Ezekiel — themes & analysis

The prophet, by the river Chebar in the land of the Chaldeans, sees the heavens open. A stormy wind comes out of the north, a great cloud with fire flashing in it and a brightness around it, and out of the midst of the fire the appearance of four living creatures. Each creature has four faces — a man, a lion, an ox, an eagle — and four wings, and they move straight forward without turning, going wherever the spirit goes. Beside each living creature is a wheel, and the wheels themselves have wheels within them, and their rims are full of eyes, and they go wherever the creatures go because the spirit of the living creatures is in the wheels.

Above the creatures is a firmament like crystal, and above the firmament a throne like sapphire, and on the throne the likeness of a man, glowing like fire and amber, surrounded by brightness like the rainbow in a cloud on a day of rain. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord, the prophet says. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face. The vision is the founding moment of what later Jewish mysticism would call the Merkavah tradition — the chariot tradition — and the vision was so charged with danger that the rabbis ruled that it should not be read or expounded except by an adult well-versed in scripture, and never alone.

The four living creatures became, in the Christian tradition (refracted through the parallel vision in Revelation 4), the symbols of the four evangelists: man for Matthew, lion for Mark, ox for Luke, eagle for John. The wheels within wheels became one of the most quoted images in religious art and folk song. What is most theologically striking about the vision, on its own terms, is the location. The glory of God is appearing not in the Jerusalem temple, where the priestly tradition Ezekiel had been raised in had located it, but in Babylon — in the land of exile, by a foreign canal, among a deported community.

The vision says, with extraordinary visual force, that God is not confined to the temple. He has come out and met his people in their exile. This theological move — the portability of the divine presence, the recognition that God is not territorially bound — is one of the deepest gifts of the exilic prophets to the later traditions, and it begins, in the canonical text, with the chariot in chapter 1.

Where to follow it: Ezekiel 1 (the first vision), Ezekiel 10 (the glory departs), Ezekiel 43 (the glory returns).

Ezekiel is struck dumb at the start of his prophetic career (3:26), able to speak only when delivering an oracle, and remains in this state until the news of Jerusalem's fall arrives some seven years later (33:22). He lies on his left side for three hundred and ninety days and then on his right side for forty days, bearing the iniquity of Israel and Judah respectively (chapter 4). He shaves the hair of his head and beard with a sharp sword, weighs and divides it into three portions, and burns one third in the city, strikes one third with the sword, and scatters one third to the wind (chapter 5). He digs a hole through the wall of his house at night and carries his belongings through the hole — the symbolic enactment of the coming exile (chapter 12).

Most extreme of all, in chapter 24, his wife — described, in one of the few personal lines in the book, as the desire of his eyes — dies suddenly, and he is told to make no public mourning for her: bind your turban on, put your shoes on your feet, do not cover your lips, do not eat the bread of mourners. He does as he is commanded. The community asks him what these things mean. He tells them. The temple, the desire of their eyes, is about to be destroyed, and they will not be permitted to mourn it in the way they had thought they would.

The theological argument behind these signs is precise. Words can be ignored, debated, dismissed. A body that has been lying on its side for over a year cannot be ignored. The exile community has to look at Ezekiel as he is, and what they see is the message. The cost of being this kind of messenger is immense, and the book preserves it without minimising it. Ezekiel is the prophet whose vocation has cost him most visibly in his flesh, and the book makes the cost part of what the prophecy is.

Where to follow it: Ezekiel 4 (lying on his side), Ezekiel 5 (the divided hair), Ezekiel 12 (digging through the wall), Ezekiel 24 (the unmourned wife).

The prophet is brought out by the spirit of the Lord and set down in the middle of a valley full of bones — a great many bones on the floor of the valley, and they are very dry. The Lord asks him: son of man, can these bones live? And Ezekiel answers carefully: O Lord God, thou knowest. He is told to prophesy to the bones. As he prophesies, there is a noise — a rattling — and the bones come together, bone to its bone. Sinews appear on them, then flesh, then skin. But there is no breath in them.

