Angels-EZEKIEL

In building their empire, the Babylonians followed
a policy of relocating populations as a way
of preventing rebellions. After they conquered
Judah in 605 B.C., they moved the upper class of
Jewish society to Babylonia. For the Jews, the
worship of God in the temple at Jerusalem was
essential to their faith. After all, it was there
that the Ark of the Covenant was housed. Thus,
this relocation posed a challenge to their traditional
understanding of religion. It is in this
context that the prophet Ezekiel’s vision and
message in the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel have
been interpreted by biblical scholars.
In Ezekiel’s fantastic vision four creatures
appear who support God’s throne and who symbolize
the four directions, a symbolic allusion to
God’s omnipresence. Ezekiel also mentions that
beside each creature is a wheel with rims and
spokes, the rims full of eyes. Wheels are symbols
of mobility and the eyes reflect God’s all-seeing
power in the world. The implicit message is
clear—God does not exist in a stationary
throne in a temple; he is everywhere and can
thus be worshiped anywhere. This was an essential message to a people
who had been exiled from the promised land and their sacred
place of worship destroyed.
The first part of Ezekiel’s vision contains description of the four
creatures. This description later became the basis for the Christian
iconography of thrones, the third choir in the nine-rung hierarchy of
angels originally laid out by Dionysius the Areopagite. Ezekiel’s
vision begins thus:
As I looked, behold, a stormy wind came out of the north,
and a great cloud, with brightness round about it, and fire
flashing forth continually, and in the midst of the fire, as it
were gleaming bronze. And from the midst of it came the
likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance:
they had the form of men, but each had four faces, and
each of them had four wings. Their legs were straight, and the
soles of their feet were like the sole of a calf’s foot; and they
sparkled like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their
four sides they had human hands, and the four had their faces and their wings thus: their wings touched one another; they
went every one straight forward, without turning as they
went. (Ezek. 1:4–9)
It is important to note the four faces of each creature: the face of a
human being, a lion, an ox, and an eagle. These represent the four
highest forms of the various realms of creation: the face of man, as the
supreme being, faces forward; the lion is the king of the wild beasts;
the ox is at the fore of domesticated animals; and the eagle is the king
of the skies. Besides providing the visual model for throne angels,
Ezekiel’s vision has sometimes been interpreted as the vision of some
great flying machine, or UFO.