Ezekiel 1

APPENDIX.

What does this strange symbolism mean? No one can doubt that it was intended to convey some deep spiritual meaning to the captives in Babylon, but it is difficult for us to understand what was no doubt sufficiently plain to those whom Ezekiel addressed.

We are strangers to the stars,

And strangers to the mystic beast and bird.

1 . One is almost tempted to believe that the movements of these “high and terrible” wheels (orbits) might symbolize the activities of Nature; and that therefore this might be a picture of God enthroned in his universe, every part of which is controlled by his omnipotence, and in every motion of which may be seen the flashing of his omniscient eye. Nothing fascinated the ancient world like the study of the heavens, and all the religious thought of the Orient is filled with a celestial symbolism. Everywhere the wheel or circle was reverenced. A wheel, or sphere, with a dot in its center was the divine title ( Ra) attached to the names of all the early Pharaohs. The winged sphere (or disk) was the supreme symbol of deity in Egypt and Assyria. Over the head of one Assyrian monarch was pictured a winged sphere consisting of a central wheel and seven stars. The wheel god was well known in Egypt and Assyria, appearing to be the judge of heaven, and holding a thunderbolt in his hand. In one picture, 850 B.C., the sun god sits upon his throne, while on a table in front of him is the wheel (the sun chariot). In the Mahabharata Agni equips Vishnu with a wheel which has a nave of thunder. Under the throne of Buddha is a revolving wheel flanked by two supernatural animals. The reverence for the celestial sphere and the revolution of the heavens, which seemed to ancient thought to represent best the supreme idea of deity, led, no doubt, to the invention of the praying wheel in India, to the use of the wheel as a symbol in Egyptian temples (according to the Greeks), and to the wheel symbolism connected with religious festivals in all parts of the earth even in Europe down to the present generation. Movements like those of the modern dervishes were prescribed by Pythagoras in the very next generation to Ezekiel, who taught, according to Plutarch, that to turn round was the highest act of adoration, representing the rotary motion of the universe. The very word universe suggests the common ancient thought. The Rig Veda contains the following suggestive remark: “The seven yoke the chariot to the only wheel; an only courser with a sevenfold name moves the triple-named everlasting wheel, that nothing can arrest, on which repose all beings” (ii, 126). The living creatures may also have a zodiacal significance, since among the Chaldeans, Assyrians, and other ancient nations, the celestial luminaries were pictured under living forms and special reverence was paid to the four cardinal points and their symbolic animal representatives. (See particularly John Oneil’s Night of the Gods, vol. ii). Much more might be added as, for example, that the “firmament” in every other place in Scripture refers to the heavens but sufficient has been given to make it possible that Ezekiel here meant to picture the throbbing universe, moving majestically onward, “wheel within wheel,” as Jehovah’s throne, and he himself immanent in all the activities of nature.

Up and down

Runs arrowy fire, while earthly forms combine

To throb the secret forth; a touch divine

And the scaled eyeball owns the mystic rod;

Visibly through the garden walketh God.

Yet could it be possible that twenty-five hundred years before the birth of Browning his deepest philosophy could have been grasped by this ancient transcendentalist?

2 . Or is it not more probable that a Hebrew prophet, instead of attempting to picture a universe filled with deity

All changes at his instantaneous will

Not by the operation of a law

Whose maker is elsewhere, at other work

might only have intended to declare that all life, in earth and heaven and Sheol, had its source and being and continuance in the One the “spirit of life?” This was an idea peculiarly attractive to the Hebrew. From the opening leaf of the primitive story of creation down to the last letter of the last living apostle, it is, over and over, emphasized that God is life; he alone has “life in himself,” and “in him all things live, and move, and have their being.” It is a great conception, and if one notes the particularity with which the prophet declares that these are “living creatures,” and repeats again and again that the “spirit of life” is in the wheels, he may not be unprepared to believe that this was a vision of life: all life permeated and thrilled and upheld by the life of God. It was something that the captives in Babylon needed to know that not in Jerusalem alone, and not the children of Abraham only, but all life, everywhere, was controlled by the living One.

He glows above

With scarce an intervention, presses close

And palpitatingly his soul o’er ours:

We feel him, nor by painful reason know.

There is a curious correspondence between the latest philosophic poesy and Ezekiel’s vision. The real nearness of God to all life was never more vividly expressed.

3 . At least one other attractive explanation of this symbolism is offered by modern cuneiform study. In Persia the flashing globe of the sun was the emblem of Ormuzd, and a golden eagle led Persian troops to victory, while in Assyria the eagle was the special symbol of the great national god Assur, and in Babylon the symbol and messenger of Shamash, the god of life. The underworld, according to Babylonian and Assyrian and Egyptian conceptions, was peopled with horrible winged monsters with animal heads. In one Babylonian picture of Hades well known in Ezekiel’s day seven demons with animal heads (bulls, lions, etc.) support on their shoulders the seat of the gods. The chief god of the underworld, Nergal, was most commonly pictured with the face of a lion, while Marduk, who could restore the dead to life, was symbolized by a bull (ox). The bull, the lion, and the eagle sometimes appear in combination in Babylonian pictures. On one Babylonian seal a god is represented sitting on a throne which is supported by four winged man-headed bulls or cherubim. In Phoenicia, a country thoroughly well known both to the Hebrews and Babylonians, death also was personified as a lion, and this figure is constantly found on the sepulchral monuments in Phrygia, Mycenae, Lycia, Cyprus, etc. In Egypt, a land equally well known, Ra was symbolized by a bull, while Set was represented as a lion with an eagle head. (For the ancient conception of the underworld see Jeremias’s Die Babylonisch-Assy. Vorstel-lungen vom Leben nach dem Tode, 1887; many articles Journal of Hellenic Studies; and Jastrow, Bab. Assy. Rel., 1898.) Eagle-winged and human-headed lions with the body and horns of bulls stood guard at the entrance of temples in all the great cities of Babylon, and were supposed also to guard the entrance to the land of the dead. The whole earth shuddered with fear as the wise men of these greatest capitals of the earth pictured the perils of the journey into the future world and the awful forms of the gods who alone could deliver and now a Hebrew prophet takes up his pen to picture his God, and behold, his God is human! And these symbolic creatures of the earth and the heaven and the underworld, before whom the kings of Babylon and of Egypt bow in abject fear, covering their bodies with amulets in order to escape from them, lo, these are all seen to be the servants of the great Jehovah; implicitly obeying him, humbly honoring him! Marduk and Nergal, with all their subordinates, life and death, the superhuman powers of the earth, the upper heaven and the underworld, the powers of the present and the powers controlling the future are all pictured as servants of the one Lord of life! Surely the Hebrew believer tempted because of the Babylonian civilization to believe also in its divinities needed some such sublime picture as this to save him from the fascinating idolatry which controlled the wealth and fashion of the world’s most famous capital. Israel was always prone to yield herself even to the coarse worship of her less aristocratic neighbors; would she not have been more ready to accept the subtle and gorgeous worship of Babylon, to which was ascribed all the glory and power of the empire especially as all the temporal interests of these new settlers suggested this as the highest business policy? What saved them from it? There can be no doubt that Ezekiel’s vision of Jehovah triumphing above all the gods of the heathen contributed much to this.

They went into captivity as idolaters; they came out of captivity ready to die for their great faith in the all-powerfulness of the one God. From that day until now the Hebrew nation has been able to sing:

Lord, on thee Eternity has its foundation; all

Spring forth from thee of light, joy, harmony,

Sole origin all life, all beauty, thine.

Thy word created all, and doth create;

Thy splendor fills all space with rays divine.

Derzhaven.