Preserved for the End of Time

A revelatory new examination of the book of Ezekiel.

In this rather stunning debut of biblical scholarship, Kevas and Walker take up the famously problematic book of Ezekiel and rigorously examine it using several energetic new methods. Their book is essentially a heavily annotated, ground-clearing new translation of Ezekiel in which the authors painstakingly lay out their exegetical methods. They assert that the notorious difficulty of the text, which most readers are familiar with via the King James translation, is mostly the result of mistranslation and linguistic inaccuracy. To correct these factors, they attempt to pinpoint the exact meaning of each word in the text as it’s found in such ancient versions as the Dead Sea Scrolls (in their translation, virtually every word is underscored and given a reference number, aka a concordance number, to verify the translation from Hebrew or Greek). Kevas and Walker do this for the sake of transparency, and they buttress their translation with exhaustive annotation that draws on a formidable range of documentary material—not only the available Jewish sources, but also such material as the Quran and the Sibylline Oracles. Their goals are twofold: first, to demonstrate that Ezekiel has been drastically mistranslated over the centuries; and second, that as a result, Ezekiel has been fundamentally misunderstood for the last 2,600 years. In the course of their new translation, Kevas and Walker claim to have uncovered not only new nuances in the text, but something far more ambitious: an entire shadow-book hidden in plain sight, a series of detailed prophecies that predict such things as airplanes, modern technology and developments in Middle Eastern history as well as a carefully imagined set of predictions involving Jesus Christ returning to Earth as the Messiah in our own times. “It seemed apparent to us,” they write, “that God would have wanted the generation that these prophecies describe to understand the warnings.” Readers may balk at the book’s conclusions about those hidden prophecies, but along the way, they’ll be thrilled by the thinking on display.

An exciting, thought-provoking new reading of a famously complex biblical text.