19 And you, take up a lamentation for the princes of Israel, 2 and say:
What was your mother? A lioness!
Among lions she crouched;
in the midst of young lions
she reared her cubs.
3 And she brought up one of her cubs;
he became a young lion,
and he learned to catch prey;
he devoured men.
4 The nations heard about him;
he was caught in their pit,
and they brought him with hooks
to the land of Egypt.
5 When she saw that she waited in vain,
that her hope was lost,
she took another of her cubs
and made him a young lion.
6 He prowled among the lions;
he became a young lion,
and he learned to catch prey;
he devoured men,
7 and seized their widows.
He laid waste their cities,
and the land was appalled and all who were in it
at the sound of his roaring.
8 Then the nations set against him
from provinces on every side;
they spread their net over him;
he was taken in their pit.
9 With hooks they put him in a cage
and brought him to the king of Babylon;
they brought him into custody,
that his voice should no more be heard
on the mountains of Israel.
10 Your mother was like a vine in a vineyard
planted by the water,
fruitful and full of branches
by reason of abundant water.
11 Its strong stems became
rulers' sceptres;
it towered aloft
among the thick boughs;
it was seen in its height
with the mass of its branches.
12 But the vine was plucked up in fury,
cast down to the ground;
the east wind dried up its fruit;
they were stripped off and withered.
As for its strong stem,
fire consumed it.
13 Now it is planted in the wilderness,
in a dry and thirsty land.
14 And fire has gone out from the stem of its shoots,
has consumed its fruit,
so that there remains in it no strong stem,
no sceptre for ruling.
This is a lamentation and has become a lamentation.
These last few verses about Zedekiah must also be regarded as a prophecy, indeed we are forced to this conclusion, if we take the chronology of the opening chapters of Ezekiel as correct. At the beginning of chapter 20, for example, it speaks of the seventh year in the fifth month, i.e. 590 BC, seven years after the first part of the captivity in 597, and if this poem was written before then, it must be regarded as a prophecy. Ezekiel, in other words, is prophesying to the exiles by the river Chebar that this is what Zedekiah is going to do. In this connection we should bear in mind that all through the first half of Ezekiel's prophecy, his concern is to convince the exiles that there is no hope of going back to Jerusalem 'in a matter of months'. He insists that the exile will be long, and Jerusalem will no longer be sacrosanct, but destroyed by the judgment of God. And he utters this lament, giving them a picture of the last agonising years, the death-throes of the kingdom and the dynasty of Israel. The picture of the 'burnt-out' vine in 14, with life disappearing from it, is a graphic picture of the tragic end of Zedekiah. This, says Ezekiel, to the exiles in Chebar, is how it is going to be.