed by Joshua, Ezekiel's specification of the outer boundaries of Ezekiel's land of restored Israel, from Hethlon and Levohamath in the north to the river of Egypt in the south, corresponds with ancient Egyptian definitions of the land of Canaan.You read extra-biblical text. To the Egyptians, these were the boundaries of Canaan. It also approaches the maximalist definition of the promised land in Genesis 15, 18, Deuteronomy 1, 7, and 11, 24, as well as the extent of the territory of the kingdom of David and Solomon.There are two definitions of the promised land. In the book of Joshua, the promised land is those territories assigned to the tribes. But in Genesis 13, or 15, 18, Deuteronomy 1, 7, and 11, 24, we have a different definition that takes the promised land from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates.Two definitions. One is maximalist, and one is minimalist. Now, it's the maximalist that was involved in David's kingdom.David's empire went from the river of Egypt all the way to the Euphrates. The interesting thing is it incorporated many non-Israelite populations. Curiously, David never attempted to make those territories part of the land of Israel.The land of Israel and the land of the kingdom of David were two different things. The land of Israel is smaller than the kingdom of David. Third, Ezekiel's understanding of Israel's tribal structure followed the traditional pre-monarchic order.Yahweh divided the land into 12 tribal allotments, like Joshua 13 to 19. Because the tribe of Levi was the subject of the interruptive description of the Terumah in the sacred space, in verses 8 to 22, Yahweh omitted Levi from the list of tribal allocation. He had no land of his own.Third, Yahweh maintained the 12-tribe system by elevating Joseph's sons, Manasseh and Ephraim. Therefore, we still have 12 allotments. And even so, this literary map anticipated the reunion of all the tribes of Israel as promised in 37, 16 to 23.Yahweh's appeal to these ancient tribal structures repudiated the past pragmatically centralized administration of the monarchy, 1 Kings 4, 7 to 19. A few more comments on that later. A fourth principle here, or observation.Although Yahweh's tribal allocations respected patriarchal family traditions, they seem unconcerned about historical tribal realities. I already noticed that in 47, 15 to 20, he fully integrated Reuben, Gad, and one half of Manasseh with the other tribes. They weren't in the Transjordan now, but they were integrated fully with the other tribes by assigning the first two territories west of the Jordan and treating Manasseh as a single tribal unit straddling the Jordan River valley, north of the Sea of Kinneret.He located the tribes of Issachar and Zebulun, historically northern tribes, and Gad, a Transjordanian tribe of the past, at the south end of the country and placed Judah north of Benjamin. This is not the historical geographic sequence. Dan's position at the extreme north deviated from Joshua's original assignment.He had them in the south, in Philistine territory, Joshua, 1940 to 48. But it did accord with the Danites' illegitimate seizure of Naphtalite territory when they conquered the city of La'ish and renamed it Dan. Correspondences to historical realities seem coincidental.We're starting over. Fifth, Yahweh's tribal boundaries ran against the grain of natural topography. North-south lines, the coastal plain, the central spinal region, the Jordan Rift Valley dominate the physical landscape.But the assigned tribal territories all ran in an east-west direction. The effect appears highly artificial. It's not natural.But this arrangement should have facilitated inter-tribal communication, combated temptations to tribalist isolation and competition. And since major roadways tended to run north and south direction, it enhanced access for all of the tribes to the sacred space right in the middle. Sixth, the tribal parity, equality, of Ezekiel's allocations neutralized the inequities of the past.Remember Joshua 17, 14 to 18. And it reflected the egalitarian ideals expressed in 47, 14, each tribe like his brother. That's what the Lord had said to Ezekiel.This expression did not apply to the size of the allotments but to the method of assigning them. What was that method? First, Yahweh determined the size of each. Second, the repeated refrain, from the eastern margin to the western sea, suggests the same principle governed the east-west length of the territories.Third, except for Joseph, which received two tribal bands because of their division into Ephraim and Manasseh, each tribe's portion is declared to be singular, echad, one portion, one allotment. Fourth, the comprehensive idiomatic use of to fall, to drop, naphal, hiphil, in 47, 14, this abbreviates the fuller expression to drop or cast a lot, to drop a dice. It highlighted the divine determination of the boundaries of each allotment, and God determined the holder of each.This excluded human interference in either