Updated American Standard Version
Giving Bible readers what God said not what translators think God meant
The Book of Ezekiel, also called The Prophecy of Ezekiel, one of the major prophetical books of the Old Testament. According to dates given in the text, Ezekiel received his prophetic call in the fifth year of the first deportation to Babylonia (593 B.C.E.) and was active until about 570 B.C.E.
As recently as the eighth edition of Driver’s ILOT, the genuineness of Ezekiel had been accepted as completely authentic by the majority of rationalist critics. But in 1924 Gustav Hoelscher advanced the thesis that only a small fraction of the book was by the historical sixth-century Ezekiel (i.e., only 143 verses out of 1273) and the rest came from some later author living in Jerusalem and contemporaneous with Nehemiah (440–430 B.C.).
The numerous parallels between the Book of Ezekiel and the Revelation of John have arrested the attention of all readers. But the number and extent of Ezekiel’s prophecies carry him over a broader field than that of any other apocalyptic prophet so that he combines vision, symbolical-typical action, parable, allegory, and formal prophesying.