The meaning of the bones

John-Paul: “Come here, son. What did you learn in church today?”

Samuel: “I learned about the skeleton.”

John-Paul: “Huh? … well, what person did you learn about?”

Crickets.

John-Paul: “Oh, right! Was it Ezekiel?”

Samuel: “Yes!”

Karin (who’d spent the morning in the classroom across the hall from Samuel): “Yes, they learned about the Valley of Dry Bones.”

John-Paul: “And what did you learn about the Valley of Dry Bones? Will God put flesh on our bones after we die?”

Samuel: “No.”

John-Paul: “Yes.”

Samuel: “Yes!”

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I was going to say: I’m delighted that my four-year-old is learning about Ezekiel 37 in Sunday School, even if he doesn’t understand it; at least the image of the Bones is being paraded before his brain.

Thinking it over, though, I’m not sure I have a firm grasp of the meaning of the Bones.

I doubt I’ve heard the passage preached upon. Nor have I gone far out of my way to read about the Bones (although I’ve read the chapter many times).

Is the passage only about the House of Israel, or is it about the resurrection of all of God’s people? The commentators I’ve glanced at mostly say the former. But it is a vision, after all, and the meaning of a vision can be narrow or wide or both.

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From Wikipedia:

The novelist Anthony Powell named The Valley of Bones, the seventh novel in the sequence A Dance to the Music of Time, for this part of Ezekiel 37. The novel is about the opening days of World War II. The entirety of the relevant part of Ezekiel 37 is read from the pulpit at the end of Chapter 1 by a Church of England padre to a motley group of mostly Welsh miners and bankers as well as some officers from England’s upper classes as they begin to form a company. The padre suggests that not just they, but all of the British army as it prepares for war, should take this image as a way of thinking about how they need to come together.

I think not.

(Incidentally, Powell is on the docket for later this year, after I finish reading Nancy Mitford’s novels.)

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Then there’s the famous song. I like it pretty well on the nursery-rhyme level, better than during childhood when I thought it silly. The same is true of “Father Abraham.” I wouldn’t mind singing these songs in church today if we would all just stand still and not do any motions.

The lyrics of “Dem Bones” are confusing. Why connect the bones to each other first, and then disconnect them from each other? How will they walk around after they’ve been disconnected? Is verse 1 supposed to come after verse 2?

The lyrics of “Father Abraham” are easier to understand: Many sons had Father Abraham; I am one of them, and so are you. Join this idea with Dem bones gonna walk around (as one might, what with the similar body-part imagery), and you get the Christian resurrection.

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“Looked at one way,” says Joel Rosenberg (The Literary Guide to the Bible, p. 203), “the book of Ezekiel is a silent tribute to his deceased wife” (cf. 24:15ff.); “viewed in another way, it is an object lesson in which the prophet’s personal tragedy is but a sign of larger events.”

Why not both?