[Sidenote:  Cor.  Ezek. 45:2-5] When ye allot the land as inheritance, ye shall offer as a special gift to Jehovah, a sacred portion of the land, five thousand cubits long, and twenty thousand cubits wide; it shall be sacred throughout its entire extent.  And out of this area shalt thou measure off a space twenty-five thousand cubits long and ten thousand cubits wide, and on it shall the most holy sanctuary stand.  It is a holy portion of the land; it shall belong to the priests who are the ministers in the sanctuary, who draw near to minister to Jehovah; and it shall be a place for their houses, and an open space for the sanctuary.  Out of this a square of five hundred cubits shall be for the sanctuary, with an open space fifty cubits wide around it.  And a space twenty-five thousand cubits long and ten thousand wide shall belong to the Levites, the ministers of the temple; it shall be their possession for cities in which to dwell.

[Sidenote:  Cor.  Ezek. 45:6-8] And as the possession of the city, ye shall assign a space five thousand cubits wide, and twenty-five thousand long, beside the sacred reservation; it shall belong to the whole house of Israel.  And the prince shall have the space on both sides of the sacred reservation and the possession of the city, on the west and on the east, and of the same length as one of the portions of the tribes, from the west border to the east border of the land.  It shall be his possession in Israel; and the princes of Israel shall no more oppress my people, but shall give the land to the house of Israel according to their tribes.

I. The Home of the Exiles in Babylon.  From the references in the contemporary writers it is possible to gain a reasonably definite idea regarding the environment of the Jewish exiles in Babylon.  Ezekiel describes the site as “a land of traffic, a city of merchants, a fruitful soil, and beside many waters,” where the colony like a willow was transplanted [17:5].  The Kabaru Canal (the River Chebar of Ezekiel) ran southeast from Babylon to Nippur through a rich alluvial plain, intersected by numerous canals.  Beside it lived a dense agricultural population.  On the tells or artificial mounds made by the ruins of earlier Babylonian cities were built the peasant villages.  Ezekiel speaks of preaching to the Jewish colony of Tel-Abib (Storm-hill), and the lists of those who later returned to Judah contain references to those who came from Tel-Melah (Salt-hill) and Tel-Harsha (Forest-hill).

II.  Their Condition and Occupations.  It is probable that these mounds were not far from each other and that the adjacent fields were cultivated by the Jewish colonists.  Thus they were enabled, under even more favorable conditions than in Judah, to continue in their old occupations and to build houses and rear families as Jeremiah had advised (Jer. 29; Section LXXXVII:35).  In Babylonia, as at Elephantine, so long as they paid the imperial tax and refrained from open violence they were probably