Christopher J.H.Wright, The Message of Ezekiel, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001
'May God strengthen him.' This was the prayer with which Ezekiel's parents launched their newborn son into the world when they named him. It was an appropriate prayer and God would have to answer it in many ways they could never have envisaged in the year of his birth. It was 622 BC - an auspicious year to be born, from the point of view of the family of priests in Jerusalem into which Ezekiel arrived. It was the year in which the book of the law was discovered in the emple, adding urgency and impetus to the reforms which King Josiah was already instigating in the kingdom of Judah. By that date, Josiah had been king for about eighteen years, since 640 BC, and had already been engaged in a programme of religious reforms for some five years.
Josiah's religious reforms, which included the destruction of all pagan places of worship and the purging of priests who had served them, meed to be set in the context of the political and international circumstances of his reign... it was technically a vassal state, and had been since the time of King Ahaz. Ahaz was the king who, in 735 BC, much against the advice of Isaiah, had put Judah under the protection of Assyria in exchange for Assyrian help against his own enemies at the time... (17-18)
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