Reformational Commentary on Ezekiel 39:9
"And they that dwell in the cities of Israel shall go forth, and shall set on fire and burn the weapons, both the shields and the bucklers, the bows and the arrows, and the handstaves, and the spears, and they shall burn them with fire seven years:" (Ezekiel 39:9)
Although expressed in terms of archaic military technology, I take this as hyperbolic language, as may be the case with the
seven year timespan mentioned as well.
Ezekiel 39:9 therefore seems to be a reference to processing (melting down) the scrap materials left from the invading armies and the
duration of this process
may be expressed as extraordinarily long in order to demonstrate the scale of the invading force, bearing in mind also that the armies of
Russia, China et al have extraordinarily large amounts of tanks and armoured vehicles.
In addition to that point, there would also be the vast fuel supplies required to propel a massive modern army’s armoured divisions, noting that
diesel for ground vehicles can be used for heating purposes (or heating as an umbrella term for all manner of energy uses,
including fuelling vehicles) and that aviation fuel for helicopters and jets is kerosene-based, and therefore an ideal natural
source of heating fuel.
It is rather ironic, or perhaps "poetic justice", that an invasion force largely motivated by avarice towards Israel's hydrocarbon
resources (see the commentary on Ezekiel 38:12), should become a bountiful source
of free fuel to the very country it was arrayed against, a point more explicitly made in the next verse.
The seven years duration of the burning of the spoils is taken by some of the old writers as a symbolic number, a definite for an
unspecific, indicative of the scale of the energy windfall presented to Israel's civilian population at that time, who will freely
and safely scour the scene for bounty; however, I think it reasonable to perhaps take the timespan as a literal seven years, so
obviously I do not take the duration cited in Ezekiel 39:9 (or in Ezekiel 39:12) as an instance of what the Reformed writers of old
classed as "prophetic time"1 but rather as a literal,
or at most a hyperbolic, expression of the time the task will take (in which latter case it might mean seven years +/- a few months).
FOOTNOTES
1. Prophetic time is used in Daniel 9's seventy weeks prophecy (one of the most wrested and abused passages of the Word of God) in which 70 weeks of years are intended, that is, 70x7 = 490 years; it is also used in Daniel 12's closing verses, and throughout Revelation, starting with the ten days of tribulation that Smyrna should suffer in Revelation 2:10 and which was fulfilled when the early church was subjected to the horrific abuse and bloodshed under the Dioclesian persection that lasted a literal ten years from February 303 until it was stopped by the Edict of Milan decreed by the new emperor, Constantine, in February 313; another example in Revelation is found in the duration of the Two Witnesses ministry in chapter 11, said to last 1,260 years and which I submit began in AD 765 and expired in the year 2025, when most nations of the West brought in new hate speech laws that are effectively "killing", i.e., gagging, the Lord's public witness against error.