issue. Seventh, although this list of tribal territories of the land of Israel, 47 to 15, begins with Dan in the north and then works southward ending with Gad, the allocations respected the traditional genealogical relationships among the tribes, distinguishing among the descendants of Jacob's wives, Leah and Rachel, and their handmaidens, Bilhah and Zilpah. Interestingly, in the north, we have Dan, the descendants of Rachel's handmaiden Bilhah, and then Asher from the handmaiden Zilpah of Leah.Naphtali are descended from Bilhah, Rachel's handmaiden, and then Manasseh from Rachel. Oh, now we've left the handmaidens with Manasseh, Ephraim, and Ephraim, we have Rachel's actual sons, then Reuben and Judah, Leah's actual sons, then the sacred Terumah, then Benjamin, Rachel's actual son, then Simeon and Issachar, and Zebulun, Leah's actual sons, and then, at the end, Gad, Zilpah, whose ancestor was Zilpah, Leah's handmaiden. So you've got the descendants of the handmaidens at the top and at the bottom.The tribes descended from Jacob's primary wives enjoyed pride of place nearest the sanctuary, with the eight Leah and Rachel tribes being equally distributed, four on each side of the sacred Terumah. The placement of Ephraim and Manasseh side by side reflects their status as two branches of the Josephite line. The list locates the tribes descended from the handmaidens at the extremities, farthest from the sacred preserve.Eighth, whether or not Judah's and Benjamin's locations nearest the sanctuary reflected their royal past, remember? Saul was a Benjamite, the first king, and then David was a Judahite. Here, Yahweh reversed their positions. Benjamin's name, meaning son of the right hand, which is also used for the word south in the author's east orientation, that may have influenced the location to the south of the sacred strip of land in the middle, the Terumah.The removal of the temple from Judean space, as it had been since David had brought the ark to Jerusalem, 2 Samuel 6. This is striking. The temple is no longer in Judah. The Davidic dynasty had often used the temple as a vehicle for royal control over the citizenry.But in the new order, this would not happen. The north-south grouping ensured that while dualities remained, disruptive regional loyalties were neutralized by assigning Judah territory with the northern tribes and denying any tribe the religio-political center. That was the Terumah.Yahweh reserved this role for this sacred band of land between Benjamin in the south and then Judah in the north. However, the geographic design further diminished Judah's role by locating the twelve-gated city through which worshipers had access to the sacred Terumah on the southern edge of the Terumah, abutting the tribe of Benjamin rather than Judah. I'll have more to say on that in the next and final study.Ninth, the allotment of territory suggests a return to an ancient theocratic ideal. Ezekiel did not call for the abolition of tribal or feudal structures but a return to a kind of theocratic feudalism that had been intended for the nation from the beginning. Yahweh was Israel's true king.The land belonged to him. His capital was in the center or was the center of gravity, and he, not an earthly king, distributed it among the tribes as he saw fit. By replacing the grossly asymmetrical two to ten monarchic structure of the past, that is, Judah and Simeon were the southern kingdom and the rest were northern Israel, he replaced this with a more balanced five-seven arrangement.It's not quite six-six, but it is five-seven, which is a move in that direction. By shifting the center of gravity northward and by assigning east-west strips of land representing combinations of desirable and undesirable zones more equitably among the tribes, this plan avoided any tribe's monopolistic control over the best lands. In fact, each tribe was to view its territory as its sacrosanct special grant, nachalah, received from the divine overlord as an act of grace, to be sure, but also as an honorarium for services to be rendered on God's behalf.See 45.1 and 47.14 and 19 and 22 and 23. Yahweh's plan did not replace the history of dystopia with a utopia, that is, a perfect but fictional and perfectly egalitarian non-place. That's a utopia.There is no such place. Completely devoid of stratification, a utopian map would have envisioned all tribes having identical sociopolitical status and enjoying equal access to the temple. That would take the form of a wheel with a hub, with spokes representing tribal boundaries and the apex of each territory adjoining the sacred area.He didn't reconfigure the landscape that way. In this plan, only distances create inequalities. Some tribes are closer to the temple than others.The outlying tribes would obviously need to travel farther to worship in the sacred center than those nearby. Furthermore, even if the widths of the territorial strips of territory were equal, apparently, differences in east-west distances would create some