Who Was Ezekiel In The Bible
The short answer
Ezekiel was a priest from Jerusalem who never got to serve in the temple the way he expected. In 597 BC, about a decade before Jerusalem fell, the Babylonians deported him along with other leading citizens to Babylon. There, by the Kebar River, far from home and from the temple that defined his vocation, God called him to be a prophet. His book opens with one of the strangest visions in scripture: a storm, four living creatures, wheels within wheels, and the glory of God appearing not in Jerusalem but in a foreign land.
That setting shapes everything Ezekiel says. His fellow exiles assumed the crisis was temporary — that Jerusalem was untouchable and they would soon return to life as usual. Ezekiel spent the first half of his ministry dismantling that assumption, often through bizarre street-theater sign-acts: lying on his side for months, shaving his head, cooking over dung. He insisted that Jerusalem would fall because the nation's whole way of life had turned away from God.
But Ezekiel is not only a prophet of judgment. After Jerusalem's destruction in 586 BC, his message pivots to hope: a valley of dry bones brought back to life, a promise of a new heart and a new spirit, and a vision of a restored temple with God's glory returning.
This is why Ezekiel stands alongside Isaiah and Jeremiah as one of the three "Major Prophets." As Walter Brueggemann points out, these books are major not simply because they are long. They are major acts of prophetic imagination — a sweeping challenge to the political and economic assumptions of established Israel, and at the same time an opening toward a genuinely new possibility for God's people. Ezekiel's scale is measured by imaginative force, not just page count.
What scholars say
Why do we call Ezekiel a "Major Prophet" — is it just that his book is long? Brueggemann answers that Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel are major in a deeper sense: as acts of prophetic imagination that challenged established Israel, opened a new possibility for it, and still resource Christians living in a culture out of sync with God's purposes.
“We commonly refer to Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel as “Major Prophets” because they are, in the Old Testament, big books. In fact, these three are “major” not only because of size but also for other reasons. These three books are a major act of prophetic imagination that constitutes a major assault on established political-economic Israel and an opening to a major new possibility for Israel. Beyond that, these prophetic books constitute a major resource for Christian thinking and acting in a culture that is manifestly out of sync with the purposes of God in the world. In order to consider the dimensions of “major” in these prophetic books, we will consider what is distinctive for each of these books and what is constant in all of them.”
What it means for you
Ezekiel speaks to anyone whose settled world has come apart — a lost job, a broken institution, a faith that no longer fits its old container. His life says that God is not confined to the places where we expected to meet him; the glory that filled the temple showed up beside a canal in Babylon. His message also refuses easy comfort: sometimes hope begins with honestly naming what has gone wrong in the way we live together. And his dry-bones vision insists that no situation is too dead for God to breathe life into. Readers in a culture that feels out of step with God's purposes will find in Ezekiel both a hard mirror and a genuine promise.
In context
The book of Ezekiel falls into three broad movements. Chapters 1–24 deliver oracles of judgment against Jerusalem, beginning with the prophet's overwhelming vision of God's glory and his call by the Kebar River. Chapters 25–32 turn to the surrounding nations. Then, after news of Jerusalem's fall reaches the exiles, chapters 33–48 shift to restoration: the shepherd God who seeks his scattered flock, the valley of dry bones, and a climactic vision of a new temple filled again with God's glory. In the canon, Ezekiel sits third among the Major Prophets, after Isaiah and Jeremiah.