Ezekiel is surely the strangest of all the prophets. Well before the appearance of the so-called writing prophets in the middle of the eighth century B.C.E., figures known as prophets, neviʾim, at least as they are represented in the narratives, were identified as people given to ecstatic states when they were inhabited by the divine spirit. All of the prophets appear to have felt that they heard God speaking, the speech sometimes accompanied by visual revelations, in what would have amounted to paranormal experiences. Prophets were sometimes perceived as altogether transgressing the borders of sanity. “The prophet is witless, / the man of spirit crazed,” Hosea proclaims, having in mind the way Israel’s waywardness had driven the prophet to wild distraction. Yet even against this background, Ezekiel is an extreme case.
He was a Jerusalem priest, in all likelihood part of the group of an exiled elite that was deported to Babylonia with King Jehoiachin in 597 B.C.E., a decade before the destruction of Jerusalem and the more general exile. His entire activity as a prophet took place in Babylonia, with many of the prophecies introduced by a careful notation of day, month, and year. (Although biblical scholars, as they are wont to do, once sought to ascribe many of these prophecies to a later period, the current consensus is that they were in fact composed by Ezekiel, probably on the dates he cites, but of course the editing could have been done considerably later.) Unlike Jeremiah, who was also from a family of priests, Ezekiel often exhibits distinctively priestly concerns—with purity and impurity, with the Temple and its architectural configurations, and with the regimen of sacrifices. But what most distinguishes Ezekiel is that so much of the prophesying is conducted in a condition that looks like God-intoxicated derangement. He is by no means a master of literary craft, like Isaiah, and most of his prophecies are composed in prose that exhibits a weakness for repetition. His power as a prophet stems from the hallucinatory vividness and utter originality of his visions.
The book begins with the grand theatrical effect of his vision of the divine chariot—fire flashing, radiance all around, the face of a different living creature on each of the four sides of a dazzling structure with mysterious wheels beneath that appears to hover in the air. Elsewhere in the Bible, “the glory of the LORD” designates an overpowering radiant manifestation of God’s presence, but we are told that it cannot really be seen. When Moses asks God to show him His glory, God tells him that he cannot look upon it head-on but, hidden in the crevice of a rock, may glimpse only its afterglow as it passes by. Ezekiel, by contrast, is vouchsafed a full and detailed vision of the divine apparatus, which he calls “the glory of the LORD.” There is nothing quite like this elsewhere in the Bible, and Ezekiel’s first chapter would accordingly become the inspiration for the development of Jewish mysticism in Late Antiquity.
There are quite a few arresting visions in Ezekiel’s book, the most memorable of them being the vision of exiled Israel’s national restoration in the Valley of the Dry Bones (chapter 37). This was a man whose mind swarmed with potent images, many of them cast as figures in allegories, which are the most effective vehicle of his prophecies. One senses that these images were not contrived or invented but manifested themselves imperatively in the imagination of the prophet. While the idea of the spirit descending on an elected person is common in biblical literature, including many of the narratives, again and again in this book the prophet attests to being seized, sometimes violently, by the spirit. In Hebrew, as in several other languages, the same word means both “spirit” and “wind,” but for Ezekiel the latter meaning is often salient, even if the former sense may also be implied: repeatedly, he is “borne off” by the wind to a place of vision (often Jerusalem), or, in tandem with this idea, the heavy “hand of the LORD” comes down on him, as in the beginning of the vision of the Dry Bones, “The hand of the LORD was upon me, and He took me out by the wind of the LORD and set me down in the valley.”
All this powerful seizure by visionary experience is associated in Ezekiel with a variety of bizarre behaviors that would seem to reflect some kind of psychological disturbance. Other prophets feel they are commanded by God to perform symbolic-prophetic acts. Jeremiah, for example, is enjoined to go down to the potter’s workshop, to purchase a plot of land, and to do other acts that are more or less ordinary actions which are given symbolic or illustrative significance. But the acts that Ezekiel reports God has ordered him to carry out are not normal ones: he eats a scroll, he constructs a model of Jerusalem with a brick and an iron pan, he lies on one side for three hundred ninety days and then forty days on his other side without the capacity to turn over. This last instance is the most egregious. It is fairly plausible that Ezekiel actually did this, and lying on one side for more than a year in “bonds,” he says, imposed by God looks very much like an extreme symptom of hysterical paralysis.
Among the themes of Ezekiel’s prophecies, the most striking expression of neurosis is his troubled relation to the female body. Real and symbolic bodies become entangled with each other. In biblical poetry, a nation, and Israel in particular, is quite often represented as a woman. God’s covenant with Israel—see Jeremiah 1—is imagined as a marriage, and so the bride Israel’s dalliance with pagan gods is figured as adultery or whoring. This is a common trope in biblical literature, but the way Ezekiel articulates it is both startling and unsettling.
The most vivid instance of this psychological twist in Ezekiel is the extended allegory of whoring Israel in chapter 16. The allegory here follows the birth of the nation in Canaan—represented with stark physicality in the image of the infant girl naked and wallowing in the blood of afterbirth, then looked after by a solicitous God—to her sexual maturity and her betrayal of God through idolatry. The focus throughout is on Israel as a female sexual body. Thus, the prophet notes (as does no other biblical writer) the ripening of the breasts and the sprouting of pubic hair. The mature personification of the nation is a beautiful woman, her beauty enhanced by the splendid attire God gives her (this is probably a reference to national grandeur and to the Temple). Yet, insatiably lascivious, she uses her charms to entice strangers to her bed: “you spilled out your whoring” (given the verb used and the unusual form of the noun, this could be a reference to vaginal secretions) “upon every passerby.” Israel as a woman is even accused of harboring a special fondness for large phalluses: “you played the whore with the Egyptians, your big-membered neighbors.” She is, the prophet says, a whore who asks no payment for her services. “You befouled your beauty,” he inveighs, “and spread your legs for every passerby.” All this concern with female promiscuity is correlative with Ezekiel’s general preoccupation with purity and impurity.
It is of course possible to link each of these sexual details with the allegory of an idolatrous nation betraying its faith. But such explicitness and such vehemence about sex are unique in the Bible. The compelling inference is that this was a prophet morbidly fixated on the female body and seething with fervid misogyny. What happens in the prophecy in chapter 16 is that the metaphor of the lubricious woman takes over the foreground, virtually displacing the allegorical referent. Ezekiel clearly was not a stable person. The states of disturbance exhibited in his writing led him to a series of remarkable visionary experiences, at least several of which would be deeply inscribed in the Western imagination, engendering profound responses in later poetry and in mystical literature. At the same time, there is much in these visions that reminds us of the dangerous dark side of prophecy. To announce authoritatively that the words one speaks are the words of God is an audacious act. Inevitably, what is reported as divine speech reaches us through the refracting prism of the prophet’s sensibility and psychology, and the words and images represented as God’s urgent message may sometimes be distorted in eerie ways.