Ezekiel 21:21

for the king … stood standeth. All the verbs had better be put in the present.

madehis arrows bright he shaketh the arrows, he consulteth the teraphim, he looketh in the liver. These ceremonies explain the phrase "to use divination," The process has several parts: a sacrifice was offered to the deity or image, the liver of the animal apparently being inspected to see what intimations it suggested. Then arrows (among the Arabs they were pointless and unfeathered), inscribed with the names or things between which a decision was sought from the god (here Rabbah and Jerusalem), were cast into a vessel or bag; these were shaken and brought before the god from whom the decision was sought; one was then drawn, and the inscription it bore was the answer of the god to the alternative propounded for his settlement; in the present case the king's right hand drew out the arrow inscribed "Jerusalem." This method of divination by arrows was common among the Arabs (cf. Wellhausen, Skizzen, iii. p. 127), and apparently also in Chaldea (Lenormant, La Divination chez les Chaldéens, ch. ii. iv., Sayce, Trans. Soc. Bib. Archæology, vol. iii. 145). It is related of the poet Imru'ulḳais that he used this method of divination to ascertain whether he should avenge his father's death or no, and the answer always coming out "no," he became enraged and breaking the arrows flung them in the god's face, telling him that if the case had been that of his own father he would not have given such a decision, and (in Arab fashion) applying many foul epithets to the god's mother. The teraphim are the deities which Nebuchadnezzar carried with him, who gave the oracle. The plur. does not imply the use of more than one image.