Gustave Doré’s illustration for Dante’s Paradiso–note the eye-like shape of heaven and the wheels of angels, evocative of Ezekiel 1
There is a very old idea that the gods and their places of worship were so different from us that that they could generate not only awe but confusion, disorientation, or even terror. One of the earliest pieces of religious literature ever discovered, the Sumerian Kesh Temple Hymn, contains the line:
Approach, O Mortal–do not approach!
What we will see here is that early Jewish traditions were even broader and more varied than what we can see in the Bible, and their sources weren’t just the Bible but also the cultures around them. Looking more closely at these visions of God’s realm and where they came from can put us in touch with a four-thousand year-old religious tradition that helps explain key elements of both Jewish and Christian mysticism, which would otherwise be invisible to us.
What Does God Look Like? Divine Visions before the Exile
In the Hebrew Bible, God certainly has a great deal of disorienting otherness about him, whether in creating the world and humanity with a few mere sentences or breathing his own air into wet clay to make us, then cursing that clay and us with his words. Yet when the early prophets see God, they do not give much detail about what they are seeing–neither the divine being nor the appearance of his dwelling place. When the Lord himself appears to the early prophet Amos (c. 760 BCE), Amos is more concerned with understanding the meaning of a riddle God tells than remarking on His appearance:
This is what he showed me: the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand. And the Lord said to me, “Amos, what do you see?” And I said, “A plumb line.”
–Amos 7:7-8
Other prophets see differently: a couple of decades later (c. 740 BCE) Isaiah has his vision of God enthroned in a temple that may be earthly or heavenly. Here we learn exactly one thing about God: he is gigantic.
In the year that King Uzziah died, I beheld my Lord seated on a high and lofty throne; and the skirts of His robe filled the Temple.
–Isaiah 6:1
We are told nothing of His face here but reckoning the Temple at 20 cubits (perhaps 30 feet) wide, this might put God at a towering 30 or 40 feet tall.
Moses himself is said to regularly see God in person in the non-Priestly tradition (called E, or Elohistic because of its preference for using the divine name Elohim) on which Deuteronomy bases most of its account:
The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one man speaks to another. — Exodus 33:11
Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses, whom the Lord knew personally, face to face –Deuteronomy 34:10
Yet immediately after the E account, Moses asks to see God’s presence and is told that nobody can do that. In the J (Yahwistic) account Moses begs:
“Oh, let me behold Your Presence!” And He answered, “I will make all My goodness pass before you, and I will proclaim before you the name Yahweh, and the favor that I grant and the compassion that I show. But,” He said, “you cannot see My face, for humanity may not see Me and live.” — Exodus 33:18-20
We do not find out whether this is a gesture of respect (you can’t look directly at the king, either) or because God’s appearance is too much for a human to bear: as the poet Rilke later wrote, he would be ‘annihilated in that stronger presence.’
Later in history, toward the very end of the kingdom of Judah around 593 BCE, we finally find a prophet’s detailed description of God. Ezekiel reports his vision of God in great detail, but now with a certain anxiety about his own perception. He speaks–as a student in my Bible class put it–as if this is something he’s never seen before. And while he is certain that he is encountering God, he seems worried about describing what he sees correctly, or describing it at all. In total contrast to Amos or Isaiah, Ezekiel has no confidence that he can really describe what he sees, so every single description is hedged with “appearance like” or “the semblance of,” culminating in a very disoriented-sounding claim to have seen what the Lord’s material presence (Hebrew Kavod) is like.
Above the expanse over [the angels’] heads was the semblance of a throne, in appearance like sapphire; and on top, upon this semblance of a throne, there was the semblance of a human form. 27 From what appeared as his loins up, I saw a gleam as of amber—what looked like a fire encased in a frame; and from what appeared as his loins down, I saw what looked like fire. There was a radiance all about him. 28 Like the appearance of the bow which shines in the clouds on a day of rain, such was the appearance of the surrounding radiance. That was the appearance of the semblance of the Presence of the Lord.
–Ezekiel 1:26-28.
