This article accompanies the fable
Letters from Africa



Ezekiel: Angels and Wheels over Zion

Is there a sexier book in the Tanakh or Old Testament? Of the Jewish prophets, Ezekiel has long been the one to make people (Jews and Christians) uncomfortable with his sexually explicit references, especially in chapters 16 and 23:

(23) 19 Yet she became more and more promiscuous as she recalled the days of her youth, when she was a prostitute in Egypt. 20 There she lusted after her lovers, whose genitals were like those of donkeys and whose emission was like that of horses. 21 So you longed for the lewdness of your youth, when in Egypt your bosom was caressed and your young breasts fondled.

It's thrilling enough to set off academics condemning its sexism and conservative religious agonizing over it as pornography. It's allegory of course: God had sex with Jerusalem who then went whoring after other gods and that brought down destruction upon her.

William Blake (above) was far more interested in the visionary aspects, as in The Whirlwind: Ezekiel's Vision of the Cherubim and Eyed Wheels (c. 1803-1805) and Satan in his Original Glory: 'Thou wast Perfect till Iniquity was Found in Thee' (c. 1805). Both are derived from The Book of Ezekiel, notably chapters 1, 10 and 28.

The Book of Ezekiel (chapter 3) is also the source for the name Tel Aviv. Its founders chose the name in 1910, after a place in Babylonia during the Captivity.