Ezekiel 1:1-28
Wheels within wheels
Four living creatures, four faces each, and wheels whose rims are full of eyes that go straight forward without turning. Above them a firmament, a throne, and the appearance of the likeness of the glory.
People of the Bible
Ezekiel
A priest who never served in a temple, given the strangest assignments in Scripture and told to carry them out without explaining.
Ezekiel is among the exiles by the river Chebar when the heavens open. He is a priest by training and thirty years old, the age a priest begins, and he is a thousand miles from the altar. What he is given is mostly performance: lie on one side for three hundred and ninety days, shave his head with a sword and divide the hair three ways, dig through a wall at evening and carry baggage out on his shoulder, and on the day his wife dies, not mourn, because the city will fall and there will be no mourning for it either.
Scroll down to the storyThe movements, in the order the text gives them.
The story of Ezekiel
- 01
- 02
Ezekiel 2:1-3:3
Eat this roll
A hand holds out a scroll written on both sides with lamentations and mourning and woe. He is told to eat it and fill his belly with it, and in his mouth it is as honey for sweetness.
- 03
Ezekiel 4:1-8
Lie on your side
A brick with a city drawn on it, an iron pan for a wall, and three hundred and ninety days on his left side and forty on his right, a day for a year.
- 04
Ezekiel 10:18-19; 11:22-23
The glory went out by the east gate
It leaves in stages. From the cherub to the threshold, then to the east gate, then it stands on the mountain east of the city. Nothing in the account is sudden.
- 05
Ezekiel 24:15-24
The desire of your eyes
He is told in the morning that his wife will die that evening and that he must not mourn. He speaks to the people in the morning, and at even she dies, and he does as he was commanded.
- 06
Ezekiel 37:1-14
Can these bones live
A valley full of bones, very many and very dry. Asked whether they can live, he answers that God knows. Then the noise, the shaking, the sinews and the skin, and only then the breath.
Why it matters
Ezekiel is the answer to the question the exiles were actually asking: whether God was left behind in a burning building. His first vision is a throne on wheels that can go in any direction without turning, and his ninth chapter shows the glory leaving the temple by the east gate, slowly, stopping twice. The last word of the book is the name of a city: the LORD is there. In between are the dry bones, the new heart, and the shepherd who goes after the one that was lost.
19 songs
The music
Every song in the catalogue whose passage falls inside these chapters.
