An Atheist Explores the Bible Part 161: An Instruction Manual For Religious Barmpots. And still absolutely no UFOs (Ezekiel 6-10)

Ezekiel 6-10
An Instruction Manual For Religious Barmpots. And still absolutely no UFOs.

Welcome to another instalment of An Atheist Explores Sacred Texts (Bible version).

In this series I work my way chapter-by-chapter through the King James Bible, commenting on it from the point of view of the text as literature and mythology.

For more detail, see the introductory post http://bit.ly/2F8f9JT

For the online KJV I use, see here http://bit.ly/2m0zVUP

And now:

Ezekiel 6

“And say, Ye mountains of Israel, hear the word of the Lord GOD; Thus saith the Lord GOD to the mountains, and to the hills, to the rivers, and to the valleys; Behold, I, even I, will bring a sword upon you, and I will destroy your high places.”

God instructs Ezekiel to preach to “the mountains”, and this seems to be a rebuke to the gods of nature, of sacred rocks and groves, that the Israelites have been worshipping, telling them that their worshippers will be killed and/or scattered and “you will know that I am the Lord”, as is repeated quite a lot in this chapter.

By actually addressing these entities and threatening them, there’s a sort of tacit acceptance that they do exist as rivals, compared to passages in, oh, I forget, Isaiah, Jeremiah, where God tells idol worshippers that they are fools for worshipping a bit of dead tree.

Ezekiel 7

“Behold the day, behold, it is come: the morning is gone forth; the rod hath blossomed, pride hath budded.”

Prophecies here about a day of reckoning, when God promises the people that He “will recompense thee for all thine abominations”, and there’s more dire warnings of violence and plunder and all manner of delightful unpleasantness in the name of God. I don’t think I’d find this kind of stuff as repugnant of various dingbats over the course of history hadn’t taken it upon themselves to get into a froth of retribution for things that they disagreed with. Here, the “iniquities” are very specifically worshipping other gods, with a hint of child sacrifice. But I doubt you’d have to look very far to find someone willing to apply it to something with which they disagreed – same-sex marriage, women priests, people who just won’t shut up and do what they’re told. Feh upon these people. I bet none of them have earned the right to speak on God’s behalf for eating cow manure cakes for over a year.

Ezekiel 8

“Then I beheld, and lo a likeness as the appearance of fire: from the appearance of his loins even downward, fire; and from his loins even upward, as the appearance of brightness, as the colour of amber.”

Ezekiel gets another vision, where God literally lifts him up by his hair and shows him various sights, including the “image of jealousy” in the north, seventy elders worshipping idols with incense, a weeping woman and a group of men worshipping the sun rise. The general intent of this is clear, that the Israelites have turned away from Yahweh, for which God promises Ezekiel that He will punish them. Because numbers are mentioned there’s a danger of trying to add layers of numerological meaning to a chapter like this, but I’m leaving that well alone. My only other comment is on the quoted verse – fire above the waist, and fire below the waist. That’s entirely fire, surely?

Ezekiel 9

“And, behold, six men came from the way of the higher gate, which lieth toward the north, and every man a slaughter weapon in his hand; and one man among them was clothed with linen, with a writer's inkhorn by his side: and they went in, and stood beside the brasen altar.”

God summons a group of men, and somewhere a cherub becomes involved too, which I seem to have missed. One with an inkpot is to go through the city and set a mark on the foreheads on all “that sigh and that cry for all the abominations that be done in the midst thereof”, presumably something akin to the Passover mark, because the others then are to go through the city and kill everyone else; “old and young, both maids, and little children, and women”. Ezekiel pleads for a remnant to be saves, but God answers ambiguously.

Since the participants in this appear to be celestial rather than mortal, this could easily be an analogy for a plague as for slaughter in war.

Ezekiel 10

“Then I looked, and, behold, in the firmament that was above the head of the cherubims there appeared over them as it were a sapphire stone, as the appearance of the likeness of a throne.”

There’s a reappearance of the UFO cherubim and wheels apparition in this chapter, and the description of it fills most of the chapter, apart from a vignette at the start where God orders the scribe figure from the last chapter, who marked the people to be saved, to take some coals from within the UFO cherubim and scatter them across Jerusalem. Mainly, though, this chapter serves to illustrate either that the apparition is utterly indescribable to Ezekiel, or Ezekiel is rubbish at describing things; I suspect a bit of both since he repeats himself a lot.

The cherubim match previous visions, kind of winged animal-man hybrids, with four wings, human hands beneath the wings, and each with four different heads – human, ox, eagle and lion. By each cherubim is a “wheel within a wheel” and the whole assembly has a strange motion – “When they went, they went upon their four sides; they turned not as they went, but to the place whither the head looked they followed it” – so they head in ox direction, lion direction etc. (which means that they can only move in four directions, like a chess rook). At times it sounds like the cherubim are riding on top of the wheels – “And when the cherubims went, the wheels went by them: and when the cherubims lifted up their wings to mount up from the earth, the same wheels also turned not from beside them”. It’s all very strange, which I suppose is what you want from a mystical vision.