As we begin the 13th book of the Hebrew Bible on this @belowthebiblebelt929 journey I am no longer surprised by the ways the sequence of daily chapters echoes my personal reality, maybe yours too, as well as our news headlines. Call it what you want - serendipity or fate - life and literature are inexplicably intertwined. It seems particularly auspicious as we begin this book of prophetic visions considered as the cornerstone of Jewish mystical traditions.
Perhaps the very awareness of obvious and more subtle links between past and present is the purpose of this project. In the middle of this cruel heartbreaking war between Hamas and Israel this continued study gives me, perhaps some of you, a brief respite from the newest horror, and also offers helpful perspectives not only for how we got here - but what may help us find paths, in the distance, towards better days.
Today we meet Ezekiel, son of Buzi, a Judean priest turned psychedelic prophet, living as an exiled refugee on the rivers of Babylon. The first sentence of the book ascribed to him, whether he wrote it or not, points precisely where and when his story begins.
Ezekiel lived in a region on the banks of the Babylonian rivers, known as Tel Abib - sometimes translated as ‘the hill of spring’, more likely referencing a site of generational accumulation of cultural layers. The modern Israeli city where I now sit and write these words was renamed Tel Aviv shortly after its founding in 1910. The name was borrowed not directly from the Bible but through the Hebrew translation of the title of Theodor Herzl’s 1902 novel Altneuland "Old New Land".
The translator, N. Sokolow chose to adopt the name of the Mesopotamian mentioned by Ezekiel. When it came to name this new city on the shores of the Mediterranean, Tel Aviv was chosen since it “embraced the idea of a renaissance in the ancient Jewish homeland. Aviv is a Hebrew word that can be translated as "spring", symbolizing renewal, and tell (or tel) is an artificial mound created over centuries through the accumulation of successive layers of civilization built one over the other and symbolizing the ancient.”
Ezekiel is even more specific about his location as the book begins:
וַיְהִ֣י ׀ בִּשְׁלֹשִׁ֣ים שָׁנָ֗ה בָּֽרְבִיעִי֙ בַּחֲמִשָּׁ֣ה לַחֹ֔דֶשׁ וַאֲנִ֥י בְתֽוֹךְ־הַגּוֹלָ֖ה עַל־נְהַר־כְּבָ֑ר נִפְתְּחוּ֙ הַשָּׁמַ֔יִם וָאֶרְאֶ֖ה מַרְא֥וֹת אֱלֹהִֽים׃
In the thirtieth year, on the fifth day of the fourth month, when I was among the exiles by the Chebar Canal, the heavens opened and I saw visions of God.
Ezekiel 1:1
The "thirtieth year" is most likely the man’s age - counted in the context of the years he has already spent in exile - five years of being deported from Jerusalem, alongside Judah's king Jehoiachin in 598 BCE. On the basis of dates described in this book, Ezekiel’s span of prophecies is calculated to have occurred over the course of about 22 years, starting in 593 BCE.
The location is likewise specific - and significant. As Dr. Laurie Pearce writes in this essay - required reading to get the context of this book,
“…the seemingly inconsequential location at which the divine word was made manifest to the prophet..aims to locate the prophet Ezekiel in the social, economic, and intellectual contexts of the communities of Judean exiles in sixth-fifth century BCE Mesopotamia...The land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the waters of Babylon, —both the springtime floods and the controlled flow coursing through canals and irrigation ditches — sustained great empires of the ancient world, the fabled kingdoms of Nebuchadnezzar, Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes.
The sweet waters which supported agriculture and urban life also absorbed the bitter tears of exiled Judeans as they sang, prompted by their captors, of their homeland (Psalm 137:1-2):
“By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept when we remembered Zion.”
One of those waterways in particular, the river Chebar was the locus at which Ezekiel’s mission began.
The Chebar canal is the Nār Kabari that appears in legal and administrative cuneiform texts of the sixth century BCE... Its course can no longer be traced with certainty, yet it is generally agreed that it flowed from the area around Babylon eastward toward Susa, connecting small settlements and major towns in the Mesopotamian countryside..
The waterway’s role as a commercial route is not in doubt, and as members of native and deportee populations traveled along it, they shared and transmitted Mesopotamian intellectual and cultural achievements.”
But the time and place of Ezekiel’s physical location is but the launching pad to what this book is really about -- the transcendence of both time and space. On one level, this is a book about cross-cultural identity, as Dr. Pearce explains
“this biblical book is marked by the densest concentration of evidence of cross-cultural contact and influence; the number of loanwords and literary motifs rooted in the Babylonian language is staggering... Across the network of rivers and canals that watered Babylonia, many languages and peoples came together. Whether native to the region, or resettled there involuntarily, these peoples interacted in an environment in which social and economic institutions supported varying levels of acculturation and cultural integration. Ezekiel, and the book that bears his name, provides a distinctive opportunity to explore the varieties and means of expressing these processes.”
But Ezekiel is not only about going beyond tribal affinities.
The Main contribution he will become famous for is the staggering amount of mystical and supernatural information with which he begins to build the edifice of Jewish mystical tradition- the Kabbalah. Marvin Sweeney comments in The Jewish Study Bible, that Ezekiel includes
“most theologically challenging and dynamic material among the prophets of the Bible, and some of the most difficult and bizarre passages.”
The ‘visions of God’ that Ezekiel describes, beginning right in our chapter, include some of the most colorful and powerful images of divine realities, angelic creatures, and the very essence of what God is about.
It includes new words that may be borrowed from the Babylonian and nowadays essential Hebrew terms. Words like ‘Chashmal’ - translated as ‘Electricity’, or ‘Merkava’ - the Chariot that is the name of an entire corpus of speculative literature, from the Bible to William Blake and many more -- spanning centuries and languages in attempts to map the cosmic consciousness. The final verse of this chapter is a dramatic set up for Ezekiel’s first official vision, and he begins big, describing in poetic prose the figure that he sees beyond the chariot of four-faced creatures and the divine throne:
כְּמַרְאֵ֣ה הַקֶּ֡שֶׁת אֲשֶׁר֩ יִהְיֶ֨ה בֶעָנָ֜ן בְּי֣וֹם הַגֶּ֗שֶׁם כֵּ֣ן מַרְאֵ֤ה הַנֹּ֙גַהּ֙ סָבִ֔יב ה֕וּא מַרְאֵ֖ה דְּמ֣וּת כְּבוֹד־יְהֹוָ֑ה וָֽאֶרְאֶה֙ וָאֶפֹּ֣ל עַל־פָּנַ֔י וָאֶשְׁמַ֖ע ק֥וֹל מְדַבֵּֽר׃ {פ}