Normally, I edit all articles and letters published in The Skeptical Review to correct errors in grammar, spelling, and punctuation and to polish syntax and style, but sometimes I leave articles unedited in order to let the way they were written make a point that the readers would otherwise miss. This is the case with Matthew Hogan's article. His main argument for the inerrancy of Ezekiel's Tyre prophecy depends upon the usage of the pronoun they, yet his article leaps from the page and screams that he is far from being linguistically qualified to base arguments on grammatical principles involving the use of a single word. His article is filled with mistakes in spelling, grammar, and punctuation; the organization of the article shows that he doesn't understand basic principles of paragraphing; yet he apparently expects us to believe that he is expert enough in linguistics to know that the pronoun they in verse 12 of Ezekiel's prophecy referred to "many nations" and not to the horses, horsemen, wagons, and chariots of Nebuchadnezzar's army, which in the verses just before this, Ezekiel had depicted raging through the streets of Tyre.
All of my analyses of passages in Ezekiel where plural pronouns were obviously used to refer to singular antecedents Hogan summarily dismissed with a simple, "So what!" and an arbitrary assertion that the pronoun they referred to the Romans, Greeks, and so forth. When confronted with incisive counterarguments like this, what can I say?
To refute Hogan's assertion that the pronoun they in this passage must refer to a plural antecedent, we have only to compare it to another passage in Ezekiel that is strikingly similar in structure. First, let's consider again the passage in dispute:
Ezekiel 26:10-12: Because of the abundance of his horses, their dust will cover you; your walls will shake at the noise of the horsemen, the wagons, and the chariots, when he enters your gate, as men enter a city that has been breached. With the hooves of his horses he will trample your streets; he will slay your people by the sword, and your strong pillars will fall to the ground. They will plunder your riches and pillage your merchandise; they will destroy your pleasant houses....
By all rules of grammar, Hogan is certainly right. The plural pronoun they in the last verse grammatically calls for a plural antecedent, and if Ezekiel was referring to Nebuchadnezzar in verse 12, he should have continued with the singular pronoun he, which, as indicated in bold print, was used throughout the passage. However, what is grammatically required is not always what writers do. Everyone who writes much at all will make mistakes, and mistakes in pronoun-antecedent agreement are very common in writing. This is a fact I know from having taught college writing for 30 years.
As I demonstrated in my first response to Hogan, Ezekiel's writing clearly shows that he was inclined to this same grammatical mistake. Hogan apparently didn't think too much of the examples I used, but another passage, very similar to the one just quoted, will show that Ezekiel was too careless in his usage of pronouns for Hogan's argument to have any credibility:
Ezekiel 29:18-20: Son of man, Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon caused his army to serve a great service against Tyre; every head was made bald, and every shoulder rubbed raw; yet had he no wages, nor his army, from Tyre, for the service that he had served against it. Therefore thus says Yahweh God: `Behold, I will give the land of Egypt to Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon; and he shall carry off her multitude, and take her spoil, and take her prey; and that will be the wages for his army. I have given him the land of Egypt as his recompense for which he served, because they worked for me....
Here we notice that Nebuchadnezzar was the subject of another of Ezekiel's prophecies, this one clearly admitting the failure of the earlier prophecy that Nebuchadnezzar would totally destroy Tyre, and so Yahweh was going to give him Egypt as compensation for the prior prophecy failure. I have italicized the appropriate pronouns to show that all through the text, Ezekiel used the masculine singular pronouns he, him, and his, which were grammatically consistent with the fact that the antecedent of the pronouns was Nebuchadnezzar (a singular masculine antecedent). However, at the very end of the prophecy, Ezekiel, for no grammatical reason, shifted to the third person plural pronoun they: "I have given him the land of Egypt as his recompense for which he served, because they worked for me" (v:20). There is no better explanation for this shift than the assumption that Ezekiel had in his mind that the siege of Tyre had been the work of not just Nebuchadnezzar but an entire army. Since a concept of plurality was in the writer's mind, he inadvertently shifted to a plural pronoun, even though grammatical consistency should have required him to use the singular pronoun, as he had done throughout the text.
This is the type of carelessness that we often see in writing and hear even more often in conversations. Someone might say, "The committee finished its report last night. They worked past midnight." In a statement like this, the speaker is aware that committee is singular, and so he/she uses its as the first pronoun but apparently forgets, because of an awareness that a committee consists of several people, and shifts to the plural pronoun they. In my responses to Hogan, I have analyzed several passages in Ezekiel to show that this type of carelessness in pronoun usage was characteristic of Ezekiel's style. This is a point that demands a response from Hogan. He answers nothing by just brushing it aside with a curt, "So what!"
