The Bible and Its World: An International Academic Conference in Israel 1/10 Jerusalem, 1–3 July, 2024 The Book of Ezekiel — a Book of Promise By Simeon Chavel The Book of Ezekiel does not feel like a book of hope. It feels brutal. Someone who heard Yahweh’s speeches over twenty years, by the time they hear his promises to reverse death and restart Israel, they are spent and the idea of revival is uninspiring. However, when one approaches the book from the point of view of its audiences, a different dynamic can emerge. The brutality is a thing of the past, a past the book’s audiences experienced differently or not at all; and the future, a near future, lies before them without the burdens of the book’s brutal past. To appreciate this possibility entails a literary analysis of the book as a whole. The Book of Ezekiel is structured as a first-person retrospective, a telling by someone of their past. 1 That past happened over a long period, all of it or most of it long before the teller retells it. The teller’s audience experiences the telling of that past, not the past itself. The book’s audience is doubly removed. They experience a story in which someone tells his audience his past. The book does not give the teller’s audience voice. His audience never speaks. The teller never addresses his audience or describes them. He also omits when he is telling, where he is as he tells, what prompts him to tell now, and what he hopes to achieve. For the book’s first audiences, it might have been easy to identify with the teller’s audience as if they are that audience, especially if they heard the book read aloud, as seems likely. They could hear the book as if Ezekiel were talking to them about circumstances they recognize. Despite the book’s portrayal of a past featuring a brutal Yahweh, they would hear it expecting Babylonian Judeans to return-migrate to Judea in the very near future.