Ezekiel’s Wheels

“When I was thirty years old and living among the exiles by the Kebar River, on the fifth day of
the fourth month, the heavens opened and I had visions of God.”

Thus opens the first chapter of the book of Ezekiel in the Bible.

I’m in the final stages of getting The Inclusive Bible ready for the publisher. The whole thing was
already published, in four volumes, between 1994 and 2004. First came the New Testament
writings, then the three volumes of Hebrew scripture: the Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings.
(We published the Psalms separately as well). This version is a single-volume edition, which has
necessitated a complete reformatting of the book, and as I’m the book’s translator and scholarly
commentator as well as its designer, I took the opportunity to revisit some of the footnotes.

Ezekiel has always fascinated me. Clearly, he’s fascinated others as well. A gifted writer and poet
and dear friend, Adam Tritt, has written an excellent short story, “Ezekiel’s Wheel,” originally
published in 2002 in the CrossTIME Science Fiction Anthology. His story, which was one of the
winners of the 2001 Paul B. Duquette Memorial Short Science Fiction Contest, is about a Jewish
eighth grade teacher . . . and Adam’s a Jewish eighth grade teacher . . . hmmm . . . who actually
builds the wheels as Ezekiel describes them in his vision, with unexpected results. You can read
the full story here.

The Talmud says, in one famous passage, “The story of creation should not be expounded before
two persons, nor the chapter on the
Chariot before even one, unless that
person is a sage and already has an
independent understanding of the
matter.” This vision has stood as the
central image of Jewish mysticism for a
good twenty-one centuries; “merkabah
mysticism” (which relates to the throne
of God and the Chariot, or merkabah,
that bears it) found its greatest voice
during the Middle Ages and strongly
influenced the development of the
Kabbalah. Biblical scholars have long
felt that this chapter is among the most
difficult to translate in the entire Bible;
the text abounds in obscurities and apparent confusion.

In re-reading my translation and its footnotes, I thought it might provoke some interesting
discussion here, so here’s your Bible lesson for the day. Or month, or year.

The opening verses continue: “On the fifth day of the month—it was the fifth year of exile for
Jehoiachin the ruler—the word of YHWH came to the priest Ezekiel ben-Buzi, in the land of the
Chaldeans by the Kebar River. It was there that YHWH’s hand rested on me.” (The Kebar
“River” was the Nari Kabari, or Great Canal, an irrigation canal that left the Euphrates above
Babylon and flowed southeast before rejoining the Euphrates.)

“In my vision I saw a vast desert storm, a whirlwind coming down from the north—a huge cloud
surrounded by a brilliant light, with fire flashing out of it. The center of the cloud—the center of
the fire—looked like electricity.”

The Hebrew word here is hashmal, which is the modern Hebrew word for electricity. The ancient
Hebrew word, however, may refer to an amber-colored, naturally occurring alloy of silver, gold,
and copper called electrum, known for its high reflectability and electrical conductivity; or it
could refer to amber, the resin gum of prehistoric pine trees, known from antiquity to have
electrical properties when rubbed—indeed, the word “electricity” is derived from the elektron,
the Greek word for amber.

The Jewish mystical tradition found hashmal a powerful concept. A passage in the Talmud says
that hashmal may be interpreted as “speech without sound” or “speaking silence,” or may be
viewed as a sort of acronym for the phrase “living creatures speaking fire” in Hebrew. Another
passage cites the story of a child “who was reading at the home of a teacher, and suddenly
apprehended what hashmal was, whereupon a fire went forth from hashmal and consumed the
child” as the reason some rabbis sought to conceal or suppress the book of Ezekiel.

Now things get really interesting. “Within the fire

I saw what looked like four living creatures in
human form. Each had four faces and four wings.
Their legs stood together rigidly as if they had a
single straight leg, the bottom of which was
rounded like a single calf’s foot, and the legs
gleamed like glowing bronze. They had human
hands under their wings on all four sides. And all
four figures had faces and wings, and the wings
touched one another. They did not turn when they
moved—each went straight ahead, any direction
that it faced. Each of the four had a human face, a
lion’s face to the right, a bull’s face to the left, and
an eagle’s face—thus were their faces.”

