Ezekiel's Wheels Are Weird Enough Without Turning Them Into UFOs

Ezekiel sees something.

Whatever else can be said about the first chapter of his book, nobody can accuse it of lacking imagery.

Living creatures appear with multiple faces and wings.

Beside them are enormous wheels.

The wheels intersect one another, can move in several directions without turning, rise from the Earth with the living creatures and have rims covered in eyes.

Modern readers understandably look at this and think:

Machine.

Some go one step further.

Spaceship.

Ancient-astronaut interpretations have repeatedly treated Ezekiel's vision as a technologically confused description of a vehicle encountered by someone without the vocabulary for advanced machinery.

It is an entertaining reading.

It is not the obvious reading of the chapter.

Ezekiel tells the reader what he believes he is describing: a vision connected to the glory and presence of God.

The imagery is symbolic, cosmic and deeply embedded in ancient religious concepts involving divine thrones and heavenly beings.

But the fact remains that the thing is spectacularly strange.

Eyes on wheels.

Wheels moving in impossible directions.

Creatures rising from the ground.

A glittering expanse above them.

A throne beyond that.

We do not need to turn Ezekiel into an accidental aerospace engineer.

The prophet already gave us something considerably weirder.