Ezekiel 14:12-23

The Righteous cannot Save the City, but only Themselves. In spite of all Ezekiel's visions and warnings, the people still cherish the illusion that Jerusalem will be spared if for no other reason, at least for the sake of the righteous to be found in it, on the principle of solidarity. Why might it not, like Sodom (Genesis 18:32), be spared for ten's sake? In this very interesting and rhetorical passage, where Ezekiel develops the broad doctrine of individual responsibility, at which he has just hinted (Ezekiel 14:10) and which he had touched upon before (Ezekiel 3:16), he strikes away this illusion. When the judgment comes, he tells them be it in the form of famine, wild beasts, or pestilence the most godly men, for all their piety, will be able to deliver no one but themselves: not their families, not even a single member of them (Ezekiel 14:20), far less their city or their land. As types of piety he chooses the names of men whose stories must have been familiar to his contemporaries (Noah, Daniel, Job) though the books named after the two latter had not yet been written (Ezekiel 14:12). This dogmatic theory of strict individual retribution would seem to be difficult to square with the survival of a guilty remnant, such, e.g. as those who were deported later to Babylon after the fall of the city in 586 B.C. Ezekiel meets this undoubted difficulty by the suggestion that this remnant, by their corrupt lives, will show how thoroughly just the doom of the others was; and the exiles will have the grim comfort of witnessing this confirmation of the Divine justice.