Ezekiel

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The Book of Ezekiel is one of the major prophetic books of the Hebrew Bible, attributed to a priest carried into Babylonian exile after the first deportation from Jerusalem early in the sixth century BCE. It is among the most precisely dated of the prophetic books: its oracles are pinned to particular years of the captivity, and they are spoken not from the homeland but from the displaced community settled by the river Chebar, in the heartland of the empire that had broken Judah. Where most of the prophets stand inside the land and speak against it, Ezekiel stands outside it and speaks back toward it — a prophet of the diaspora before the word existed, addressing a people whose Temple, city, and king were about to be taken from them, and then taken in fact.

The priest by the river Chebar

The opening verses fix the man and the moment with unusual care. Ezekiel son of Buzi was a priest of the Zadokite line, deported to Babylonia in 597 BCE in the company of King Jehoiachin and the Jerusalem elite — the first of the deportations, eleven years before the city itself fell. He was resettled at Tel-abib among the exiles by the Chebar, one of the great irrigation canals of the Babylonian plain, and it is there, in the fifth year of the captivity, that the heavens open over him. A priest separated from the only sanctuary where his office had meaning, he receives instead a vision of the sanctuary’s true occupant on the move, unbound from the Temple and present at a foreign canal. That displacement is the theological hinge of the whole book: the conviction that the God of Israel is not confined to one mountain in one city, and can be encountered — in glory, in judgment, in mercy — wherever the exiles are.

The book is structured by its dates, more than a dozen of them, counted from the exile of Jehoiachin, and by a clean three-part movement that the dates carry. The first chapters (1–24) are oracles of judgment against Jerusalem, delivered before its fall. The middle chapters (25–32) are oracles against the surrounding nations — Ammon, Moab, Edom, the Philistines, Tyre, Sidon, and above all Egypt. The closing chapters (33–48) turn, after news of the city’s destruction reaches the exiles, toward restoration: the regathering of the scattered, the revival of the dead nation, and the blueprint of a Temple to come. The pivot is explicit. The night before a fugitive arrives with word that Jerusalem has fallen, the prophet’s long-imposed silence is lifted and his mouth is opened; from that point the message changes register from doom to rebuilding.

The vision of the chariot-throne

The book opens with the vision for which it is best remembered. By the river the prophet sees the heavens open: a great storm-wind out of the north, a vast cloud shot through with fire and a brightness round about it, and out of the fire the gleam of amber. Within it stand four living creatures, each with four faces — of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle — and four wings, their legs straight, the soles of their feet like burnished bronze, moving as a single thing wherever the spirit drives them, darting like flashes of lightning and never turning as they go. Beside each creature is a wheel, and a wheel within the wheel, their rims so high they are dreadful, and the rims full of eyes round about. The spirit of the living creatures is in the wheels: when the creatures move, the wheels move; when they stand, the wheels stand. Over their heads is the likeness of a firmament, the color of awful crystal, and from above the firmament comes a voice. Above the firmament is the likeness of a throne, in appearance like sapphire, and upon the throne a likeness as the appearance of a man — from the loins upward the gleam of amber and fire, from the loins downward the appearance of fire, and round about a radiance like the bow that is in the cloud on a day of rain. This, the text says, was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD; and when the prophet saw it he fell on his face.

Everything in the description is held at one remove. The vision is rendered not in statements of what is but in a careful, recursive grammar of resemblance — the likeness of a throne, the appearance of a man, as it were the color of amber, a brightness like the bow in the cloud. The seer reaches for the visible world and then withdraws the comparison in the same breath, so that the reader is shown a structure of analogies pointing past themselves to something the analogy cannot hold. This is the inaugural vision that the later tradition would call the merkavah, the chariot — though Ezekiel’s first chapter never uses the word; it speaks of the living creatures and the wheels, and the term is supplied by reception. The whole apparatus is a mobile throne: the glory of God, borne on wheels full of eyes and on the wings of the creatures, capable of leaving its fixed seat and traveling. A vision of the divine presence as portable was the one thing an exiled priest most needed and least expected to be given. The status of this seen Glory became a problem for later thought: on the medieval doctrine that the Glory beheld by the prophets was a created intermediary rather than the divine essence itself, see Saadianic created-Glory theology.

The call and the eaten scroll

What follows the vision is the prophet’s commissioning. A voice tells him to stand on his feet, and the spirit enters him and sets him upright. He is sent to a rebellious house, a people of hard face and stubborn heart, and warned that whether they hear or refuse to hear, they will know that a prophet has been among them. Then a hand reaches out to him holding a scroll, written within and without with lamentations and mourning and woe, and he is commanded to eat it. He eats, and in his mouth it is sweet as honey — the bitter message and its sweet reception held together in a single image of the prophet who must take the word into his own body before he can speak it. The act establishes the dominant mode of the book: Ezekiel does not merely deliver oracles, he absorbs and embodies them, and his person becomes the medium through which the message is performed.

