1. in the thirtieth year. What this refers to has stumped scholars. One proposal is that it is the thirtieth year of Ezekiel’s life.

divine visions. Or, “visions of God.” But most of the vision here is devoted to the divine “chariot,” with the figure of God introduced only toward the end, so “divine” may be a more apt translation.

2. the fifth year of the exile of King Jehoiachin. He was exiled with a substantial group of Judahites, by Nebuchadnezzar in 597 B.C.E., when Judah was reduced by Babylonia to a vassal state. The clear implication is that Ezekiel was among those deported to Babylonia in 597. The beginning of his prophecy overlaps with the last decade of Jeremiah’s prophecy; he would have been a generation younger, Jeremiah having begun his mission in the 620s.

3. the word of the LORD came to Ezekiel. Since the book begins in the first person and then continues here in the first person, this third-person reference to the prophet may reflect an editorial intervention.

4. a storm wind was coming from the north, a great cloud, and fire flashing, and radiance all round it. These accoutrements of epiphany are traditional in the Bible: in many different texts, from Exodus to Psalms, God reveals himself in fire and lightning and cloud. Nevertheless, this prophecy is strikingly innovative in form. First, it combines the pyrotechnic paraphernalia of divine revelation with imagery evidently borrowed from sundry Mesopotamian sources—the wheeled throne, the four faces of the creatures like the four faces of the Babylonian god Marduk, the iconic animals. Isaiah in his dedication scene (Isaiah 6) glimpses the skirts of God’s robe filling the Temple and sees seraphim, but there is no direct description of God and no elaborate imagining of a celestial vehicle. One should also note that this elevated vision is cast in prose, but it is a visibly poetic prose marked by hypnotic cadences. The words do not scan as poetry, yet some of the diction is poetic. The reiterated term for “radiance,” nogah, for example, ordinarily appears only in poetic texts. Thus, Ezekiel has devised a prophetic prose-poetry that has scant precedents.

like the appearance. The preposition here could also mean “the color of.”

amber. This translation adopts one traditional equivalent for the Hebrew ḥashmal, but its precise identity is elusive. It would seem to be some sort of precious stone that is orange, yellow, or reddish in color.

5. likeness. This word, demut, and its complementary term, marʾeh, “look” or “appearance,” are insisted on again and again in this vision as well as in several visions that follow. The prophet wants to make clear that his report of what he has seen is of something that can be represented only by analogy: these are likenesses, appearances, analogs of things known to humankind, but not literally those things.

8–9. And the faces and the wings of the four of them were joined to each other. As the vision proceeds, it becomes progressively difficult to sort out visually what these creatures and the moving composite they make up look like. (Two and a half millennia of exegetes have labored in vain to work out all the details.) A certain bewilderment may well have been Ezekiel’s intention. There are abundant repetitions of phrases through the passage, some of them probably quite deliberate in order to create an incantatory effect, although at least a couple of them seem to be the product of scribal inadvertence.

10. lion . . . bull . . . eagle. These are all heraldic beasts associated with royalty or divinity. The fourth face is human.

11. two covered their bodies. Evidently, for modesty as with the wings of the seraphim in Isaiah 6.

14. sparks. The Hebrew bazak appears only here, but it clearly indicates some sort of flashing light. In rabbinic Hebrew, it serves as a synonym for “lightning.”

16. as when a wheel is within a wheel. The most likely reference is to concentric wheels.

18. they were high and they were fearsome. More literally, “they had height and they had fearsomeness.” The fearsome aspect of the wheels may be because they are then said to be studded, nightmarishly, with eyes. The meaning of the eyes remains mysterious. Some commentators claim they were a manifestation of all-seeing divine omniscience. Perhaps the primary effect is that they are disorienting and disturbing: these are wheels like none ever encountered by human gaze.

19. when the creatures went, the wheels went with them. The wheels are not physically attached to the creatures, but their movements are synchronized with them through a shared “spirit.”

20. [there the spirit to go]. This bracketed phrase, with its tenuous syntactic connection with the rest of the sentence, definitely looks like a mistaken scribal repetition.

21. when they lifted up above the ground, the wheels would lift up along with them. This four-sided moving structure, with wheels below and a kind of platform above, is what led tradition to call it a “chariot,” merkavah. To moderns, it may seem like a bizarrely composite hovering helicopter.

22. a platform. The Hebrew raqiʿa indicates a flat, pounded-out surface (it is derived from a verbal root that means to “pound” or “to stomp”). In Genesis 1, it is the word used for the vault of the heavens (more traditionally, “firmament”), so here it figures as a constructed equivalent of the sky. Structurally, the raqiʿa amounts to a beaten slab.

24. many waters. This phrase, recurring often in biblical literature, refers to the primordial sea or deep, with mythological overtones. Compare, for example, Psalm 93:4.

like the sound of an uproar, like the sound of an armed camp. All this emphasis on sound, after the exclusive focus on visual elements, sets the stage for God’s speech, which is introduced at the end of the chapter.

28. the look . . . of the glory of the LORD. Never before in biblical literature has God’s “glory,” kavod, been given such visual realization.