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Unlike Moses, Ezekiel sees God, or at least his material presence, and lives, but seems shaken.
Centuries later, by the time of the early Jewish mystical Hekhalot literature, the writers are equally confident that a direct vision of God would destroy you in specific, gruesome terms:
…And no eyes of any being are able to gaze at Him, neither eyes of flesh and blood nor the eyes of His attendants. And the one who gazes at Him and peers at and sees Him—flashing seizes his eyeballs, and his eyeballs discharge and bring forth torches of fire, scorching and burning him. And the fire that goes forth from the man who gazes burns him and scorches him. For what reason? Because of the likeness of the eyes of the robe of [the mystical name of the] God of Israel, who is garlanded and comes down to sit on the throne of glory.
His beauty is pleasant and sweet, like the appearance of the beauty of the splendor of the adornment of the eyes of the likeness of the holy living creatures, according to the word that is said, “Holy, holy, holy” (Isa 6:3).
The Rejection of the Earthly Temple in Favor of the Heavenly Temple
Why these increasingly psychedelic and magnificent visions? Are they dreamt in compensation for the loss of a real temple or was the heavenly temple somehow always there, even before the earthly one? Readers of the Bible familiar with history know that the earthly temple is doomed from the start, but this does not make it any less important. The Bible describes the Jerusalem temple in great detail: first, most of the second half of Exodus is devoted to a lush (and to us, probably over-elaborate) description of the Priestly Tabernacle. While this scene is set on Mt. Sinai, it is clear from the careful ritual laws described for it in Leviticus that this is the model of the Temple that is going to be built in Jerusalem. Then, in the book of Kings, God appears to Solomon and tells him it is time to finally build a real one. Its luxurious construction and final ritual consecration is described as intertwined with the fate of the kingdom of Judah and the Davidic Dynasty itself from 1 Kings 5:15 to 9:9.
The tragedy of the first temple’s destruction happens in tandem with the destruction of Jerusalem and the doom of the kingdom of Judah. It is described in 2 Kings 24-25. The terrible human impact of this defeat is reflected in the book of Lamentations. After this Judahite history becomes rather vague and blurry for about a century. It is probably no coincidence that this history starts again with the saga of the rebuilding of the Temple and Jerusalem in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. After this holy place, known as the Second Temple, is revived it stands for almost 500 more years before its final destruction by the Romans in 70 CE, detailed in both the Gospels and early Jewish literature.
But there were some like Ezekiel and the Dead Sea Scrolls community who thought the Temple was already a lost cause even when it still stood. Even in exile, Ezekiel 8 describes a supernatural vision of horror and corruption in the Jerusalem temple around 592 BCE, leading God himself to remark:
“Mortal, do you see what they are doing, the terrible abominations that the House of Israel is practicing here, to drive Me far from My Sanctuary?”
Here it is hard to separate what is accurate historical description and what is Ezekiel’s passionate opinion. After all, this is a particularly fierce and strict prophet who thought the Temple had been defiled almost from the beginning due to the traditional Davidic practice of burying kings near it.
It is Ezekiel’s alienation from the Temple that makes possible his magnificent vision of a mobile, heavenly throne for God. While Isaiah sees God enthroned inside, contained in a room, Ezekiel sees him enthroned atop the sky itself. Rather than being stuck in a defiled place, Ezekiel 1-2 describes his throne as a chariot surrounded by a rainbown and composed of four-faced living creatures, each with the features of an ox, a lion, a man, and an eagle. In language that can still boggle the reader’s imagination almost as much as it boggled Ezekiel’s, it describes the animated, seeing wheels of the chariot:
As I gazed on the creatures, I saw one wheel on the ground next to each of the four-faced creatures. As for the appearance and structure of the wheels, they gleamed like beryl. All four had the same form; the appearance and structure of each was as of two wheels cutting through each other. And when they moved, each could move in the direction of any of its four quarters; they did not veer when they moved. Their rims were tall and frightening, for the rims of all four were covered all over with eyes.
–Ezekiel 1:15-18
This terrifying, psychedelic shrine, Ezekiel implies, was always God’s real abode.
