• “You Will Come to Life”
    Pure Worship of Jehovah—Restored At Last!

    • “Our Bones Are Dry, and Our Hope Has Perished”

      6. What words of Jehovah helped Ezekiel to understand the vision?

      6 Jehovah next revealed to Ezekiel how the vision was to be understood, saying: “These bones are the whole house of Israel.” Indeed, after the exiles had learned of Jerusalem’s destruction, they felt that they were as good as dead. Therefore, they lamented: “Our bones are dry, and our hope has perished. We are completely cut off.” (Ezek. 37:11; Jer. 34:20)

  • “You Will Come to Life”
    Pure Worship of Jehovah—Restored At Last!

    • 8. (a) How was “the whole house of Israel” in a deathlike condition? (b) How does Ezekiel 37:9 indicate the cause of Israel’s symbolic death? (See footnote.)

      8 How had the ancient nation of Israel experienced the fulfillment of the gloomy part of this prophetic vision? The symbolic demise of Israel had already begun in 740 B.C.E. with the fall and exile of the ten-tribe kingdom. Some 130 years later, when the people of Judah were also deported, “the whole house of Israel” was in captivity. (Ezek. 37:11) Symbolically speaking, the whole group of exiles were then as dead as the bones seen in Ezekiel’s vision.a

  • “You Will Come to Life”
    Pure Worship of Jehovah—Restored At Last!

    • a The bones that Ezekiel saw in vision belonged, not to people who had died from natural causes, but to “people who were killed.” (Ezek. 37:9) “The whole house of Israel” was, indeed, killed symbolically when the inhabitants of the ten-tribe kingdom of Israel and those of the two-tribe kingdom of Judah were successively conquered, taken captive, and deported by the Assyrians and the Babylonians.