Ezekiel 28:24–26

Ezekiel 28:24 — The Removal of the "Pricking Brier" The verse opens with a sharp image rooted in the landscape of the ancient Near East: thorns and briars were not merely agricultural nuisances but symbols of curse and hostility (cf. Gen 3:18; Num 33:55). The surrounding nations — Tyre, Sidon, Philistia, and Edom, against whom the preceding oracles in chapters 25–28 were directed — are here collectively figured as a "pricking brier" and a "hurting thorn." The Hebrew מַכְאִב (mak'iv, "painful, hurting") carries a visceral weight: these nations were not merely inconvenient to Israel but actively wounding. The phrase "that scorned them" (שְׁאָט, sha'at) recalls the language of contemptuous mockery used against Israel in her humiliation — the nations rejoiced at Judah's fall (cf. Ezek 25:3, 6; 26:2). God's answer to this scorn is not merely political reversal but covenantal vindication. The concluding recognition formula — "Then they will know that I am the Lord Yahweh" — closes the section on Israel's enemies, tying divine judgment against the nations directly to Israel's restored knowledge of God. This formula appears over 70 times in Ezekiel and functions as the hermeneutical key to the entire book: all of history, both catastrophe and consolation, is oriented toward the acknowledgment of God's sovereign identity.

Ezekiel 28:25 — The Gathering and the Sanctification of the Name Verse 25 introduces two simultaneous divine acts: the ingathering of scattered Israel (qibbēṣ, a technical term for eschatological regathering, used also in Deut 30:3–4; Isa 43:5–6) and God being "shown as holy" (wĕniqdaštî, a Niphal form meaning "I sanctify myself" or "I am hallowed") among them before the nations. This is a remarkable sequence. The sanctification of God's name is not contingent on Israel's moral perfection but on his own act of faithful gathering. This resonates with Ezekiel 36:22–23, where God explicitly states he acts "not for your sake, O house of Israel, but for my holy name." The land is identified as "given to my servant Jacob" — invoking the patriarchal covenant and grounding the promise not in Israel's merit but in God's prior, unconditional gift. "Jacob" here is significant: not the glorified patriarch but the one whose very name connotes struggle and wandering, suggesting that God's fidelity spans Israel's entire imperfect history.

Ezekiel 28:26 — Security, Building, and Planting The culminating vision is one of settled, fruitful domestic life: building houses, planting vineyards. These images are drawn from the Deuteronomic tradition of blessing (Deut 28:30; Amos 9:14) and deliberately reversed from the curse — in exile, Israel built houses for others, planted vineyards they could not enjoy. The word labeṭaḥ ("securely/in security") appears twice in this single verse, creating an emphatic envelope around the vision of restoration. Security is not mere military safety; it is the shalom of dwelling without fear under divine protection. The judgment executed on contemptuous nations is the necessary condition for this security — not as revenge, but as the clearing away of everything that opposed God's covenantal purposes. The final recognition formula — "they will know that I am Yahweh their God" — slightly alters the standard form by adding "their God" (Eloheihem), personalizing the divine name and recalling the covenant formula of Sinai: "I will be your God, and you will be my people."

Typological and Spiritual Senses In the Catholic interpretive tradition (following the fourfold sense of Scripture: literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical), this passage opens beyond its immediate historical reference. Allegorically, the ingathering of scattered Israel prefigures the gathering of all humanity into the Church, the new Israel, which the Second Vatican Council describes in Lumen Gentium as "the new People of God" gathered from all nations (LG 9). The "pricking brier" of hostile powers typologically points to sin, death, and the diabolical — all that wounds the soul in its exile from God. The promised security of building and planting evokes the eschatological banquet and the New Jerusalem (Rev 21), where there will be no more mourning, crying, or pain. Morally, the passage calls each believer away from the thorns of sinful attachments that wound the soul in its pilgrimage toward God.

Catholic tradition brings several distinctive illuminations to this passage. First, the theology of God's name and holiness. The Catechism teaches that "God's name is holy" (CCC 2143) and that the sanctification of the divine name — the very petition of the Our Father — is accomplished not through human effort alone but through God's own redemptive action in history. Ezekiel 28:25's declaration that God "is shown as holy" through the ingathering of his people is a profound Old Testament foundation for this truth: God hallows his own name by fulfilling his promises.

Second, the ecclesiological dimension. St. Cyril of Alexandria, commenting on parallel passages in Ezekiel, saw the restoration of scattered Israel as a figure of the Church's universal mission of gathering. Pope Pius XI in Mortalium Animos and, more fully, the Second Vatican Council in Lumen Gentium §6 identify the Church as the fulfillment of the scattered people being gathered into one — "one flock, one shepherd" (John 10:16). The "land given to Jacob" becomes, in this reading, the Kingdom of God, the inheritance promised to all the baptized.

Third, the theme of unmerited election. The Catechism (CCC 218–221) emphasizes that God's love is not earned but freely given, and that his fidelity endures through human infidelity. Ezekiel's grounding of the restoration in God's own holiness rather than Israel's merit anticipates Paul's theology of grace in Romans 11:28–29: "the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable." This is profoundly anti-Pelagian: God gathers not because his people became worthy, but because he is who he is — Yahweh, the faithful one.

For contemporary Catholics, this passage addresses a deeply human fear: that our failures, scatterings, and the contempt of the world are the final word about us. Many Catholics today experience a kind of spiritual exile — from communities fractured by scandal, from a culture hostile to faith, or from their own sense of distance from God after sin. Ezekiel's oracle insists that God's response to scattering is ingathering, not abandonment.

Practically, this passage invites the Catholic reader to identify the "pricking briars" in their own life — the relationships, habits, or cultural pressures that wound and destabilize the soul — and to bring them before God in prayer, trusting that their removal is part of his sanctifying work. The image of building houses and planting vineyards is also a call to patient, embodied fidelity: the spiritual life requires tending, rooting, and long cultivation, not quick escapes. Most concretely, the recognition formula — "they will know that I am Yahweh their God" — challenges Catholics to ask: through what events of my life, joyful or painful, is God revealing himself to me personally? The answer, Ezekiel suggests, is: through all of them.