Ezekiel1chapter 1

The Chebar was not a river in our sense. Babylonia ran on canals — engineered channels that carried Euphrates water across a flat, hot plain to water barley fields and date palms. Business tablets recovered from the city of Nippur name a waterway called the Kabaru, the Grand Canal, and that is almost certainly Ezekiel's Chebar. Deportees were parked along these channels in work villages and put to farming.

Deportation was Babylonian policy, not random cruelty. When Jerusalem surrendered in 597 BC, Nebuchadnezzar took the young king Jehoiachin, the royal family, the officers, the metalworkers and the skilled craftsmen — the whole leadership class — and left the poor behind under a puppet king. Clay ration tablets dug up in Babylon list oil issued to Yaukin, king of the land of Yahud, and to his sons. The deported king was kept alive at royal expense, a hostage in reserve.

Ezekiel was a priest, the son of Buzi. The thirtieth year in his opening line is most simply his own age, the age at which a priest entered full service at the sanctuary. He should have been putting on linen in Jerusalem that summer. He was sitting beside an irrigation ditch in a foreign country instead.

The creatures would not have looked as alien to him as they do to us. Assyrian and Babylonian palace doorways were guarded by carved composite beings — the human-headed winged bull, the winged genie — set there to keep out what should not enter. Thrones of gods and kings were carried in procession or set on wheeled platforms. What Ezekiel sees is the real version: a throne that travels anywhere, on wheels that never have to turn to change direction, carried by living guardians.