He is told to prophesy to the wind (the same Hebrew word that means breath and spirit) — come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live. He prophesies, and the breath comes into them, and they live, and stand upon their feet, an exceeding great army. The vision is then interpreted explicitly: these bones are the whole house of Israel; they say, our bones are dried up, our hope is lost, we are completely cut off; therefore prophesy and say, behold, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, my people, and I will bring you back to the land of Israel.

The vision has been one of the most quoted passages in the Hebrew Bible. It is the source of the African American spiritual Dem Bones, in which the verbal energy of the bones coming together has been preserved into modern folk song. It has been read across two and a half thousand years as the foundation of the doctrine of bodily resurrection — explicitly so in the rabbinic literature, where the chapter is cited as one of the principal scriptural warrants for the resurrection of the dead. What is most striking on the page is the simplicity of the vision's mechanism. The bones are dry. The prophet speaks. The bones come together. The breath comes. The army stands. The pattern is the pattern of Genesis 1: God speaks, the world is.

Where to follow it: Ezekiel 37 (the dry bones and the two sticks).

In chapters 8–11, the prophet is transported in vision from his location in Babylon back to Jerusalem and shown the abominations being practised in the temple itself: the image of jealousy at the gate, seventy elders worshipping creatures painted on the wall, women weeping for Tammuz, men with their backs to the temple worshipping the rising sun. Then he is shown the chariot of God moving — first from above the cherubim in the holy of holies to the threshold of the temple (10:4), then from the threshold to the east gate (10:18–19), and finally out of the city altogether to stand on the mountain east of the city (11:23), the Mount of Olives. The glory has left the temple.

The temple is now empty of the divine presence, and the destruction that follows in 587 is, on the book's theology, the consequence of the glory's departure rather than its cause. God does not abandon a temple in which his presence still dwells; the absence of the presence makes the destruction possible. The narrative of the glory's departure is then balanced, twenty chapters later, by the narrative of its return. In chapters 40–48, in the long visionary tour of the new temple, Ezekiel is shown the glory returning — coming from the east, by the way the glory had departed (43:2), entering the new temple by the east gate, and filling the house.

The east gate by which the glory returns is then sealed (44:1–3), so that no one else may enter by it; it is reserved for the prince. The two narratives — departure and return — frame the book's theological argument about the relationship between God and the temple. The book closes with the city renamed: the Lord is there.

Where to follow it: Ezekiel 8 (abominations in the temple), Ezekiel 10 (the glory departs), Ezekiel 11 (the glory leaves Jerusalem), Ezekiel 43 (the glory returns).

The setting is twenty-five years after the fall of Jerusalem, fourteen years after the destruction. The prophet is taken in vision to a high mountain, where a man with a measuring reed is standing in a gateway. The man takes the prophet through the new temple piece by piece, measuring as he goes: the outer wall, the outer court, the gates and chambers, the inner court, the temple building itself, the altar in front of the temple. The measurements are given in cubits with painstaking specificity.

The prophet is then shown the glory returning to fill the temple (chapter 43); the regulations for the priests, the prince, and the people in the new arrangement (chapters 44–46); the river that flows out from beneath the temple, deepening as it goes — first to the ankles, then to the knees, then to the loins, then waters to swim in, a river that cannot be crossed — and reaching the Dead Sea, which it heals, so that the salt sea is filled with fish and the trees that grow on its banks bear fruit every month and their leaves are for the healing of the nations (chapter 47).

The book closes with the redivision of the land among the twelve tribes and the renaming of the city: the name of the city from that day shall be, the Lord is there (yhwh shammah, 48:35). The Jewish tradition has read it as the future temple to be built in messianic times. The Christian tradition has read it as the church, the new heavens and new earth, or a still-future eschatological structure. What is undeniable on the page is the precision of the architecture and the strangeness of the conjunction: an extraordinarily detailed building, never built, given by God in vision to a priest in exile.

Where to follow it: Ezekiel 40 (the outer courts), Ezekiel 43 (the glory returns), Ezekiel 47 (the river from the threshold), Ezekiel 48 (the city named "The LORD Is There").