Ezekiel Chapter 6 verse 14 Holy Bible

Pulpit Commentary

Pulpit CommentaryVerse 14. - More desolate than the wilderness towards Diblath; better, with the Authorized Version, from the wilderness. The name does not appear elsewhere, and has not been identified. Assuming the Authorized Version rendering, we must think of Ezekiel as naming, as Dante haines the Valdichiana ('Inf.,' 29:47), some specially horrible and desolate region. For such a region the name of Diblah (a cake of figs) does not seem appropriate. Taking the Revised Version translation ("from the wilderness toward Diblah"), we have a phrase analogous to "from Dan to Beersheba," as denoting the extent of the desolation. The "wilderness" is usually applied to the nomad region south of Palestine, and this would lead us to look for Diblah in the north, and so to look elsewhere than to the two places Beth-diblathaim (Jeremiah 48:22) and Almon-diblathaim (Numbers 33:46), both of which are in Moab. The difficulty was solved by Jerome by the conjectural emendation of Riblah, the two Hebrew letters for d and r being often written by copyists for each other. Riblah (it is a suggestive fact that the two chief manuscripts of the LXX. the Alexandrian and the Vatican, have Deblatha, or Deblaa, in 2 Kings 23:33; 2 Kings 25:6) was a fortified town on the north road from Palestine to Babylon, where the Babylonian kings used to take up their position during their invasions of the former. Within a short time after Ezekiel wrote this chapter, it became memorable in its connection with Zedekiah's sufferings (comp. 2 Kings 23:33; 2 Kings 25:6, 20, 21; Jeremiah 39:5, 6; Jeremiah 52:9, 10, 26). Its probable site is fixed on the banks of the Orontes. The evidence, on the whole, is, I think, in favour of this interpretation. It is adopted by Ewald, Cornill, Smend, Gesenius, and most recent critics. An additional fact in its favour is that Hamath, in the same region, appears as an ideal northern boundary in Ezekiel 47:16.

Ellicott's Commentary

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers(14) More desolate than the wilderness toward Diblath.--The name Diblath does not occur elsewhere; but Diblathaim, the dual form, is mentioned in Numbers 33:46-47, Jeremiah 48:22, as a double city on the eastern border of Moab, beyond which lay the great desert which stretches thence eastward, nearly to the Euphrates. It was customary to call any wilderness by the name of the nearest town. (See 1Samuel 23:14-15; 1Samuel 23:24-25; 1Samuel 25:2, &c.) That wilderness appears from this passage to have been proverbial for its desolation.