Ezekiel

Ezekiel, whose Hebrew name Yechezkel means God strengthens, was a priest and prophet of ancient Israel active in the sixth century BCE. He is identified in the biblical book that bears his name as the son of Buzi, a priest, and is generally held to have been born in Jerusalem in the Kingdom of Judah. In 597 BCE, after Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon captured Jerusalem and deported King Jehoiachin together with the city's leading citizens, Ezekiel was taken into exile in Babylonia. He lived among the Judean captives at a settlement called Tel Abib beside the Chebar canal, a watercourse in the vicinity of Nippur in southern Mesopotamia.

The Book of Ezekiel dates his inaugural vision to the fifth year of King Jehoiachin's exile, corresponding to 593 BCE. In that vision, by the Chebar, he beheld the merkabah, or divine chariot-throne, borne by four living creatures, and received a commission to speak to the rebellious house of Israel. His recorded oracles extend to the twenty-seventh year of the exile (571 BCE), covering the years before and after the final destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 586 BCE. The book falls broadly into oracles of judgment against Judah and Jerusalem, oracles against foreign nations, and oracles of consolation and restoration. Among its most celebrated passages are the vision of the valley of dry bones, symbolizing national revival, and the lengthy description of a future temple and reordered land. Ezekiel's preaching stresses the holiness and mobility of God's glory, which he describes as departing the defiled Temple and later returning, and it insists on individual responsibility for sin.

The prophet was married; the biblical narrative records that his wife, described as the delight of his eyes, died suddenly, and that he was forbidden to observe the usual rites of mourning so that his conduct might serve as a sign of the unmourned catastrophe about to overtake Jerusalem. No children are named in the canonical text, and neither the date nor the precise place of Ezekiel's death is known from contemporary sources. Later Jewish, Christian, and Islamic tradition places his grave at Al-Kifl on the Euphrates in present-day Iraq, where a shrine long associated with him has been a place of pilgrimage. In Islamic tradition he is sometimes identified with the Qur'anic prophet Dhul-Kifl, though scholars differ on that equation.

Ezekiel is numbered among the three Major Prophets in the Christian Old Testament and among the Latter Prophets in the Hebrew Bible. His merkabah vision became a central text for Jewish mystical speculation in late antiquity and the Middle Ages. He is venerated as a prophet and saint in Eastern and Western Christianity: the Eastern Orthodox Church commemorates him on 21 July, and the Roman Martyrology of the Catholic Church lists him on 23 July. Oriental Orthodox churches likewise honor him among the biblical prophets. His historical setting in the Babylonian exile and the distinctive imagery of his book have made him a pivotal figure for understanding the transformation of Israelite religion in the sixth century BCE.