In the twelfth year of our exile, on the fifth day of the tenth month, a fugitive from Jerusalem came to me and reported, “The city has been taken!”
A refugee brought the news a year and five months after Jerusalem burned, though the prophet had surely heard it sooner through steady commerce between Babylon and the ruins. Yet this eyewitness account was different: a man who escaped the flames himself could speak with particularity and real feeling of what he had seen, fulfilling the sign God gave that one would come to make him hear it with his own ears.
AI summary
Commenting on Ezekiel 33:21-29
Then the word of the Lord came unto me,.... After the messenger had delivered his message, and he had received it, and conversed with him about it: saying: as follows:
twelfth year . . . tenth month--a year and a half after the capture of the city (Jer 39:2; Jer 52:5-6), in the eleventh year and fourth month. The one who escaped (as foretold, Eze 24:26) may have been so long on the road through fear of entering the enemy's country [HENDERSON]; or, the singular is used for the plural in a collective sense, "the...