A Throne Appears Where the Captives Are

The Chebar was not a river but a large irrigation canal near Nippur in southern Mesopotamia; Babylonian business tablets of the next century name it the nar Kabari. “Visions of God” recurs at 8:3 and 40:2, marking the book’s three great visions. “The heavens were opened” returns at the Jordan in Matthew 3:16.

The fifth year of Jehoiachin’s captivity is 593 BC, and the fourth month is midsummer. Ezekiel dates by the exiled king, not by Zedekiah reigning in Jerusalem, and every later date in the book counts from the same deportation. For the exiles, the captive in Babylon was still the king.

“Expressly” renders a doubled Hebrew verb, the word came, truly came. Ezekiel means God strengthens, or God makes hard, and the verb returns when God tells him “I have made thy face strong against their faces” (3:8). As a priest he could only serve in Jerusalem’s temple, hundreds of miles away.

The north was the direction from which Jeremiah said disaster would come (Jeremiah 1:14). “Amber” renders chashmal, a word found only in Ezekiel, of uncertain meaning; the Greek took it as electrum, a gleaming gold and silver alloy. Modern Hebrew borrowed chashmal for electricity.

“Living creatures” is chayyot, the ordinary Hebrew word for animals, used of the beasts of the field in Genesis 1:24–25. The first thing said of their shape is that it is human, upright, before any wings or faces are described. Everything strange about them is added to a human outline.

Isaiah’s seraphim have six wings and are not said to have more than one face (Isaiah 6:2). Ezekiel’s creatures have four of each, four being the number of the compass. Their faces are counted before they are described, so the reader meets the number before the shapes.

“Straight feet” means straight legs, without a bending knee; they do not kneel or sit. The Talmud (Berakhot 10b) takes this verse as the reason for standing with the feet together during the central Jewish prayer, in imitation of the angels. A calf’s rounded hoof has no front or back.

The hands matter later. In 10:7 a cherub stretches out his hand from between the cherubim, takes fire, and puts it into the hands of the man clothed in linen. Beings otherwise so strange can act as a man acts, taking and giving, with human hands under their wings.

With the four creatures set in a square, wingtips touching, and each creature having a face on every side, some face always looks the way the whole company is going. That is why no one needs to turn. The phrase “they turned not when they went” comes three times in the chapter (verses 9, 12 and 17).

A rabbinic reading (Talmud, Hagigah 13b) took the four faces as the proudest of creatures: man over all, the lion over wild beasts, the ox over cattle, the eagle over birds. Irenaeus and Jerome assigned them to the four Gospels. In 10:14 the ox is replaced by “the face of a cherub”.

“Stretched upward” is literally separated from above: the wings parted at the top. Two wings covered the body, as Isaiah’s seraphim covered their faces and their feet before the throne (Isaiah 6:2). Even these creatures cover themselves in that presence.

“The spirit” is ruach, which also means wind and breath, and the whole vision began with a ruach of storm in verse 4, “a whirlwind”. The creatures move as the ruach moves. The same word will lift Ezekiel himself and set him on his feet in 2:2 and 3:12.

“Lamps” are lappidim, torches, the word for Gideon’s torches hidden in jars (Judges 7:16) and for the burning torch that passed between Abraham’s divided animals (Genesis 15:17). In 10:2 the man clothed in linen fills his hands with coals from between the cherubim and scatters them over Jerusalem.

The word rendered “flash of lightning” is bazaq, which occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible; the usual word for lightning, baraq, appeared in verse 13. “Ran and returned” pictures darting there and back, too fast for the eye to follow.

“Wheel” is ophan, and later Jewish writings made the ophanim a whole order of angels on the strength of this chapter, ranked with the cherubim and seraphim. Each creature has its wheel on the ground beside it, and the wheel too has “four faces”, four sides.

“Beryl” renders tarshish, a gemstone perhaps named after the distant port Jonah sailed for, and probably a yellow or golden stone such as chrysolite. It was set in the fourth row of the high priest’s breastplate (Exodus 28:20). The wheels gleam like jewels, not like timber.

“Their four sides” is literally their four quarters, the four directions. The wheels can go any way without swinging round. The same mobility becomes ominous later, when the glory rises from the temple and moves east (10:19; 11:23), because a throne on wheels can leave.

“Rings” are the rims of the wheels. “Eyes” is ayin, and the same word is translated “colour” in verses 4, 7, 16, 22 and 27, since it can mean a gleam or sparkle. The rims may be studded with points of light, or with eyes; in 10:12 the cherubim’s whole bodies are full of eyes.

The whole assembly can leave the ground. It is not a road vehicle but something that rises, and in 3:12–14 Ezekiel himself is lifted up by the spirit and hears the rushing sound behind him. Wheels that go up as well as along are part of what makes the thing impossible to draw.

“The living creature” is singular in Hebrew, though there are four of them: “the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels.” The four are treated as one being, and 10:15 and 10:20 speak the same way, “This is the living creature that I saw”.

Rabbinic tradition named this whole vision the Merkavah, the chariot, from 1 Chronicles 28:18, “the chariot of the cherubims”, though Ezekiel never uses that word. The Mishnah (Hagigah 2:1) forbade teaching it except to one student at a time, and only one who already understood of himself.

“Firmament” is raqia, the same word as the expanse God made on the second day of creation (Genesis 1:6–8). Here it is a platform over the creatures’ heads. The word for “crystal” can also mean ice, and “terrible” means awe-inspiring: something clear and bright enough to frighten.

In Solomon’s temple two great carved cherubim stood in the most holy place with wings outstretched, touching one another in the middle and the walls on either side (1 Kings 6:27). Ezekiel was a priest and knew that arrangement. He is seeing its living original, wings touching, far from the building.

“The noise of great waters” comes back in 43:2, when the glory returns to the new temple: “his voice was like a noise of many waters.” “The Almighty” is Shaddai. “The voice of speech” renders a rare word for a roaring tumult, the noise of a crowd.

The voice is not yet quoted. The chapter closes on a voice heard but not given, and the first words are held back until 2:1, “Son of man”. The creatures fall silent and lower their wings before it, which is the only point in the vision where they are still.

When Moses and the elders went up Sinai they saw under the feet of the God of Israel “a paved work of a sapphire stone” (Exodus 24:10). “Sapphire” is lapis lazuli, deep blue. The figure on the throne has “the appearance of a man”, adam, the word from which Adam takes his name.

Chashmal, the unexplained “amber” of verse 4, returns at the centre of the vision. The division at the loins, fire above and fire below, is repeated almost word for word in 8:2, where the same figure takes Ezekiel by a lock of his hair.

“The bow that is in the cloud” is the phrase of Genesis 9:13, “I do set my bow in the cloud”, the sign of God’s covenant with every living thing after the flood. This is the first of several times Ezekiel falls on his face (3:23; 9:8; 11:13; 43:3); the spirit will set him on his feet in 2:2.