15 The word of the Lord came to me: 16 “Son of man, take a stick and write on it, ‘For Judah, and the people of Israel associated with him’; then take another stick and write on it, ‘For Joseph (the stick of Ephraim) and all the house of Israel associated with him.’ 17 And join them one to another into one stick, that they may become one in your hand. 18 And when your people say to you, ‘Will you not tell us what you mean by these?’ 19 say to them, Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I am about to take the stick of Joseph (that is in the hand of Ephraim) and the tribes of Israel associated with him. And I will join with it the stick of Judah, and make them one stick, that they may be one in my hand. 20 When the sticks on which you write are in your hand before their eyes, 21 then say to them, Thus says the Lord God: Behold, I will take the people of Israel from the nations among which they have gone, and will gather them from all around, and bring them to their own land. 22 And I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel. And one king shall be king over them all, and they shall be no longer two nations, and no longer divided into two kingdoms. 23 They shall not defile themselves any more with their idols and their detestable things, or with any of their transgressions. But I will save them from all the backsliding in which they have sinned, and will cleanse them; and they shall be my people, and I will be their God.
24 “My servant David shall be king over them, and they shall all have one shepherd. They shall walk in my rules and be careful to obey my statutes.25 They shall dwell in the land that I gave to my servant Jacob, where your fathers lived. They and their children and their children's children shall dwell there for ever, and David my servant shall be their prince for ever. 26 I will make a covenant of peace with them. It shall be an everlasting covenant with them. And I will set them in their land and multiply them, and will set my sanctuary in their midst for evermore. 27 My dwelling place shall be with them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 28 Then the nations will know that I am the Lord who sanctifies Israel, when my sanctuary is in their midst for evermore.”
The intention of the second section of the chapter is clear: the two sticks in 16ff represent the two separated kingdoms, Israel and Judah that had remained so from Solomon's time to the time of the captivities, in 732 and 586 respectively. Now, God says, the two will become one and shall be no more parted. There is a sense in which one could say that this was at least partially fulfilled in the return to the land under Zerubbabel, because the people were a unity from that time onwards. But the reference to David in 24, which echoes and parallels that in 34:23, must surely mean that the prophecy cannot be tied up with the return of the captives in 586. For one thing, they did not have a king at that time; nor has there been, as we have already pointed out, a king in Israel since Zedekiah. The words must therefore have an eschatological reference, whatever we may make of them, and since this is so, the vision of the dry bones may well be said to have some reference to, and significance for, the Jews in Palestine in our own day. It is not surprising, then, that there are those who see in this twofold movement of the dry bones a reflection of what has been happening in our time. In 1948 the State of Israel was constituted by the United Nations, and it would be true to say that sinews and flesh and skin have been put upon the dry bones of the Jewish people. Is not this a fair description of what has happened since that time, when Jews from all over the world have converged on Israel? The dry bones have come together; but as yet, there is no breath, no spirit in them. But who shall say categorically that that will never happen, so far as the Jews today are concerned? Have we not in this chapter a commentary on the emergence of modern Israel, the dry bones having been shaken and gathered together in this most remarkable phenomenon of our modern world?