The priest in exile who saw the glory leave the temple
Ezekiel is a priest who was supposed to serve in Jerusalem and never got the chance. He was deported to Babylon in 597 BC with the second wave of exiles, alongside King Jehoiachin. The temple was still standing at the start of his ministry. By the end it was rubble. The book that bears his name is one of the strangest in the canon — visions of impossible creatures, prophetic street theatre, an architectural specification for a temple that has not yet been built, and a refrain that punctuates every section: *then they will know that I am the LORD.*
The opening vision (Ezekiel 1) is the most disorienting theophany in the Hebrew Bible. By the river Chebar in Babylon, the heavens open. Four living creatures appear with four faces each — human, lion, ox, eagle — and wheels within wheels covered in eyes. Above them is a crystal expanse, and above the expanse a sapphire throne, and on the throne *the likeness of a likeness of a human form* (Ezekiel 1:26). Ezekiel falls on his face. The Hebrew is deliberately careful — Ezekiel is naming, by indirection, what cannot be named directly. The early church reads the four creatures as the four Gospels: Matthew the human, Mark the lion, Luke the ox, John the eagle. The patristic identification is partly play, partly serious — the same throne-room Ezekiel saw will appear again in Revelation 4 with the same four creatures still attending.
The central trauma of the book is the departure of the *kabod* — the glory of the LORD — from the temple. In a vision Ezekiel is taken to Jerusalem and shown the abominations the priests are practicing in the inner courts (Ezekiel 8). Then the glory begins to move. It rises off the cherubim above the ark. It pauses at the threshold of the temple. It moves to the east gate. Finally it ascends from the city and rests on the mountain east of Jerusalem — the Mount of Olives (Ezekiel 11:23). The temple is left empty. The siege that destroys the building in 586 BC destroys only stone — the glory was already gone.
The Christian reading has not been able to read past Ezekiel's geography of the departing glory. The Mount of Olives is the same hill from which Christ ascends in Acts 1, and the same hill Zechariah names as the place the LORD's feet will stand in the day of the LORD (Zechariah 14:4). The Christ who weeps over Jerusalem on the western slope of that hill (Luke 19:41) is reading Ezekiel as the geography of his own ministry — the glory left, and the glory is returning.
The valley of dry bones (Ezekiel 37) is the most quoted hope-passage in Christian preaching. The LORD asks Ezekiel: "Can these bones live?" Ezekiel answers, "O LORD God, you know." Then the LORD speaks through the prophet — bones come together, sinews appear, flesh covers them, but they are still corpses. Then the *ruach* — breath, wind, spirit, the same Hebrew word — is summoned. The corpses stand on their feet, a vast army. The vision is, in its original context, a promise to exiled Israel: the nation that looks dead will be raised. The Christian church has from the patristic period also read it as the resurrection vision tout court — bones will live again, because the LORD's *ruach* is the same Spirit who raised Christ.
The second half of Ezekiel (chapters 40–48) is the architectural blueprint for a temple that was never built. The dimensions are precise. The priestly regulations are restored. A river flows out from under the threshold of the temple, deepening as it goes, healing the Dead Sea, lined on both banks with trees whose leaves are for the healing of the nations (Ezekiel 47:1–12). The book of Revelation closes with the same river — flowing from the throne of God and the Lamb, with the tree of life on its banks, its leaves for the healing of the nations (Revelation 22:1–2). The Christian reading has held Ezekiel 40–48 as a vision the second temple did not fulfill, and the heavenly Jerusalem will.
Ezekiel's vocation is also one of the most physically punishing. He lies on his side for three hundred and ninety days as a sign-act. He shaves his head and beard and divides the hair as judgment. He is forbidden to mourn his wife when she dies suddenly ("the delight of your eyes," 24:16) as a sign to the people of how exile will leave them. The book gives the prophet's life as a long parable acted out in his body.
Related entries: Heavenly Temple Naos, Mount of Olives, New Jerusalem