Talk:Ezekiel 22

"spoken by the prophet Ezekiel"
Because there's a number of ongoing issues with a few hundred of these Bible-chapter articles that will need fixing, I think this is as good a place as any to centralize any discussion about one particular sentence that is copy-pasted into a good many Wikipedia articles: "This book contains the prophecies spoken by the prophet Ezekiel, and is one of the Books of the Prophets.[1]" It's a matter of fact that the Book of Ezekiel contains writing and we don't actually have any evidence that bears on whether the prophecies recorded here in written form were orally delivered at some point. There are a lot of scholars (I think they might be a majority) who see Ezekiel as the author of this book, more or less completely. So my intent is not to argue authorship.

The problem is that this sentence makes it sound like it is a known fact that the book originated as a series of oral addresses by Ezekiel and not as a written work -- as if it contained transcripts. There is a source given, but it is a citation to an entire commentary series, The Interpreters Bible and not to a specific passage. It is for all practical purposes unverifiable. In addition, the author of these four hundred or so Bible-chapter passages has been TBANned for reasons having to do with problems with text-source integrity, so I don't think we should take for granted that somewhere in the commentary series there is a statement to the effect that Ezekiel actually did deliver these prophecies orally before they were collected as transcripts.

For now, I think we should remove the footnote, and rewrite the sentence to read, "This book contains the prophecies of Ezekiel, and is one of the prophetic books of the Bible." Of course, if someone can come up with reliable sourcing for the (highly unlikely) claim that modern scholarship has successfully reconstructed how much of the written content in Ezekiel goes back to oral deliveries, we can always cross that bridge when we come to it. Alephb (talk) 18:51, 3 August 2017 (UTC)
 * The lede is using the format "This book contains the prophecies attributed to the prophet Ezekiel" similar to that of other prophetic books. JohnThorne (talk) 00:30, 20 March 2019 (UTC)