If Ezekiel’s description of the living creatures seems confusing to us, it may be that the vision
was confusing to him as well. Though the term “living creatures” is feminine in the Hebrew,
Ezekiel frequently employs masculine suffixes and verb agreements; this may indicate the
difficulty Ezekiel had in describing the creatures’ androgyny—or even what they looked like.
They clearly resemble the terrifying and gigantic Assyrian or Akkadian kabiru or winged
sphynxes (in Hebrew, cherubim) in many details: they usually had a human head or torso, the
wings of an eagle, the forelegs of a lion, and the hindquarters of a bull.

The number four—four faces, four wings, four creatures—symbolizes the four directions, that is,
the omnipresence of divinity in the world and nature. These four may represent the four main
“tribes” of land creatures: humankind, birds, wild animals, and domestic animals.
 “Their wings spread upward; two of their wings touched the wings on the
figures on either side of it, and two of their wings covered their bodies. They
moved straight ahead, any direction they faced; whichever way the wind blew,
they went, without turning as they moved. In the midst of these living creatures
was a fiery glow like burning coals, or like torches moving back and forth between them—it was
a bright fire, and lightning flashed forth from it. The creatures sped to and fro like thunderbolts.”
(This last phrase could be translated,“kept disappearing and reappearing like lightning flashes.”)

“As I looked at the living creatures, I saw four wheels on the ground, one beside each creature.
The wheels glistened as if made of chrysolite. Each of the four identical wheels held a second
wheel intersecting it at right angles, giving the wheel the ability to move in any of the four
directions that the creatures faced without turning as it moved. The wheels were enormous, and
they were terrifying because the rims were covered all over with eyes.

“When the living creatures moved, the wheels beside them moved; and when the living creatures
lifted from the ground, the wheels lifted. Wherever the wind moved, they would move, and the
wheels moved as well, because the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels. When the
beings moved, the wheels moved; when they stopped, the wheels stopped. And when they rose
from the ground, the wheels rose up as well, for the spirit of the living creatures was in the
wheels.”

In Hebrew, ruach means wind, spirit, or even breath; it is the animating and life-giving principle,
the creative and healing activity of God that bridges the gap between the divine and the human; it
is both kinetic energy and the spark of life.

“Over the heads of the living creatures was something like an expanse that glistened like a sheet
of ice. Under this vault-like structure, their wings spread out toward one another, and each had a
pair of wings covering its body. When the creatures moved, their wings made a noise like the roar
of rushing waters, like the voice of the Breasted God, like the din of a moving army, and a Voice
came from above the expanse over their heads. When they stood still, they lowered their wings.”

What? “Breasted God”?? Yes, very possibly. The name El Shaddai is usually translated “the
Almighty,” under the assumption that it derives either from the word shadad, which means
“burly” or “powerful,” or from shadah, which means “mountain,” making the name mean “God
of the mountains.” There is growing opinion from serious biblical scholars, however, that
Shaddai may derive from the word shad, which means “breast”—thus El Shaddai may be a
feminine image of God meaning “the Breasted God.” Then again, since mountains are frequently
shaped like breasts, these two interpretations are not mutually exclusive.

“Above the vault over their heads there appeared what looked a throne of sapphire, and high
above on the throne sat a figure in the likeness of a human being. From the waist up, the figure
looked like electricity, like metal glowing in a furnace;
and from the waist down, it looked like fire surrounded by
a brilliant light. The radiance was like the appearance of a
rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day. It looked like the
appearance of the Glory of YHWH. When I saw it, I fell
on my face, and heard a Voice speaking to me.”
An appropriate response indeed.

Most of the depictions of Ezekiel’s vision, at least in the contemporary era, are strongly UFO-
centric, or else completely abstract. Before the twentieth century, artists like Raphael and
William Blake emphasized clouds and a feeling of rapture. In 1973 the late Josef Blumrich, a
NASA engineer who worked on the Saturn 5 rocket, the lunar lander, and Skylab, wrote a book
called The Spaceships of Ezekiel. He felt that Ezekiel’s description of the Chariot of God as a
spacecraft would fail under a rocket engineer’s rigorous examination, but said that it could be
adapted into a practical design for a landing module launched from a mothership.

This explanation doesn’t thrill me. What I hear is in Ezekiel’s words is the experience of power
and awe. The intersecting wheels don’t impress me as much as the terrifying eyes that covered
their rims.