Prophetic Hallucinations

And within it there were figures resembling four living beings. And this was their appearance: they had human form.  Each of them had four faces and four wings.  Ezekiel 1:5-6 NASB

Human form – With the verse, Ezekiel begins to share his visions.  Commentators and end-times prognosticators have had a field day with Ezekiel’s descriptions.  Maybe that’s because they have forgotten what happens to a man overwhelmed by God.  Robert Alter’s words are helpful:

“The prophet is witless, / the man of spirit crazed,” Hosea proclaims, having in mind the way Israel’s waywardness had driven the prophet to wild distraction.  Yet even against this background, Ezekiel is an extreme case.

 . . . what most distinguishes Ezekiel is that so much of the prophesying is conducted in a condition that looks like God-intoxicated derangement. . . His power as a prophet stems from the hallucinatory vividness and the utter originality of his visions.

There is nothing quite like this elsewhere in the Bible, and Ezekiel’s first chapter would accordingly become the inspiration for the development of Jewish mysticism in Late Antiquity.

All this powerful seizure by visionary experience is associated in Ezekiel with a variety of bizarre behaviors that would seem to reflect some kind of psychological disturbance . . . like an extreme symptom of hysterical paralysis.[1]

Alter comments on Ezekiel’s sexual diatribe:

But such explicitness and such vehemence about sex are unique in the Bible.  The compelling inference is that this was a prophet morbidly fixated on the female body and seething with fervid misogyny . . . Ezekiel clearly was not a stable person.[2]

In summary, Ezekiel demonstrates “the dangerous dark side of prophecy.”[3]

If Alter is correct (and it certainly seems so), then we might want to ask, “How did the ravings of a deranged man get into the Hebrew Bible in the first place?”  And that brings us to another question: Why do we continue to read the visions of a maniac, someone who would undoubtedly be committed to a mental hospital today?  Because this material has been canonized, we tend to overlook or ignore just how bizarre or outrageous it really is.  We think of Ezekiel in the same way we think of Isaiah or Daniel, men of great godly insight, circumspect, holy!  We forget what happens to some men when God infects them.  They literally go crazy.  They see things.  They say things.  They experience things we just don’t understand.  We want to avoid these kinds of people.  Until the Church officially calls them saints.  But they’re really not like us.  We read their words with a careful distance, with gloves on so we won’t get the same disease.  We speculate about what they say, but we really don’t want to experience how they came to say these things.  What we see in men like Ezekiel is what happens when God gets too close.  No, no, normal is just fine.

And what do you suppose Ezekiel would say about that?

Do you really want to read Ezekiel?  Then get ready to be sideswiped by insanity.

Topical Index: Ezekiel, prophet, God-intoxicated, deranged, Ezekiel 1:5-7

[1] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible, Volume 2: Prophets, pp. 1049-1051.

[2] Ibid., p. 1051.

[3] Ibid., p. 1052.