The sign-acts and the watchman

No prophet stages his message on his own body as relentlessly as Ezekiel does. He is told to lie bound on his left side for a long stretch of days and then on his right, bearing the punishment of the two kingdoms; to shave his head and beard with a sword and divide the hair into thirds, burning, striking, and scattering it as a sign of the city’s fate; to eat rationed food cooked over fuel as a sign of siege and famine; to pack an exile’s baggage and dig through a wall and carry it out at dusk with his face covered, enacting the flight of the prince from a doomed Jerusalem. The most severe of the sign-acts is imposed not on his body but on his grief: at a single stroke his wife, called the delight of his eyes, is taken from him, and he is forbidden to mourn — a sign to the exiles that when the sanctuary, the delight of their eyes, falls, they too will be left numb and unable to lament in the ordinary way. Alongside the sign-acts runs the figure of the watchman, set on the wall to sound the alarm: the prophet is told that if he warns and is not heeded the blood is on the people’s own heads, but if he fails to warn, the blood is required of him. The watchman charge frames the prophet’s accountability and shifts, over the course of the book, toward a doctrine of individual responsibility — the soul that sins shall die, and neither the righteousness of the fathers nor their guilt is simply inherited.

The glory departs and returns

The structural spine of the judgment chapters is the slow withdrawal of the divine glory from the doomed Temple. In a vision transported to Jerusalem, Ezekiel is shown the abominations practiced within the sanctuary courts, and then he watches the glory — the same fiery presence borne on the cherubim and the wheels of the first chapter — rise from above the cherubim, move to the threshold of the house, pause at the east gate, and finally lift from the midst of the city and come to rest on the mountain east of it before vanishing. The God of the Temple abandons the Temple before it is destroyed; the catastrophe of 586 BCE is thereby read not as the defeat of Israel’s God by Babylon’s gods but as that God’s own deliberate departure. The vision of the new Temple at the book’s close answers this departure exactly: at its climax the glory returns from the east, the way it had gone, and fills the house, and a voice declares that this is the place of the throne where the divine presence will dwell among the people forever. The book is framed, beginning to end, by the movement of the glory — out of the city it had judged, and back into the city it has remade.

The valley of dry bones

The vision of the valley of dry bones, in the thirty-seventh chapter, is the most famous image of the restoration. The prophet is set down in a valley full of bones, very many and very dry, and asked whether these bones can live. He is told to prophesy over them, and as he speaks there is a noise and a shaking, and the bones come together, bone to its bone; sinews and flesh come up upon them and skin covers them, but there is no breath in them. He prophesies again to the breath — the same word that means wind and spirit — and it comes from the four winds and enters the slain, and they live, and stand on their feet, an exceedingly great host. The vision is given its own interpretation in the text: the bones are the whole house of Israel, who say their hope is lost and they are cut off, and the God who opens their graves and brings them up is promising the exiles a national resurrection — a return from the death of exile to life in their own land. Read first as the revival of a people, the image carried, in later Jewish and Christian reading, an unmistakable charge toward the resurrection of the body; but in its own setting it is the dead nation, not the dead individual, that stands up and breathes.

The new Temple

The book closes with its longest and most exacting vision: a guided tour, given in the twenty-fifth year of the exile, of a Temple to come, measured cubit by cubit. A man whose appearance is like bronze, holding a measuring reed and a line of flax, leads the prophet through the gates, courts, chambers, and sanctuary, recording every dimension. The vision sets out the duties of the priesthood, restricting the inner service to the sons of Zadok; it regulates the festivals and offerings and the portion of the prince; and it traces a river that issues from beneath the Temple threshold, deepening as it flows east until it is a river that cannot be crossed, turning the salt sea fresh and lining its banks with trees whose leaves do not wither and whose fruit is for food and whose leaf is for healing. A final section apportions the land in idealized parallel strips among the twelve tribes, with a sacred reserve at the center for the sanctuary, the priests, and the prince. The closing word of the book names the restored city: the LORD is there. This Temple was never built to Ezekiel’s specifications, and the differences between his blueprint and the actual Second Temple were noticed early; the rabbis preserved a tradition that the discrepancies between the book of Ezekiel and the law of Moses were so troubling that the book was nearly withdrawn from circulation, and were reconciled only by the prolonged labor of one sage who is said to have burned through many measures of lamp-oil to harmonize them.

Composition and authorship

Historical scholarship treats the book as the deposit of a real exilic prophet, though it has long debated how much of the present text is his and how much the shaping of later editors. For much of the twentieth century the trend ran toward heavy redaction, with the original prophet’s words thought to lie buried under layers of later expansion; the counter-movement, associated above all with the commentaries of Moshe Greenberg and Walther Zimmerli, recovered a high degree of literary and theological coherence in the received text and treated its very systematic structure as evidence of a controlling mind rather than of editorial accretion. The book’s unusually exact dating system, its dense priestly and legal vocabulary, its long and elaborately developed allegories, and its insistent first-person voice have made it a test case for theories of how prophetic books were composed and transmitted. The strangeness of its visionary chapters has also drawn psychological and physiological speculation about the prophet himself — the catatonic episodes, the muteness, the bizarre commanded behaviors — though such readings remain marginal to the study of the book as a literary and theological whole.

