Ezekiel

← Encyclopedia

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.

The book opens with the vision for which it is best remembered. By the river the prophet sees the heavens open: a storm out of the north, four living creatures each with four faces, wheels within wheels rimmed with eyes, and above them a crystalline expanse bearing a throne, and on the throne a figure with the appearance of fire and the radiance of the rainbow — described, throughout, in the careful language of likeness rather than direct sight. From this point the text moves through judgment and consolation: the slow departure of the divine glory from the doomed Temple, the sign-acts the prophet is commanded to perform on his own body, oracles against the surrounding nations, and then, after Jerusalem falls, a turn toward restoration. The vision of the valley of dry bones knitting back into a living host, and the long closing blueprint of a rebuilt Temple measured cubit by cubit, belong to this later movement.

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; its unusually systematic structure and its dense priestly vocabulary have made it a test case for theories of how prophetic books were composed. What is not in dispute is the afterlife of its first chapter. The throne-chariot — the merkavah — became the central image of an early Jewish contemplative tradition whose practitioners sought ascent through the heavenly palaces toward the throne itself. The rabbis treated this material as dangerous: the tradition held that the opening of Ezekiel was not to be expounded in public, nor studied except by the mature and alone. That reticence is itself part of the text’s reception — a book read, for centuries, as a doorway that ought to be approached with caution.

Within Jewish and Christian devotion the book has been held as genuine prophecy, its restored Temple read by some as a promise still outstanding. Among the later esoteric currents that drew on Kabbalah, the merkavah and its bearers supplied a vocabulary for the soul’s ascent and for the architecture of the upper worlds. The four living creatures passed into Christian iconography as the emblems of the evangelists, and the wheels full of eyes into the medieval ranking of the angels. What the prophet recorded as a thing seen by an exiled man at a foreign river became, over the long centuries that followed, one of the most consequential images in the Western religious imagination.

→ Related: Isaiah · Jeremiah · Amos · Book Of Joel · Book Of Malachi