“Hey up, there!” he called. “Hey up, there!”
Just as the cattle began to move, a shadow fell across them, and Ezekiel, who’d forgotten the strange bank of cloud, again craned his head back and stared up at the sky.
How strange!
The cloud had completely stopped, it hung motionless in the sky above him, and from its dark edges sparks appeared.
He shaded his eyes with his hand to see better. But no, it wasn’t lightning, it was flame.
The cloud was burning!
His heart began to beat faster. The cloud was burning, and within the fire there was a flash as of shining metal.
There was something there.
With eyes agog he saw four figures come into sight in the flames. They resembled human beings, but each of them had four faces and four wings. Their feet were straight. Their soles looked like calves’ hooves. They shone like burnished bronze. Under each of their wings they had human hands.
He was more terrified than he’d ever been before. But he didn’t run away. He didn’t shut his eyes. He just kept looking at the fantastic creatures that hung in the sky, perhaps fifty feet above him.
And at their wheels. For beneath them glided four enormous wheels. They spun slowly around while the creatures hung quite motionless. Each upper pair of wings was spread wide so that each creature touched the next, while the other pair of wings covered their bodies.
It wasn’t the cloud that was burning, but them.
Suddenly, without warning, they began to drop toward him. Their wings remained motionless, it was as if they glided through the air, slow and soft as falling leaves, but not passively or accidentally, because there was also something hard about them, something inhumanly hard. They were pitiless in the way predators are pitiless.
Then they landed.
They had the face of a man in front, the face of a lion on the right, the face of an ox on the left, and that of an eagle at the back. The wheels, which followed the slightest movement they made, now stood motionless at their side. They were covered in eyes. And their wings, too, were full of eyes.
Ezekiel’s stomach contracted as if in cramp, and unable to prevent himself, he stooped forward and vomited.
When he looked, up they were moving toward him.
The appearance of the creatures was as if fire from burning coals or torches were darting to and fro among them; the fire was radiant, and out of the fire came lightning, he was later to write. I heard, too, the noise of their wings; when they moved it was like the noise of a great torrent or of a cloudburst, like the noise of a crowd or of an armed camp.
Many would have fled in panic at the sight of these fiery beings walking along the riverbank, or at least would have fallen on their faces and pressed them to the ground, as is the norm with such revelations in the Bible, but not Ezekiel. In spite of his fear he remained standing, with sufficient presence of mind to be able, later, to describe their appearance and the way they moved with more detail and precision than anyone before or since. And perhaps this was precisely why Ezekiel became God’s chosen one. At least he was that day. The cherubim’s appearance in the sky above the River Kebar was a prelude to the Lord’s own coming. But it was a long time before he understood that. The sight of the four creatures, which at first hung unmoving in the air above him and then came walking toward him along the bank, was so awe-inspiring that he could think of nothing else. The hooves that barely pressed the sand as they stepped, the flames that rose from them, almost invisible in the clear air, the outstretched wings. The wheels rolling beside them.
They came toward him, and his heart trembled.
There was a rumble from the sky.
The four creatures halted and lowered their wings. Ezekiel raised his eyes, and discovered a vault. It was like crystal, arching high above their heads. Over the vault was a sapphire in the shape of a throne, and on the throne was a figure.
It was like a man’s in outline, but also not, because from what appeared to be his hips upward, Ezekiel clearly saw what looked like shining metal, and from these seeming hips downward, he saw something that resembled fire, encircled with radiance. Like a rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day was the sight of that encircling radiance, he would describe it.
Only then did he fall down with his face to the earth. He lay there for what seemed like an eternity, paralyzed with fear for what was to come.
Then a voice sounded.
“Man!” it said. “Raise yourself, I wish to speak to you!”
The next moment, without any volition on his part, Ezekiel found himself on his feet, and with head bowed stood listening to what the voice said to him.
“Man, I am sending you to the Israelites, those rebels that have risen up against me. Both they and their fathers have been faithless toward me right up to this moment. To these people of impudent countenance and hard heart I send you, and you shall say to them: This is what the Lord says. And either they will listen to you or not — for they are rebels — then they will understand that a prophet has come among them. But you, man, shall not be afraid of them, and do not be intimidated by what they say, though they surround you like nettles and thorns, and you are living among scorpions.”
Ezekiel wrote not a word about how he experienced what he saw, what went through his head as he stood there, what thoughts filled him. But it isn’t unreasonable to assume that he was still frightened. On the sand a few yards away were four burning angels with lowered wings, each had an enormous wheel full of eyes by its side, and in the gaping sky above them the Lord showed himself in all his pomp, sitting on a throne of sapphire, and he, too, was aflame. The great light of the revelation must have wiped out all the details of the landscape in the immediate vicinity, and then gradually diminished in strength, until a little way away it was completely dissolved in daylight, and this, the fact that he found himself in the heart of the divine, even as life carried on in its normal rhythm just a few hundred yards away, where the herd of cows sauntered slowly along the bank of the river and swarms of insects rose and fell above the sparkling water, and the sandbank that stretched out into the river, blanched in the bright sunshine, was full of twittering birds, must have caused him to feel pleasure as he stood there. It was to him the Lord showed himself, it was to him the Lord spoke.
“Don’t be afraid of what they say, don’t fear them!” the voice went on. “For they are rebels. You shall speak my words to them whether they want to hear or not, for they are defiant. But you, man, hear what I say to you! Don’t be rebellious like this race!”
Then something strange occurred.
“Open your mouth and eat what I give you!”
Ezekiel looked up and caught sight of a hand reaching out toward him. The hand held a scroll. When it was opened, Ezekiel saw that it was covered in writing both on the inside and the outside. When he looked closer, he saw that they were dirges and laments and words of woe. God’s dirges. God’s laments. God’s words of woe.
“Man, eat what you find here!” said the Lord. “Eat this scroll! Go and speak to the Israelites!”
Ezekiel opened his mouth.
“Man!” he said. “Fill yourself and your intestines with this scroll that I give you.”