Wheels within Wheels

Now as I beheld the living creatures, behold one wheel upon the earth by the living creatures, with his four faces.
The appearance of the wheels and their work was like unto the colour of a beryl: and they four had one likeness: and their appearance and their work was as it were a wheel in the middle of a wheel.
When they went, they went upon their four sides: and they turned not when they went.

-- Ezekiel 1: 15-17 (KJV)

We now use "wheels within wheels" to mean "devices within devices," or "multilayered plots" with intricate, hidden motions. But what the prophet Ezekiel sees in his strange "visions of God" (1: 1) is something more mysterious.

As Ezekiel, an exile in Babylon, hears of the fall of Judah to the forces of Nebuchadnezzar, he wonders why this calamity strikes both the wicked and the obedient. As he ponders the mysteriousness of God's ways, the heavens open before him and out of a whirlwind emerges a great cloud flashing a "fire infolding itself."

In its amber glow he sees four figures, resembling men but each with four faces (those of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle) and four wings, all joined together in a circle, moving in whichever of the four directions they choose without turning. At each figure's feet is a wheel, fiery gold, that has the shape and motion of a "wheel in the middle of a wheel," with eyes ringed about it. As these wheels moved, "they turned not when they went" -- which may mean that they didn't turn at all or, as the New English Bible has it, that they "never swerved in their course." According to Ezekiel, "the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels" (verse 20).

What Ezekiel describes, if it isn't some real device, is probably his idea of an ideal foundation for the throne of God, which he soon sees suspended above the four interlocked figures. As God is both mysterious and never-changing, so the creatures and their wheels -- a kind of living platform -- are mysteriously constructed and never-turning. All this is lost on most people who quote from Ezekiel today. While he claims to have seen God eye to eye, we refer to what is hidden rather than revealed.

 
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Michael Macrone is Associate Site Producer of GraceCom and the author of nine books on language, literature, and ideas, including the best-selling Brush Up Your Shakespeare!