Hogan thinks that my position is "strange," because "[he doesn't] have any trouble understanding the Tyre prophesy [sic]." Well, I don't have any trouble understanding it either, and it is precisely because I do understand it that I consider it an obvious example of prophecy failure. That Hogan claims to understand the prophecy is unimpressive to me, because he has demonstrated that he has difficulty understanding rather simple statements. In my first response, for example, I made the following statement in reply to Hogan's claim that the shift to the personal pronoun "I" at the end of Ezekiel's tirade against Tyre meant that Tyre's final destruction would happen "when Christ returns":
As for the switch to the first-person pronoun "I" in the Tyre prophecy, Hogan makes entirely too much of this. It was not a switch but merely a return to the first person with which the prophecy had begun: "Therefore, thus says Yahweh God, `Behold, I am against you, O Tyre" (v:3). After then describing in third person the devastation that Nebuchadnezzar would bring upon Tyre, the narrative [re]turned to the first person ("I will put an end to your songs") as a means of showing that Nebuchadnezzar would merely be the agent through whom Yahweh would destroy Tyre. If Hogan will take the time to examine the book of Ezekiel more carefully, he will see that this narrative style was characteristic of Ezekiel's prophecies. Ezekiel 28:6-10 and 30:10-12 are just two examples of where Ezekiel began a prophecy with Yahweh speaking in the first person after which he shifted to third-person narration to describe the agencies of punishment that he would use, and then he returned to first-person narration by Yahweh" (TSR, September/October 1996, p. 6).
Now it should be rather obvious to anyone that in this statement I was clearly recognizing that the personal pronoun "I" referred to Yahweh and that the literary device that Ezekiel used was to begin his prophecies as if Yahweh himself were speaking, to switch within the text of the prophecy to the third person as Yahweh described the agents, such as Nebuchadnezzar, whom he would use to administer punishments, and then at the end of the prophecy to return to the first person as Yahweh concluded his tirades with warnings like, "For I Yahweh have spoken it" (26:14). Despite the clarity of my explanation, Hogan made this astounding statement in his second article:
Till erroneously thinks that the "I" is "merely a return to the first person..."
Oh Mary, here we go again! The I refers to "Yahweh God." This interpretation makes much more sense than Till's bazzare [sic] "return to the first person" idea.
How can anyone read the statement I quoted above and think that I don't understand that the pronoun "I" in the disputed passage referred to Yahweh God? Didn't I say that Ezekiel typically used a literary device in which he "began a prophecy with Yahweh speaking in the first person"? So, yes, absolutely, the "I" in the text is a first-person singular pronoun whose antecedent was Yahweh God. This, however, is not to say that the use of the pronoun "I" in this passage "makes it plain that Tyre will not be finally uninhabited until Christ returns."
To argue that the "I" at the conclusion of the Tyre prophecy meant that the final destruction of Tyre wouldn't happen "until Christ returns" [who at that time had not even come the first time] would require rather absurd interpretations of some of Ezekiel's other prophecies. In 30:10-12, for example, Ezekiel prophesied the total destruction of Egypt by Nebuchadnezzar. This prophecy is structured exactly like the one against Tyre. It begins with Yahweh speaking in the first person: "I will also make the multitude of Egypt to cease by the hand of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon" (v:10). Then after Nebuchadnezzar was introduced as Yahweh's agent of punishment, the prophecy shifted to a third-person description of what Nebuchadnezzar would do to Egypt: "He and his people with him, the terrible of the nations, shall be brought in to destroy the land, and they shall draw their swords against Egypt and fill the land with the slain" (v:11). Then at the end of the prophecy, Yahweh returned to first-person narration: "I will make the rivers dry and will sell the land into the hand of evil men, and I will make the land desolate and all that is therein, by the hand of strangers. I, Yahweh, have spoken it" (v:12).
Nothing like this and the long tirades before it, predicting utter and complete destruction of Egypt, ever happened, so it is just another example of a failed prophecy. To be consistent, then, Hogan would have to argue that this was just a prophecy of the final destruction of Egypt when "Christ returns," even though the prophecy was directed against "Pharaoh, king of Egypt" (29:2-3; 30:21-25;31:2), and Nebuchadnezzar was clearly identified as the agent that would bring about the destruction (29:17-20; 30:10, 25). This is the extreme that people like Hogan are driven to when they try to defend the accuracy of Old Testament prophecies that obviously failed to materialize. Even if we assume the existence of the Hebrew god Yahweh, we would have to consider him a very stupid deity if he sent prophets to warn nations of an utter destruction that was going to come upon them at the final coming of a Messiah at some remotely distant time in the future. If this god should send a prophet to warn a country today that it would be totally destroyed when "Christ" returns at some unknown time that could be thousands of years away, what effect, if any, would it have on the people?
