Ezekiel 20:41
39 “‘As for you, O house of Israel, this is what the Sovereign Lord says: Each of you go and serve your idols, if you will not listen to me. But my holy name will not be profaned again by your sacrifices and your idols. 40 For there on my holy mountain, the high mountain of Israel, declares the Sovereign Lord, all the house of Israel will serve me, all of them in the land. I will accept them there, and there I will seek your contributions and your choice gifts, with all your holy things. 41 When I bring you out from the nations and gather you from the lands where you are scattered, I will accept you along with your soothing aroma. I will display my holiness among you in the sight of the nations. 42 Then you will know that I am the Lord when I bring you to the land of Israel, to the land I swore to give to your fathers. 43 And there you will remember your conduct and all your deeds by which you defiled yourselves. You will despise yourselves because of all the evil deeds you have done.
Sirach 36:3
Ben Sira, Ecclesiasticus1 Have mercy upon us, O God of all, 2 and put all the nations in fear of you. 3 Lift up your hand against foreign nations and let them see your might. 4 As you have used us to show your holiness to them, so use them to show your glory to us. 5 Then they will know, as we have known, that there is no God but you, O Lord.
Notes and References
"... Verse 4 refers to the divine punishment that Israel had to face and which also served as evidence of Yahweh's holiness to the Gentiles. The biblical background for this argumentation is primarily found in Deuteronomy 28:36-37 which presupposes the setting of the Babylonian exile: 'The Lord will bring you, and the king whom you set over you, to a nation that neither you nor your ancestors have known, where you shall serve other gods, of wood and stone. You shall become an object of horror, a proverb, and a byword among all the peoples where the Lord will lead you.' These lines can be interpreted as an ideological background, but even more direct lexical connections are detectable between Sirach 36:4 and the recurring phrase 'I will manifest my holiness among you in the sight of the nations' that occurs in Ezekiel 20:41, 28:25 (and with slight modifications in Ezekiel 38:16 and 39:27). The composer of our prayer firmly adheres to the proclamation of Ezekiel which promises the reversal of political powers. Israel has been humiliated and she has been scattered among the nations. This is one sign of the might of Yahweh, which even the foreign nations should acknowledge. But greater than this will be Yahweh's act towards Israel when he gathers her dispersed tribes and leads them back to their own land. This idea is implicitly expressed in Sirach 36:4, and it reaches its concrete formulation in verse 11. The adherence to the Ezekielian passages presupposes that the foreign nations either would not remain intact when Yahweh decides to punish, for it is said that Yahweh will summon his sword against Gog (Ezekiel 38:21) ..."
Marttila, Marko Foreign Nations in the Wisdom of Ben Sira: A Jewish Sage between Opposition and Assimilation (pp. 136-137) De Gruyter, 2012