A picture is worth a thousand words

A standard premil objection to the amil interpretation of Ezk 40-48 is that it’s implausible to think Ezekiel would spill so much ink describing a structure which will never be built.

I’ve discussed this before, but now I’d like to add one more consideration. It takes less time to see something than read about it. During Ezekiel’s guided tour, he would have taken in the temple complex at a glance. But writing down what he saw automatically bogs down in many minute details. There’s a fundamental difference between his original visionary experience and his verbal description of what he saw. Doing a walk-through of the temple complex wouldn’t be tedious or time-consuming. That could happen in a few minutes.

But converting that into extended word-pictures for the benefit of the reader, for someone who didn’t see what he saw, is necessarily more cumbersome. These are two different media. It may seem excessive to have 8 close-packed chapters describing something which will never be built, but that’s a misleading comparison. For it fails to take into account the disproportion between the original visionary experience and translating that experience into a wordy medium. Pictures aren’t propositions.