And after the destruction of the Second Temple, this is this vision that is built on in the Book of Revelation. Chapter 4 describes a vision that recombines the rainbow, animals, and eyes of Ezekiel with the prayer Isaiah hears in heaven:
…there in heaven stood a throne, with one seated on the throne! And the one seated there looks like jasper and carnelian, and around the throne is a rainbow that looks like an emerald... and in front of the throne there is something like a sea of glass, like crystal.
Around the throne, and on each side of the throne, are four living creatures, full of eyes in front and back: the first living creature like a lion, the second living creature like an ox, the third living creature with a face like a human, and the fourth living creature like a flying eagle. And the four living creatures, each of them with six wings, are full of eyes all around and inside. Day and night without ceasing they sing,
“Holy, holy, holy,
the Lord God the Almighty,
who was and is and is to come.”
Was the Rejection of the Earthly Temple Just Sour Grapes for Exiles Who Couldn’t Visit It, or Was there Something More?
In fact the very first vision of a temple in the Bible is not an earthly one at all but God’s own. It appears when the elders are invited to meet God on Mt. Sinai (Exodus 24:9-10) as part of accepting the covenant, immediately after the first set of laws (the Covenant Code) is given:
“Then Moses and Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy elders of Israel ascended. And they saw the God of Israel, and beneath his feet was something like a brickwork of lapis lazuli, (kemaˤaśê libnat hassappîr) like the very heavens in purity.”
For Moses and the elders, you can visit God while you’re still alive, but you don’t need to travel to heaven. It’s accessible from our physical world on top of a mountain, because Sinai connects this world with another one–at least for some.
What makes this vision of meeting God especially interesting is the description of his temple’s floor: it is like brickwork, a high-status building material in the more ancient religious texts of the Near East, but a low-class one for human temples in the Bible. While in historical reality it was still a common building material in Iron Age Syria-Palestine, in the Hebrew Bible brick is depicted as a shoddy, low-budget building material. The Tower of Babel story makes fun of the builders for their cheap, Mesopotamian-style construction work (Gen 11:3). Meanwhile not one brick is used in the Bible’s depiction of the Temple, the Tabernacle, or Solomon’s palace.
This early vision of a heavenly temple was more than just the writers’ own contemporary real-life Temple projected onto heaven, because it was made of materials they would never have imagined in the real Jerusalem temple–brick, not wood or stone.
It turns out that God’s throne in Exodus 24 resembles some of the most ancient visions of divine temples, dating to at least 500 or 1000 years before the text of Exodus was written down. Mark Smith (1987) pointed out this shared imagery between early Canaanite imagery and some biblical and apocalyptic images of heaven. Already in the Canaanite Baal epic (around 1250 BCE), when the storm-god Baal begins construction on his temple, he order the builder to use lapis lazuli, a blue precious stone whose glow resembles sapphire :
wbn.bht.ksp.wḫrṣ Build the house with silver and gold,
bht.ṭhrm.iqnim The house of pure lapis lazuli! [Baal Epic KTU 1.4 V 18-19, 33-5]
When it comes time to actually build, the house is burnt, a process that transforms the precious metals into bricks, like in Exodus 24:
sb.ksp.lrqm The silver had turned to building material ,
ḫrṣ/nsb.llbnt The gold had become bricks
šmḫ/aliyn.bˤl Mightiest Baal rejoices:
[b]hty.bnt/dt.ksp. “My house I have built of silver,
hkly[.]dtm/ḫrṣ My palace of gold.” [Baal Epic KTU 1.4 VI 34-8]
Like God’s throne, Baal’s temple is made of bricks and shining blue stone. But even then, this vision was ancient. What was Baal’s real-life temple at Ugarit, the one his worshipers would have encountered, actually made of? Not brick! Archaeologists found that its temple walls, preserved in several places, are made of large, well-cut stones, carefully assembled on massive stone foundations. Stone was the prestige material of construction in the West Semitic world, as the stonework of the Jerusalem Temple and the jibe at mudbrick construction in Genesis suggest. But it leads to a surprising observation: by contrast with Baal’s real-life temple, his mythic temple in the Baal epic, as well as God’s palace in Exodus, is already archaic.
