NOTES for Eze 1:1-28
Many of us remember the once-popular attempts by certain “scholars,” who searched everywhere for traces of visitors from outer space, to interpret Ezekiel's vision in the spirit of their theories. They were very eager to see alien mechanisms in the prophetic images. They even went so far as to “reconstruct” them on the model of modern technology. All this merely reveals the limitations of pseudo-rational thinking, which, when confronted with something new and incomprehensible, seeks to reduce it to elements already familiar. After all, for some reason it became possible to see “space technology” in the Bible only after people themselves had acquired similar devices.
Ezekiel, however, encountered a reality that surpassed his ideas, and it is not even so important to us whether what he describes happened to him while awake or whether he contemplated it with his inner sight in a prophetic vision. What matters more is that his contact with this reality was genuine. Human language simply has no means of describing it precisely, and yet Ezekiel finds the words needed to express the grandeur of an encounter with what surpasses his imagination.