they were not simply giving voice to their homesickness but facing a theological dilemma. Today religious people believe that they can make contact with their God wherever they are in the world: in a field, supermarket, or church. But in the ancient world, prayer in our sense was far from common. In exile the Judaeans developed the practice of lifting up their hands, turning in the direction of Jerusalem, and speaking words of praise or entreaty to Yahweh precisely as a substitute for sacrifice, which was the normal way to approach the deity.13 But this type of prayer was a novel idea and would not have occurred to the first deportees as a matter of course. The exile would teach the Judaeans the more interior spirituality of the Axial Age. When they first arrived in Babylonia in 597 the exiles would probably have felt that they had been taken away from Yahweh’s presence. His home was in Zion, and they could not build a temple to him in Babylon, as we would build a church, synagogue, or mosque, because according to the Deuteronomist ideal there was only one legitimate shrine for Israel and that was in Jerusalem. Like the Gabon Pygmies, the exiles must have wondered whether their Maker was actually with them in this strange city. Hitherto Israelites had gathered for communal worship only in places associated with a revelation of Yahweh or some other type of hierophany. But there was no known instance of a Yahwistic theophany in Babylonia.
Then, out of the blue, Yahweh made an appearance in Tel Aviv. Among the first batch of deportees to arrive in Babylon in 597 was the priest Ezekiel. For the first five years, he stayed alone in his house and did not speak to a soul. Then he was—literally—knocked out by a shattering vision of Yahweh which left him stunned for an entire week. A cloud of light had seemed to approach him from the north in the midst of which he saw a huge chariot drawn by four of the cherubim, strange beasts not unlike the karibu carved on the palace gates of Babylon. When he tried to describe this apparition, Ezekiel was at pains to show that it lay beyond normal words and concepts. What he had seen was “something … shaped like a throne and high upon this throne was a being that looked like a man.” In the dense confusion of storm, fire, and tumultuous noise, Ezekiel knew that he had glimpsed “something that looked like the glory [kavod] of Yahweh.”14 Like Isaiah, Ezekiel had glimpsed the extraordinary Reality that lay behind the symbols of the Temple. The Ark of the Covenant—Yahweh’s earthly throne—was still in the Temple in Jerusalem, but his “glory” had arrived in Babylon. It was indeed a “revelation,” an unveiling: the great curtain separating the Hekhal from the Devir in Solomon’s Temple had represented the farthest limit of human perception. Now that veil had been pulled to one side, though Ezekiel was careful to distinguish between Yahweh himself and his “glory,” a manifestation of his Presence which made the ineffable reality of the sacred apprehensible to human beings. The vision was a startling reformulation of an older theology. In the very earliest days, Israel had experienced God as mobile. He had come to his people from the Sinai to Canaan on the wings of the cherubim. Now the cherubim had conveyed him to his people in exile. He was not confined to either the Temple or the Promised Land, like so many of the pagan gods who were associated indissolubly with a particular territory.
Furthermore, Yahweh chose to be with the exiles, not with the Judaeans who were still living in Jerusalem. Ezekiel had his vision in about 592, some six years before the destruction of the city by Nebuchadnezzar, but in a later vision he realized that Jerusalem was doomed because even though they were on the brink of disaster the Judaeans back home were still worshipping other gods and ignoring the terms of their covenant with Yahweh. One day Ezekiel was sitting in his house in Tel Aviv with the exiled elders of Judah when “the hand of the Lord Yahweh” fell upon him and he was taken in spirit to Jerusalem. There he was led on a conducted tour of the Temple and was horrified to see people bowing before alien gods within the sacred precincts. These “filthy practices,” he was told, had driven Yahweh from his house, and Ezekiel watched the cherubim spread their wings, the wheels of the great chariot-throne begin to move, carrying the “glory of Yahweh” out of the city of Jerusalem and disappearing over the Mount of Olives to the east of the city. He had decided to come to the community of exiles instead, and now that Yahweh was no longer living in Zion, the destruction of Jerusalem was only a matter of time.15
But Yahweh also promised the prophet that one day he would return to his city, taking the same route over the Mount of Olives, and reestablish his residence on Mount Zion. There would be a new exodus, as the scattered exiles were brought home, and a new creation in which the land would be transformed from a desolate wasteland to become “like the garden of Eden.” It would be a time of healing and integration: Judah and Israel would be reunited under a Davidic king and, as in Eden, Yahweh would live among his people.16 It would be the end of separation, alienation, and anomie and a return to that original wholeness for which people longed. Jerusalem was central to this vision. Some fourteen years after the destruction of the city by Nebuchadnezzar, either Ezekiel or one of his disciples had a vision of a city “on a very high mountain” whose name was Yahweh Sham: “Yahweh is there.”17 The city was an earthly paradise, a place of peace and fertility in the old sense. Just as the stream had welled up in the midst of the Garden of Eden and flowed down the sacred mountain to fructify the rest of the world, Ezekiel saw a river bursting up from beneath the city’s Temple, leaving the sacred precincts and bringing life and healing to the surrounding territory. Along the banks of this river there grew trees “withleaves that never wither and fruit that never fails … good to eat and the leaves medicinal.”18 As they experienced the pain of severance and dislocation, the exiles turned to the ancient myths to imagine a return to the place where they were supposed to be.
Yet Ezekiel was not simply clinging to the past but shaping a new vision for the future. As he contemplated the city of Yahweh Sham, he created a new sacred geography. The Temple in the middle of the city was a replica of Solomon’s Temple, which was now in ruins. Its vestibule (Ulam), cult hall (Hekhal), and inner sanctum (Devir) represented the gradations of holiness: each zone was more sacred than the last.19 As of old, the sacred could only be approached in stages and not everybody was to be permitted to approach the inner circles of sanctity. This concept would be central to Ezekiel’s vision and would form the basis of his new map of the ideal world. The Temple differed from Solomon’s in two important respects, however. The palace of the king was no longer next door to the Temple, and the Temple buildings were now surrounded by two walled courts.20 The holiness of Yahweh was to be segregated more carefully than before from the profane world. God was becoming a more transcendent reality, more radically separate (kaddosh) from the rest of mundane existence. J, the first biblical writer, had imagined Yahweh sitting and talking with Abraham as a friend, but for Ezekiel, a man of the Axial Age, the sacred was a towering mystery that was overwhelming to humanity. But despite the essential “otherness” of the divine reality, it was still the center of the world of men and women and the source of their life and potency, a reality that was symbolized in Ezekiel’s vision by the paradisal river. Ezekiel now described the Promised Land in a way that bore no relation to its physical geography. Unlike the city of Jerusalem, for example, Yahweh Sham was in the very center of the Land, which was far bigger than the joint kingdoms of Israel and Judah had ever been, stretching as far as Palmyra in the north and to the Brook of Egypt in the west.21 Ezekiel was not attempting a literal description of his homeland but was creating an image of a spiritual reality. The divine power radiates from the city of Yahweh Sham to the land and people of Israel in a series of concentric circles, each zone diluting this holiness as it gets farther from the source. The Temple is the nucleus of the world’s reality; the next zone is the city which enfolds it. Surrounding the city and Temple is a special area, occupied by the sacred personnel: the king, priests, and Levites. This district is holier than that occupied by the rest of the twelve tribes of Israel, who inhabit the rest of this sacred territory. Finally, beyond the reach of this
