The chapter is about setting the boundary of the entire land. For no reason except that I started w/the King James 2000 edition, I'll use that again. Other bibles will comport pretty darn well on the sense of these verses. I've also thrown in 21 and 23 for context.
21So shall you divide this land unto you according to the tribes of Israel.
22And it shall come to pass, that you shall divide it by lot for an inheritance unto you, and to the strangers that sojourn among you, who shall bear children among you: and they shall be unto you as if born in the country among the children of Israel; they shall have inheritance with you among the tribes of Israel.
23And it shall come to pass, that in whatever tribe the stranger sojourns, there shall you give him his inheritance, says the Lord GOD.
Preceding these three verses is a long passage explaining the North, East, South, and West borders of the whole land.
So the structure is:
1) Here's the whole land
2) Divide it according to tribes, with perpetual inheritance rights
3) If there are foreigners among you with children, they too have perpetual inheritance rights
4) If the foreigner is living in Danite territory, his chunk comes out of Dan's share. If he's in Judah, it comes from Judah's share. If he's in Benjamin, it comes out of Benjamin's share. Etcetera. Or
will in the future, if you get a new alien living among Israelites.
Yes, verse 23 is in the future tense. "It shall come to pass... you
shall give him his inheritance."
So if you get a newbie foreigner who has an "anchor baby" in the land of Israel, guess what? You have to carve him out a parcel.
Here's a page purporting to give the word-by-word literal translation of 47:23...
http://biblehub.com/text/ezekiel/47-23.htm
Oddly, it seems to pronounce the "v" (vav) in
vehaya, as "w." I don't know if the vav is supposed to have once been a "w" sound, but I think the confusion there is that vav with a little dot becomes "oo" within a word... I'm going by some pretty lame and kindergarten level understanding, but I thought all "Ws" at the beginning of Hebrew words were loan-words from other languages.
In any event, I do know that "hahyah" means "was," and
VEhayah (the word that begins Ezekiel 47:23) is "[it] will." As this page explains, you can use vav to change the tense from past to future or vice versa.
http://www.zionism-israel.com/hebrew/Hebrew_Alphabet_for_Dummies_6a.htm
So in verse 23, you get "It will" as the beginning. Ezekiel is describing the process whereby you grant an inheritance to a newcomer.
Bear in mind that Ezekiel wrote well after the conquest of the land. The use of the future tense is Ezekiel describing the future process for according inheritance to non-Jews -- a future commandment he's stipulating ex-post-facto.
Want it to get weirder? Ezekiel was writing in the Babylonian captivity. Nobody argues this. So think about the the activities of the prophets when the elite were in exile in Babylon, and the "people of the land" were back in Israel.
For one thing, they get all the stories down in written form, and/or transcribe any pre-existent written forms they have with them. As you say, earlier descriptions of the tribal inheritance isn't like Ezekiel has - they're very concerned about the boundaries
betweeen tribes in texts that predate the conquest of first, Israel, and then, Judah.
When the First Temple falls in 597 (along with Judah itself,) Ezekiel becomes part of an exiled group in Babylon.
He is writing the rules pertaining to the conquest of the land
after the end of the country he is writing about. And,
he is writing in future tense.
So Ezekiel writes about the
restoration of Israel (perhaps more precisely, Judah, since Israel seems to have been dispersed -- the so-called 10 lost tribes). He makes provisions for the "stranger who sojourneth among you," where previous accounts of the tribal division, dating from earlier traditions/texts, do not.
However, in Numbers, there is a dispute about what would happen when daughters marry into another tribe. (Numbers 36:1-13) Moses resolves the question with a ruling that it's unacceptable to marry across tribes where women have inherited tribal property. In the course of the ruling he decrees that (1) you can't transfer property across tribes, and (2) for some reason, perhaps to put a really fine point on it, they have to marry their blood relatives on their father's side. They end up marrying their first cousins.
So the theory that Ezekiel is introducing an intertribal transfer policy seems to be directly contrary to the law of Moses. Numbers 36:7 is explicit:
So shall not the inheritance of the children of Israel move from tribe to tribe: for every one of the children of Israel shall keep to himself the inheritance of the tribe of his fathers.
However, it does not say anywhere I know of that "You get nothing if you are a resident alien." To the contrary, as in the Leviticus quote, in the books of Moses God repeatedly commands the Israelites to deal fairly with the strangers among them, reminding them that they were strangers in the land of Egypt.
So in the prophecy of
restoring Israel, Ezekiel quite practically accounts for the non-Israelites who are already known to be proliferating in the Babylonian province that was once Judah. He does so without contradicting earlier law - the inheritances of aliens living as free men among Israel may just not have been mentioned.
PFnV
It doesn't say "...except if your future obligations look daunting unto you one day in the vague future."
