Reflections on Ezekiel 18 “Finding Fault”

It makes no difference which news source you access—Fox, MSNBC or somewhere in between—there is an inordinate level of commentary concerning questions of guilt and fault. Whenever some tragedy or other, whether natural, human-induced, or a combination of the two, you can always count on “expert commentators” to weigh in on the reasons these events occurred. To be sure, if you watch Fox exclusively, you are bound to hear words like “fuzzy-headed liberal” quite often when culprits are hunted and named. And if MSNBC is your choice, then “bigoted, ossified conservatives (or alt-right beasts)” may fill the ears. Whoever are designated as the causes, the fact is that a cause has been found, an enemy named, a bad guy (or gal) given the glaring spotlight. The 24-hour news cycle regurgitates the names over and over, confined usually to the Breaking News crawl at the bottom of your viewing screens.

There is nothing new about the search for malefactors in the face of tragedy. In the very ancient Epic of Gilgamesh from Sumer and Babylon, whose origins are at least 4,000 years old, the death of Gilgamesh’s dear friend, Enkidu, sets the hero on a search for the reasons for his death, and more broadly the reasons for death itself. There must be a fault somewhere, reasons the author, because death is a ravaging scourge that causes vast pain for those inevitably left behind. And since Enkidu is a spotless wonder of a man, surely he could not be responsible for his own demise. Somebody or something must pay! The epic, unfortunately, provides no clear answer to life’s ultimate conundrum.

When Israel was defeated and destroyed by the empire of Babylon, and its king/general Nebuchadnezzar, first in the year 597BCE, and ultimately ten years later, questions of guilt and responsibility were prominent among the exiles in Babylon. One of the early deportees was apparently the prophet Ezekiel, and his concern to wrestle with the question was paramount in his chapter 18. He no doubt knew of the oracles of his prophetic forebears in Israel who time and again had warned the chosen people that their continuous refusal to follow the ways of YHWH, their God, especially in their treatment of the poor and marginalized among them, would inevitably lead to their defeat and exile by a foreign power. Their location in Babylon seemed to prove them right. In other words, “the parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge,” a well-known saying Ezekiel quotes at 18:2. Ezekiel rejects the proverb out of hand. “As I live, says YHWH God, this proverb shall no more be used by you in Israel” (Ez.18:3).

Why is this prophet so adamant against this idea? “Know that all lives are mine; the life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine: it is only the person who sins that shall die” (Ez.18:4). A moment’s thought will suggest how odd and seemingly false this formulation is. Does a parent bear no responsibility at all for the actions of the child? Are the people of Israel in exile only because of things they, the exiles, have done? Are not their forebears at least partially culpable for their current tragedy? Is Ezekiel in fact letting the Israelites of history off the hook entirely for the terrible realities of Babylonian exile? Is the answer of culpability confined only to the one who now has sinned?

Surely not! Our own modern legal system recognizes again and again that the sins of the parents (guardians, grandparents, responsible adults) do indeed and beyond doubt play significant roles in the sinning of their charges. Violent early childhood lives too often lead to violent adult lives; many of those who inhabit our prisons for various violent crimes were themselves the victims of violence against them. The percentages of that truth are staggeringly high.

Then what is Ezekiel going on about? Why is he so intent on debunking a human reality like the power of elders in the creation of a child, apparently asking us to look only at the actions of the child with no recourse to where that child was nurtured or not nurtured? Why does he ask that we not take into account the forebears of Israel as proximate causes for the current plight of the exiles of Israel? I cannot be certain, but I have a few ideas.

First, it may be that some of the exiles were trying to deny their own evil by blaming their exilic state on those who preceded them, their sinning ancestors who worshipped idols and refused the cries of the poor and needy. We are in Babylon because of them, they shouted! We wash our hands of our own culpability in this disaster! Are there not more than a few of us moderns who join this chorus? My poverty is the result of my parents’ lack of interest in me as a child. Or, I am violent solely because I was treated with violence only when I was growing up. As I noted above, there is deep truth in these claims, but it is also the case that not every person so raised ended up in prison or became perpetually violent. Some other factors occurred to intervene in the creation of another prison inmate. In this case, Ezekiel is saying that blaming others for one’s own sin is too cheap an out; responsibility for one’s own actions is surely a part of the reasons for one’s current state.

Second, the very search for clear culprits outside of oneself for the exile of Israel may itself be self-defeating. A lack of introspection may lead to a refusal to take some responsibility for one’s own life. The chief tenet of Alcoholics Anonymous is the admission of one’s own culpability in one’s inability to control the need for alcohol. Despite the behaviors of a terrible spouse, an abusive parent, a recalcitrant child, in AA the first cause is you. Unless one can come to that belief, there can be no lasting sobriety. When Ezekiel demands that each person look at him/herself as the sinner in need of YHWH’s grace, he may be echoing the wonderful work of AA, a salvation tool for thousands in our day.

Third, and more troubling, our nation remains deeply racist, a place where white people have unnumbered and unacknowledged advantages, while persons of color subsist in the shadows of slavery and servitude. My white inability to admit my stark advantage leads to a 100-yard dash where I start at the 50-yard line and expect my fellow racers of color to somehow catch up, though they begin at the beginning. Certainly, Ezekiel’s adage should never be used as a way to blame those disadvantaged for their own disadvantages by refusing to take into account the cultural and historical origins of those disadvantages.

So, do we do well to be in the business of blame? Yes and no. We must search for fault if we are ever to find correction to some of our present evil circumstances. Yet, if we spend all our time seeking to blame others, we run the risk of not looking at ourselves to discover there at least a part of our problems. Ezekiel has focused his attention too narrowly in the question of faultfinding. We need to do better than he, and look with more nuance at the origins, and ultimate corrections, of our modern evil.

(Right: Job’s so-called friends find fault with him)