In other words, the heavenly temple is not simply modeled on the earthly one, either in Exodus or Canaanite myth. Instead, the tradition in the Baal epic is so ancient that it was already out of date at Ugarit, and reflects older mythological conceptions as well as traditions from earlier realities. This tradition finds a closer fit with accounts that are a thousand years older. For around 2100 BCE the Sumerian king Gudea also had a heavenly vision of a temple, that he describes as guiding his real-life temple. Like Baal, Gudea burns the area where he is building, and molds bricks (Gudea Cylinder B). But unlike Baal, Gudea’s gods were actually worshipped in brick temples.
And this tradition of visualizing God’s realm persists into early Judaism and Christianity. If the lack of fit between the temple materials of Baal’s textual and physical throne is significant, the distance between the brickwork of Exodus 24 and the materials of the Jerusalem Temple is a striking recurrence of the same phenomenon. By the time of the Dead Sea Scrolls it is already 2,000 years old. The phenomenon reaches its extreme in the following text from the Scrolls’ Sabbath liturgy, the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice:
The pi[ece]work of the wondrous firmament is brightly mixed (mmwlḥ ṭwhr)…[im]ages of the living God, images of bright spirits. All their workmanship is of holy, wondrous joining, [spirits (formed of)] piecework, figures of the shapes of angels engraved around their glorious bricks (llbny [k]bwdm), glorious images (formed of) splendid and awesome b[rick]work (lmˤśy l[bn]y hwd whd[r ]). Their construction is all of the living God/living divine beings and the appearance of their figures is (that of) holy angels.**
An alternative vision of the Heavenly Throneroom from The Brick Testament, h/t my student Christine Le
This text shows a deep fascination with seeing and encountering the physical construction of the heavenly temple: if our previous texts narrate heavenly architecture, this passage detonates it. And its imagery is not simply copied from one Biblical text or another.* Instead, the words appear in phrases unparalleled in the Bible. Indeed, one reason for the difficulty in interpreting this passage as a whole is that it appears to have a set of idioms and a technical vocabulary with which we were previously unfamiliar.
Visualizing the Heavenly Temple: A Four Thousand Year Old Tradition
This combination of ancient architectural concerns, which seem in some way to bypass those of the Bible, with a pervasive concern with the number seven as a physical structuring principle, suggests that we have found essential elements in the Dead Sea Scrolls liturgy which can neither be derived from Biblical interpretation nor imagined as springing full-blown out of the minds of the Qumran sectarians. The entire body of liturgical and poetic material in the Hebrew Bible shows almost no interest in the appearance or features of the Temple. From a strictly formal point of view, the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice’s closest relatives are not in the Bible but in the ancient Sumerian Kesh Temple hymn and the later Hekhalot literature.
The most plausible explanation of these literary patterns is that there was a set of poetic techniques transmitted among Judean circles who were not only speculatively interested in but also ritually committed to the visualization and worship of a heavenly temple. The archaism of elements of these texts and their partial independence from biblical language and views suggests that they continue liturgical traditions not well represented in the Bible and not necessarily directed towards or performed in the Jerusalem Temple. The archaeology of worship in ancient Israel demonstrates there had to be liturgies outside of Jerusalem, and our Hellenistic materials may represent their descendants.
This suggests a new explanation for the apparent explosion of interest in heavenly temples in Jewish apocalyptic: these apparently new materials build on an ancient and shared hymnic tradition barely attested in the Bible. Temples outside of Jerusalem provide a possible physical and ritual context for the use of these hymns. We are thus able to document not only in the ancient Near East but within early Jewish tradition itself a stream of Israelite religion only dimly hinted at in the Hebrew Bible.
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*. If the relation to I Kings 19 is exegetical, the use of two words from Exodus 24:10 ṭwhr and lbnt, is not, since they are not used in a similar way or associated with each other (thus failing Fishbane’s criteria for exegetical reuse).
** 4Q405 19 a,b,c,d 3-7
sethlsanders 