Maccoby, Bad Commandments
Footnote

See Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 1-20 (Anchor Bible), Doubleday, New York, 1983, pp. 368-70.

Greenberg argues: "It is essentially the same as God's hardening of Pharaoh's heart so that his ruin might be a lasting object lesson ... or the complaint of Isaiah 63:17, `Why, YHWH, do you make us stray from your ways, and harden our hearts not to fear you?'" Greenberg's interpretation is thus superficially similar to that of the Targum and Rashi; with the important difference that the latter do not portray God as actually giving bad laws to ensure that no reformation takes place. However, this is not the same at all. To harden the heart of a person to prevent him from obeying an existing (good) law, is very different from giving him a bad law. `Hardening the heart' (after due allowance of time for repentance) means blocking the way to performing good deeds; giving a bad law, on the the other hand, means luring a person into bad deeds through the very desire to do good by obeying God. The first expresses the idea that God has lost patience in waiting for the sinner's repentance; the second, that God himself has become a criminal. Greenberg further remarks that the biblical polemic against human sacrifice shows that `it was popularly believed that YHWH accepted, perhaps even commanded, it'. The gap between this and the statement that Ezekiel believed that God had commanded it is enormous. If the people believed that human sacrifice had been ordained of God, they did not simultaneously believe that this was a bad law. Ezekiel, on the other hand, is accused by Greenberg of believing simultaneously that God had ordained human sacrifice and that it was a bad law. This is to turn God into a devil.