So do I read you correctly when I assume from your answer (re: Ezekial's date) that you agree with the WT on the dating of the book and authorship?.(ie, not a post-exile work and forgery by later hands?)
Well, it is not agreeing with the WT per se but with the weight of scholarship. The idea of Torrey that the whole book dates to Hellenistic times is imho without foundation and was adequately debunked by Spiegel. More substantive are doubts about the unity of the work, particularly whether ch. 38-39 or ch. 40-48 are from the same hand as ch. 1-37. I haven't made a study of it, but I am inclined to accept the overall unity of the work on the basis of language, style, and religious ideas. That is not to rule out subsequent editorial redaction and scribal modification which may be detected (cf. the relationship between ch. 1 and 10 and the irregular gender suffixes in ch. 1).
One older objection to the early date of Ezekiel concerned the several allusions to "Danel" but this is not a valid argument because the reference is not to the prophet the book of Daniel is attributed to. Earlier writers also suspected that ch. 38-48 or 40-48 originally circulated as a second volume (as a pseudepigraphon) on the basis of Josephus (Antiquities 10.5.1), but since the discovery of the DSS we now know that there was indeed an apocryphon attributed to Ezekiel (which anyway was also cited in 1 Clement 8:3, Tertullian, De Carne Christi 23, Clement of Alexandria, Paedagogus 1.9, Epiphanius, Panarion 64.70), and the copy of Ezekiel found at Masada contained ch. 38 so the book was apparently a unity in Josephus' day at least for some.