Hogan's entire argument, which he has obviously borrowed from apologists like Gleason Archer and Norman Geisler, depends upon a claim that the pronoun they in 26:12 refers to "many nations" in verse 3. In other words, he is claiming that the antecedent of they is to be found nine verses before the pronoun was used. I think I know enough about principles of writing to say that if this is what Ezekiel really intended, he was an extremely careless writer, because no effective writer would separate a pronoun from its antecedent with that much verbiage, especially when there were so many words like horses, horsemen, men, wagons, and chariots in between that could be confused as the antecedent of they. So if Hogan (read Archer and Geisler) is right, we have to wonder why an omniscient, omnipotent deity didn't do a better job of verbally guiding his "inspired" agent. As I have pointed out before, even if Hogan could prove his case--and he can't--he would then have to explain this problem, which is just as damaging to biblical inerrancy as a failed prophecy.
On the matter of the "many nations," Hogan said, "If Farrell can explain what Ezekiel meant when he wrote about the `many nations' that would come up against Tyre, then perhaps I would admit defeat." Well, I do have an explanation, which I consider far moresensible than the strained interpretation that Hogan has resorted to in an attempt to salvage this prophecy. This interpretation is based on the fact that the Hebrew language had no future tense. Thus, Ezekiel did not actually say, "I am against you, O Tyre, and will cause many nations to come up against you." Instead, he said, "I am against you, O Tyre, and have caused to come up against thee many nations" (Young's Literal Translation of the Holy Bible). In the absence of a future tense, which was characteristic of Semitic languages, future action was denoted by using the past tense, and in the introduction to his literal translation, Young discusses at length the controversy that this linguistic feature has generated among Bible translators ("Battle of the Hebrew Tenses," Revised Edition, Baker Book House).
To people whose native languages have a future tense, as English does, it may seem strange that some languages don't have this tense, but even in English we sometimes express future intention the same way. In a heated dispute, someone might react to the other's insult with a threat like this: "Okay, buddy, you've had it." The object of the threat hasn't received any kind of retaliation yet, but he would understand that his adversary is threatening that he will take some kind of action in the future, just as surely as if the threat had been, "Okay, buddy, you're going to get it." In such cases, the meaning is determined by context.
Without a future tense, this was how it always was in Hebrew, so it is possible that some past-action statements in the Bible were misinterpreted by translators and rendered in the future tense when futurity wasn't intended. A comparison of English versions will show several places where translators disagreed on how tenses should be rendered.
With this tense problem in Hebrew, it may have been that Ezekiel was talking in verses 3-6 not entirely about what would be done to Tyre but what had already been done, at least in part, because the mainland villages of Tyre had been frequent victims of invading armies. However, at verse 7, Ezekiel obviously focused his prophecy on what Nebuchadnezzar would do to both the mainland villages and to Tyre proper. That Ezekiel was predicting action by Nebuchadnezzar against both the mainland villages and the island city is evident to those who want to see it. First, Nebuchadnezzar would "slay your [Tyre's] daughters in the field [the mainland villages]," and then he would "set his battering engines against your [Tyre's] walls, and with his axes he will break down your [Tyre's] towers" (vs:8-9). Surely, if Ezekiel had been referring only to walls and towers of the mainland villages, he would not have used the second-person singular pronoun your but the third-person plural their. If a modern dictator should threaten a nation, he might say, "I will destroy all of your allies, and then I will send my army against your cities and break down your fortifications." Who hearing a statement like this would not understand that the first clause was a threat against only the nation's allies and that the second clause was a threat against the nation itself? This is exactly the situation in Ezekiel's prophecy against Tyre. The prophecy quickly addressed the fate of Tyre's daughter villages (v:8), which had always been sitting ducks, and then turned to Tyre proper, the island fortification that posed the greatest problem to an invading army.
The extensive allusions to Tyre as a city associated with the sea shows that the prophecy was concerned with Tyre proper and not the mainland suburbs, which had often been attacked and destroyed by invading armies. These allusions are too extensive to examine in a single article, but Ezekiel said that after the complete destruction of Tyre, "Shall not the isles shake at the sound of your fall, when the wounded groan, when the slaughter is made in your midst?" (v:15). All the "princes of the sea" would come down from their thrones and tremble and "take up a lamentation" in which they would say, "How are you destroyed that was inhabited by seafaring men, renowned city, that was strong in the sea, she and her inhabitants" (vs:14-17). All of this was obviously applicable to the island city of Tyre but not to the mainland villages. They had been overrun so often that no nation would have expressed surprise that they had been destroyed one more time. It was the island city of Tyre that had always proven to be impregnable.
Tyre still exists today despite Ezekiel's prophecy that it
would be destroyed and never rebuilt, but it exists only as a shadow of
its former glory. The causeway that now links the city to the mainland,
not to mention modern weaponry that would be available to an invading
army, has forever removed the natural protection that Tyre enjoyed in
Old Testament times, so for Hogan to think that nations will express
astonishment at the final destruction of Tyre when "Christ returns" is
an utterly ridiculous attempt to salvage this prophecy from the garbage
heap of other prophecy failures that it must be relegated to. A modern
army could attack Tyre today and wipe it from the face of the earth,
and no one would see anything astonishing about it. So it turns out
that Hogan is the one who has erected a straw house.