Reception: the chariot and the four creatures

What is not in dispute is the afterlife of the first chapter. The throne-chariot became the central image of Hekhalot and Merkavah mysticism, an early Jewish mystical tradition whose visionaries sought ascent through the heavenly palaces toward the throne itself; the merkavah stands at the head of the long history of pre-Zoharic Jewish esotericism that runs toward the later Kabbalah. The rabbis treated the material as dangerous. The Mishnah ruled that the account of the chariot — the ma’aseh merkavah — was not to be expounded even to a single student unless he was a sage who already understood of his own knowledge, and the Talmud surrounds the rule with stories of fire descending on those who discoursed on Ezekiel’s chapter and of the four who entered the orchard of forbidden contemplation, only one of whom emerged whole. That reticence is itself part of the text’s reception: a chapter read, for centuries, as a doorway that ought to be approached with caution, alone, and only by the mature. The contemplative current that grew from it belongs properly to the mystical tradition rather than to the prophet’s book; the book supplied the seed and the vocabulary — the living creatures, the wheels, the sapphire throne, the glory — and the tradition built the architecture of ascent upon it.

The four living creatures had a second great afterlife in Christian iconography. Combined with the four-faced creatures of the throne-vision in the Revelation of John, they were assigned, from the patristic period onward, as the emblems of the four evangelists. The early attempts varied in their assignments, but the arrangement fixed by Jerome became standard in the Latin West — the man to Matthew, the lion to Mark, the ox to Luke, and the eagle to John — and the four-faced tetramorph became one of the most reproduced motifs in medieval art. The wheels full of eyes passed into the medieval ranking of the angels as the order of the ophanim, the wheels, set among the highest choirs near the throne. Ezekiel’s imagery surfaces again in the visionary art and poetry of later centuries, in William Blake’s figures of the chariot and the wheels among them, and the chariot-vision has more recently been pressed into service by the ancient-astronaut and UFO literatures, which read the wheels and the gleaming creatures as a misremembered technological encounter — a reading that says more about the modern imagination than about the exilic one.

Scholarship and texts

The book’s reception and composition have generated a deep critical literature; the landmark modern editions and studies, with the relevant primary texts, are noted here.

• Moshe Greenberg, Ezekiel 1–20 (Anchor Bible 22; Doubleday, 1983) and Ezekiel 21–37 (Anchor Bible 22A; Doubleday, 1997). The fullest exponent of the “holistic” reading that takes the received Hebrew text as a coherent composition. Catalog record: openlibrary.org/books/OL4545123M.
• Walther Zimmerli, Ezekiel, 2 vols. (Hermeneia; Fortress Press, 1979–1983; German original Ezechiel, Biblischer Kommentar, Neukirchener Verlag, 1969). The standard form-critical and tradition-historical commentary. Catalog record: openlibrary.org/books/OL5198629M.
• David J. Halperin, The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 16; J. C. B. Mohr, 1988). The major reception-history study of the merkavah vision from the Bible through the rabbis to the Hekhalot corpus. Publisher record: mohrsiebeck.com.
• Daniel I. Block, The Book of Ezekiel, 2 vols. (New International Commentary on the Old Testament; Eerdmans, 1997–1998). A comprehensive recent commentary treating the book as a literary and theological unity. Catalog record: openlibrary.org/books/OL1009716M.
• Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken, 1941), whose opening lectures established the merkavah chapters as the fountainhead of the Jewish mystical tradition — a continuity thesis since substantially revised, but the starting point of all later debate. Catalog record: openlibrary.org/books/OL6171844M.
• The text of Ezekiel itself is read in the Masoretic Hebrew and in the Old Greek of the Septuagint, whose shorter and sometimes divergent text is an important witness to the book’s textual history. For the apocalyptic ascent and throne-vision literature that grew up alongside the merkavah tradition, the archive hosts R. H. Charles’s 1912 translation of the Book of Enoch, which shares Ezekiel’s vocabulary of opened heavens, enthroned glory, and heavenly ascent.

For the contemplative tradition that built on the vision, see Hekhalot and Merkavah mysticism. The prophet stands among the writing prophets of the Hebrew Bible alongside Isaiah and Jeremiah, his older contemporary in Jerusalem as the city fell. What the prophet recorded as a thing seen by an exiled man at a foreign river became, over the centuries that followed, one of the most consequential images in the Western religious imagination — and the book that carries it remains, beneath its visionary surface, the record of how a priest without a Temple learned to find his God in Babylon.

→ In the library: The Book of Enoch (Charles, 1912) — heavenly ascent and throne-vision

→ Related: Isaiah · Jeremiah · Amos · Book Of Joel · Book Of Malachi · Hekhalot Merkavah Mysticism · Jewish Mysticism · Jewish Mysticism Pre Zoharic · Babylon · Old Testament · Tanakh · Book Of Enoch