On Every High Hill and under Every Green Tree

I read some chapters of 1 Kings a couple weeks ago (after seeing a citation of 1 Kings 11:3 in my edition of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales), and I came across the phrase "on every high hill and under every green tree" in 1 Kings 14:23.  A couple years ago, I'd run across a somewhat expanded version of this phrase in Ezekiel 6:13 ("on every high hill, on all the mountain-tops, under every green tree, and under every leafy oak, wherever they offered pleasing aroma to all their idols").  At the time, I knew this sounded familiar, and I eventually found what I was thinking of, in Jeremiah 2:20:  "on every high hill and under every green tree."

These constructions may not fit a strict definition of a merism, but the nearly opposite senses of "high" and "under" do provide a sense of breadth.  This is also indicated more clearly by "wherever" in the verse in Ezekiel.

At the time, I didn't consider this significant enough to write about, but since I found a third occurrence of this phrase, I thought I would note it.

Ezekiel 36:25

Earlier this month, I read Ezekiel 36, and I found a chiasm in verse 25:

I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean

From all your uncleannesses, 

And from all your idols

I will cleanse you.

I lookt up the Hebrew text, and I'm pretty sure it also has this feature.

Around the same time I read this particular verse, I was following along with the Daily Dose of Greek series in John 3 where Jesus is talking to Nicodemus and refers to baptism.  Dr. Plummer mentions this verse from Ezekiel in his video on John 3:5, and the study notes in my Bible also reference it.  Clearly, this verse in Ezekiel describes baptism.

But since it has this chiastic structure, it also points to Christ's crucifixion.  The study notes in my Bible explain that "sprinkle" is a "term most often used with the blood of the atonement and covenant," and that description seems to fit more with the crucifixion than with baptism.

Ezekiel 29:9-10

I'm still making my way through Ezekiel, but I recently found a note I made in late March about chapter 29 that I forgot to write about.

The Lord tells Ezekiel to prophesy against Pharaoh, and in the second half of verse 9 and into verse 10, He says, "Because you [Pharaoh] said, 'The Nile is mine, and I made it,' 10 therefore, behold, I am against you and against your streams, and I will make the land of Egypt an utter waste and desolation, from Migdol to Syene, as far as the border of Cush."

Pharaoh's claim that "The Nile is mine, and I made it" is very similar to what the Psalmist says of God in Psalm 95:5:  "The sea is his, for he made it, and his hands formed the dry land."  (I lookt up the Hebrew, and while most of it is beyond me, I did notice that both verses use the same verb for "made.")  Pharaoh's claim is prideful and arrogant, but the Psalmist properly credits and (elsewhere in this Psalm) praises God for His creation.


As brief side notes:

"From Migdol to Syene" and "the sea/the dry land" are both merisms.  The first seems simply to indicate a specific geographic area, but the second illustrates the variety and expanse of God's creation and - in turn - His powerful dominion over it.

Psalm 95:5 has a chiastic structure whose elements are features of God's creation ("the sea" and "the dry land") and the act of creation ("he made it" and "his hands formed"):

The sea is his

for he made it 

and his hands formed

the dry land.

Ezekiel 4:16

I read Ezekiel 4 a couple weeks ago, and I noticed something interesting about verse 16:  "Moreover he [God] said to me, 'Son of man, behold, I will break the supply of bread in Jerusalem.  They shall eat bread by weight and with anxiety, and they shall drink water by measure and in dismay.'"  At first, I noticed only that the second sentence features zeugma:  while "by weight" and "with anxiety" are both adverbial prepositional phrases that modify "eat," "by weight" describes how in a physical sense and "with anxiety" describes how in an emotional sense.  Same for "drink water by measure and in dismay" because the sentence also features structural parallelism.

When I lookt up the definition of zeugma to confirm that I'd correctly identified it, Merriam-Webster's observation that "Zeugma... is economical: it contracts two sentences into one" made me realize something else.  This verse describes how people will have to ration their food and water, and zeugma's reuse of sentence elements illustrates this saving in a grammatical way.  Rather than two clauses ("They shall eat bread by weight, and they shall eat it with anxiety"), they're combined into one.

Then I started wondering whether this structure is in the original Hebrew.  I've been reading The Lutheran Study Bible, which uses the English Standard Version.  The New International Version has the more prosaic "The people will eat rationed food in anxiety and drink rationed water in despair."  When I referenced the STEP Bible, I discovered that the Hebrew text does have zeugma:

וְאָכְלוּ־לֶחֶם בְּמִשְׁקָל וּבִדְאָגָה וּמַיִם בִּמְשׂוּרָה וּבְשִׁמָּמוֹן יִשְׁתּֽוּ׃

Here's a link to the interlinear.