The Vision of the Valley of Dry Bones in Ezekiel 37:1-14 is the most explicit resurrection prophecy in the Hebrew Bible and one of the most visually generative passages in all of scripture. The prophet is carried by the Spirit of the Lord to a valley filled with bones - very many, and very dry, the text emphasizes, as if to maximize the impossibility of what is about to happen. God asks Ezekiel: 'Son of man, can these bones live?' And Ezekiel gives the perfect prophetic answer: 'O Lord God, you know.' Then the word of the Lord commands Ezekiel to prophesy over the bones, and the bones come together, and sinew and flesh grow upon them, and breath enters them, and a vast army stands on its feet.
The theological meaning of the vision is supplied by the divine explanation in 37:11-14: 'These bones are the whole house of Israel.' The vision is, in its original context, a prophecy of national restoration after the Babylonian exile - Israel, scattered and apparently lifeless, will be reassembled and returned to its land by divine power. But the imagery is so evocative, and the process so explicitly corporeal, that the tradition of Jewish resurrection belief drew on it heavily, and Christian theology read it as a prophecy of bodily resurrection at the last day.
Doré's engraving renders the valley in its full extent: a vast plain of scattered human bones reaching to a distant horizon, with the prophet's figure in the foreground bearing witness to the reassembly that is beginning at the edges of the composition. Some bones in the middle distance are already beginning to articulate into recognizable skeletal forms, while others remain in scattered disorder. The scale of the vision - Doré consistently excels at rendering the overwhelming spatial dimensions of prophetic and apocalyptic scenes - gives the image its theological force. This is not a private vision but a cosmic one, the restoration of an entire nation represented as a bodily event.
The visual tradition of this scene is relatively sparse before Doré - it did not attract the sustained attention of Renaissance and Baroque painters in the way that New Testament subjects did - which made his engraving particularly formative for Victorian visual imagination. The plate became the standard reference for sermons and commentary on Ezekiel 37, and its imagery influenced the wave of resurrection hymns that Victorian Protestant culture produced in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Beyond its specifically theological use, the dry bones vision has had remarkable cultural resonance. African American spirituals gave the scene new life: 'Dem Bones, Dem Bones, Dem Dry Bones' translates the Ezekielic vision into a musical form that combines anatomical humor with genuine resurrection theology. T.S. Eliot's Waste Land (1922) inverts the scene for secular purposes, the dry bones of a post-war civilization unable to hear the word that would reassemble them. In each case, Doré's visual rendering of the scene - the vast plain, the scattered remains, the prophet standing over the impossible promise - provided a shared visual reference point from which these variations departed.
The plate also contributed to Victorian discussions of premillennial eschatology, which were particularly intense in the decades following the publication of Doré's Bible. Prophecy interpreters who expected a literal restoration of Israel to its land drew on Ezekiel 37 as a central text, and Doré's image gave that expectation a concrete visual form. The bones rising from the valley of death became a literal image of Jewish national restoration for audiences who read prophecy in a historically literal mode.