13 The word of the Lord came to me: 2 “Son of man, prophesy against the prophets of Israel, who are prophesying, and say to those who prophesy from their own hearts: ‘Hear the word of the Lord!’ 3 Thus says the Lord God, Woe to the foolish prophets who follow their own spirit, and have seen nothing! 4 Your prophets have been like jackals among ruins, O Israel. 5 You have not gone up into the breaches, or built up a wall for the house of Israel, that it might stand in battle in the day of the Lord. 6 They have seen false visions and lying divinations. They say, ‘Declares the Lord’, when the Lordhas not sent them, and yet they expect him to fulfil their word. 7 Have you not seen a false vision and uttered a lying divination, whenever you have said, ‘Declares the Lord’, although I have not spoken?”
This chapter contains prophecies against the false prophets. It divides naturally into three sections. In 1-7, Ezekiel brings against them the charge of undermining the security of the nation. The comparison in 4 of the prophets with 'the foxes in the desert' is the key to our interpretation. What is in view is the habit of foxes to burrow indiscriminately to make lairs for themselves, careless and indifferent to any damage they may do to the landscape. The prophets are burrowing into the foundations of the nation's security without any regard for what they are doing, intent on making a den for themselves, and undermining the nation's stability. It is the insidious nature of this burrowing that is in view, and we can hardly think of a better comment upon this than a passage quoted in 'The New Morality' by Arnold Lunn and Garth Lean, in the flyleaf of that book: 'The truth is that civilisation collapses when the essential reverence for absolute values which religion gives disappears. Rome had discovered that in the days of her decadence. Men live on the accumulated faith of the past as well as on its accumulated self-discipline. Overthrow these and nothing seems missing at first, a few sexual taboos, a little of the prejudice of a Cato, a few rhapsodical impulses - comprehensible, we are told, only in the literature of folklore - these have gone by the board. But something else has gone as well, the mortar which held society together, the integrity of the individual soul; then the rats come out of their holes and begin burrowing under the foundations and there is nothing to withstand them.' Such is Ezekiel's word here. He is saying 'In a time of crisis what was needed was to give a moral and spiritual lead to the people, to enable them to close their ranks against the approaching enemy. This is what you have not done. You have not gone up into the gaps, neither made up the hedge for the house of Israel to stand in the battle of the day of the Lord' (5).