Verse 1 :
He said to me, "Son of man, eat what you find; eat this scroll, and go, speak to the house of Israel". "Son of man" is sometimes translated "O mortal", as in the
New Revised Standard Version. Ezekiel is called 'son of man' here and throughout the remainder of the book, not as an
honorific title, but as a mark of the distance between this 'mere mortal' and his divine interlocutor". Similarly, the prophet
Jeremiah records that he "found" and "ate" the words of God. A flying scroll also features in the sixth of the eight visions of the prophet
Zechariah.
Verse 3 :
And He said to me, ::
"Son of man, feed your belly, and fill your stomach with this scroll that I give you." :
So I ate, ::
and it was in my mouth like honey in sweetness. • "Like
honey in sweetness": Although the scroll contains "lamentations and mourning and woe" (
Ezekiel 2:10), when eaten it tastes "as sweet as honey" in the mouth (). The phrase affirms the saying that 'God's word was sweet' (; ).
Verse 15 :
Then I came to the captives at Tel Abib, who dwelt by the River Chebar; :
and I sat where they sat, and remained there astonished among them seven days. • "
Tel Abib" (,
Tel Aviv; lit. "Spring Mound", where "Spring
(Aviv) is the season") is an unidentified place on the Kebar Canal, near
Nippur in what is now Iraq. The Kebar or
Chebar river was part of a complex network of irrigation and transport canals that also included the Shatt el-Nil, a silted up canal toward the east of Babylon. • "Astonished" is read as "astonied" in the
Revised Version, i.e. dumb and motionless. The seven-day long "period of motionless silence" seems to express "the strength of the prophet’s emotions" on his arrival at Tel Abib. ==Ezekiel as a watchman for Israel (3:16–27)==