Buzi: The Father Named in One Verse of Ezekiel

A Name Carried by One Verse

Buzi (בּוּזִי) is a man of the exile, placed in the era running around 606 BC to 536 BC (era placed on Ussher's chronology, 1650). Everything Scripture records about him fits inside a single verse, Ezekiel 1:3, and even there he is not the subject of the sentence. He is named because someone else is being identified. His whole biblical footprint is one verse in one book, and the one thing said of him is that he had a son.

The Verse Itself

"Yahweh's word came to Ezekiel the priest, the son of Buzi, in the land of the Chaldeans by the river Chebar; and Yahweh's hand was there on him" (Ezekiel 1:3).

Read it slowly, because there is nothing else to read. The verse tells us four things that touch Buzi. First, he had a son named Ezekiel. Second, that son is called a priest. Third, the son is in the land of the Chaldeans, by the river Chebar, when Yahweh's word comes to him. Fourth, Yahweh's hand is there on him. Buzi himself does nothing in the verse. He speaks no word, takes no journey, offers no sacrifice, receives no promise. He is the second half of a name.

That is not a small thing in Scripture. To be called "the son of Buzi" is to be given a place, an anchor, a household. Ezekiel is not introduced as a wanderer of unknown origin; he is introduced as belonging to someone. When the word of Yahweh comes to a man by a foreign river in a land not his own, the text still troubles itself to say whose son he is. Buzi's name survives because it was the answer to that question.

No Scene Is Told

It is worth naming plainly what kind of mention this is, because a reader can be tempted to build a life out of a patronymic. There is no scene here. No narrative is told about Buzi at all: his single appearance is a passing note inside the identification of his son. He has no dialogue, no location of his own, no recorded death. Ezekiel 1:3 places Ezekiel in the land of the Chaldeans by the river Chebar; the verse does not say that Buzi was there, and Scripture does not tell us where he was, whether he lived to see his son's calling, or whether he was still alive at all.

The verse calls Ezekiel "the priest." It does not call Buzi a priest. Scripture, in this one line, says nothing about Buzi's own office, his work, or his standing. What is said of the son here is said of the son.

Failures and Faithfulness Alike Unrecorded

Scripture is candid about the men it follows closely, and it does not spare them. With Buzi there is nothing to spare and nothing to expose. The text records no sin of his and no act of obedience either. He is neither praised nor blamed. Anyone who wants a moral portrait of Buzi has to invent it, and inventing it means saying about a man what God did not see fit to say. Honesty here means silence: we do not know whether he was faithful, and the Bible does not tell us.

What We Do Not Know

The list of unknowns is longer than the list of knowns. Scripture does not name his parents. No tribe or people is given for him. We are not told his age, his trade, his character, or the manner of his death. We are not told of any child other than Ezekiel. We do not know whether he went into exile, or stayed, or died before either. Everything Scripture records of him fits in one verse, and that verse is about his son.

So Buzi stands as one of those figures in the Bible who exist entirely as a relation. He is a father, and that is the whole of what we are given. It is worth resisting the urge to fill the gap. The gap is part of the record.

What a Name Still Does

There is something steadying in a verse like Ezekiel 1:3. The word of Yahweh does not come to an abstraction. It comes to a particular man, in a particular land, by a particular river, and that man had a father with a name. Whatever Buzi was, he was real enough that his name was worth writing down when Yahweh's hand came down on his son.

The dossier lists no New Testament references for Buzi, and so no line can be drawn here from him into the New Testament. What remains is a name, held in one verse, attached to a son on whom Yahweh's hand rested by the river Chebar (Ezekiel 1:3). For a man whose record is that short, it is a considerable thing to be remembered at the exact moment the word of Yahweh broke into the land of the Chaldeans.