Ezekiel Chapter 45 Vs. 9-12

The Land of the Temple Priests

Ezekiel 45:9-12

Ezekiel used the reality of God’s promised future blessings as a springboard to exhort the princes in his day to repentance. You have gone far enough, O princes of Israel! (cf. Eze. 44:6) Give up your violence and oppression and do what is just and right. Israel’s civil leaders had callously disregarded the rights of those they were to protect (cf. Eze. 19:1-9; 22:25; 34:1-10).

Their basic problem was greed. So Ezekiel exhorted them to use accurate scales, an accurate ephah, and an accurate bath. An ephah was a measure of dry capacity and a bath was a measure of liquid capacity. They were each equivalent to approximately five gallons. Each of these was a 10th of a homer. A homer was approximately 50 gallons or about 6 bushels. The Hebrew word ḥōmer, possibly related to ḥămôr (“donkey”), suggests that this was a “donkey load.” The leaders of the land are urged to be thoroughly honest in their commercial dealings. This warning shows that there will be sin in the Millennium. The believing Jews who entered into the 1,000 year reign of Christ on earth and inherited the promised kingdom will be fully human and capable of such sins. There also will be children who do not necessarily believe, as the final rebellion against King Messiah and His temple proves.

Ezekiel also defined the measure of weight (in addition to the measures of capacity): the shekel is to consist of 20 gerahs. A “shekel” weighed just under 11½ grams or about 2/5 of an ounce. The “gerah” was Israel’s smallest unit of weight; it took 20 gerahs to make one shekel (cf. Exo. 30:13; Lev. 27:25; Num. 3:47). Ezekiel stated that 60 shekels (20 + 25 + 15) equal one mina. Some have felt that this was a deviation from the usual standard of 50 shekels to a mina, as in Ugaritic texts. However, there is evidence that the standard, at least in Babylon, was 60 shekels to a mina. This would make the mina about 24 ounces or 1½ pounds.


Weights found from Old Testament times vary to some extent. Apparently people used weights of differing sizes to cheat others. Ezekiel was exhorting Israel’s leaders to establish honest standards for all Israelites.