inequities. Since the distance from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River at the south end of the Sea of Galilee is only 40 miles, Judah's territory would have been less than one-half as long as the territory of Zebulun at the south end of the Dead Sea, though we must recognize that the bands north of the Teruma were wider than those at the south.The massive eastward bulge of the border north of the Sea of Galilee, where the strips could have been a hundred miles long, is potentially even more problematic. However, efforts to interpret these details literally are all ill-founded. This document is neither a blueprint for administrative structures of the nation in the future, nor a literary photograph of the land of Israel.It is a cartographic, impressionistic painting by an artist driven by a theological agenda. A tenth observation. Although the tribe of Levi as a discrete entity was extremely important in Ezekiel's eschatological territorial vision, its territorial ties differed radically both from the other tribes in this scheme and from the geographic spaces allotted to them by Joshua.According to Joshua 21, fulfilling Yahweh's charge to Moses, Numbers 35, 1-8, Joshua assigned 48 towns distributed throughout all the tribal allotments to serve as residential towns and bases for this tribe's pastoral ministry to the nation. By contrast, in Ezekiel's map, the Levites would live inside the sacred band, the Teruma, at the center of the map. We'll deal with that a little bit more in the last lesson.This reflects a fundamental shift in priestly ministerial strategy. Instead of a centrifugal vision of priests fanning out to the farthest reaches of the land, Ezekiel envisions a centripetal approach with worshippers all coming to the sacred Teruma, a vision reinforced by naming the twelve gates of the town after the twelve tribes, though now Levi is represented and Ephraim and Manasseh are subsumed under Joseph in 48, 30-35. What can we say about the theological significance and, if there are any, practical implications of this geography lesson? In spite of the overt parochialism of this text, the last in the collection of Ezekiel's prophecies, the theological implications for the modern reader are actually powerful and very compelling.What can we say? First, Ezekiel's vision of Israel's territorial arrangement offers a profound theology of land. Most obviously, the land belongs to God. As sovereign, he has authority to grant it to his people and then to distribute it among the tribes as he wants.He is entitled to royal lands, and his residence constitutes the geographic center of gravity. His call for a Teruma, a holy reserve, an offering, invites his subjects to acknowledge his sovereignty and celebrate his national territory as a gift from him, just as the religious observances and rituals where the Teruma offers worshippers an opportunity to return a gift of produce to Yahweh in recognition of his ownership over all the land. So, this territorial Teruma reminds Israel that Yahweh is the real owner of the land, that Teruma is the scarlet ribbon tied around the scroll, and the clay bulla on the knot of this ribbon is stamped with his seal.That's my imaginative interpretation. Second, Ezekiel's territorial vision extends the concentric rectangles of graded sanctity beyond the temple walls to the holy land of Israel as a whole. The concentricity is not exact, but the sanctuary represents the center of gravity for the priestly share of the Teruma.It's the center of gravity of the central spine of the reserve, which is the center of gravity for the nation as a whole. Whereas the temple design carefully regulated access to different gradations of holiness in cultic worship, the territorial allotments regulated daily life. Priests and Levites did not occupy tribal property, but they and only they could live in a land set aside for Yahweh.Citizens of the twelve tribes could own their land, but visits to the Teruma would be temporary, and they would enter through the filter of the city. To the smallest and largest detail, Ezekiel's final vision proclaims the holiness of Yahweh and the sanctity of the land. God may condescend to reside among his own people, but he does so without sacrificing any of his holiness.Third, Ezekiel's territorial vision proclaims a new understanding of the community of faith. If the allocation of land to each of the tribes with special allotments for the religious functionaries recognizes structure within the people of God, the nature of the distributions also affirms divine concerns for justice. The allotment of the land, each like his brother, is based on egalitarian foundations designed to prevent the social injustices of the past.Without equitable distribution, Yahweh's ancient promises to the nation cannot be fully realized by all. Finally, the restoration of the land is a gracious gift, made possible by Yahweh and stamped with the seal of his name. But that is the subject of our final chapter.