Karl Knausgaard - A Time for Everything

“Don’t be afraid of what they say, don’t fear them!” the voice went on. “For they are rebels. You shall speak my words to them whether they want to hear or not, for they are defiant. But you, man, hear what I say to you! Don’t be rebellious like this race!”

Then something strange occurred.

“Open your mouth and eat what I give you!”

Ezekiel looked up and caught sight of a hand reaching out toward him. The hand held a scroll. When it was opened, Ezekiel saw that it was covered in writing both on the inside and the outside. When he looked closer, he saw that they were dirges and laments and words of woe. God’s dirges. God’s laments. God’s words of woe.

“Man, eat what you find here!” said the Lord. “Eat this scroll! Go and speak to the Israelites!”

Ezekiel opened his mouth.

“Man!” he said. “Fill yourself and your intestines with this scroll that I give you.”

Ezekiel ate the scroll. It tasted as sweet as honey.

This incident by the River Kebar is indubitably one of the Bible’s oddest. With their four faces, two pairs of wings, sets of wheels, and profusion of eyes, Ezekiel’s cherubim are a radical departure from other sightings of angels, and since it is these other descriptions that have become normative for the notion of the angels’ appearance in the collective consciousness, there is something monstrous, indeed even grotesque, about Ezekiel’s cherubim, which in another context, without the Lord’s presence, might well have been taken to be the servants of darkness rather than light. Consequently, most theologians have either chosen to construe the cherubim’s presence allegorically — the number four indicating here the points of the compass, the wheels eternity, the many eyes that God sees everything, etc., etc. — or to pass it by without comment. But, as Bellori points out, the fact that Ezekiel breaks with the biblical tradition of angelic description doesn’t mean that the picture he gives is incompatible with the others, merely that it contains more information. The cherubim that guarded the way to the tree of life might well have fit Ezekiel’s description, anything can lurk behind the term “the cherubim,” and the same applies to the Lord’s instructions to Moses. He says that the cherubim shall “stretch forth their wings” but says nothing of how many wings they have, he says that “toward the mercy-seat shall the faces of the cherubim be” but says nothing of how many faces they have.

What about Solomon’s sculptures? Doesn’t it clearly say “the other wing,” something that limits the number of wings to two, provided a third or fourth wing isn’t mentioned?

Yes, it does say “the other wing” not “one of their other wings” and there is no reason to doubt this; Solomon’s cherubim had two wings.

Doesn’t this make them incompatible with Ezekiel’s cherubim?

Bellori thought not. In contrast to Moses, Solomon didn’t receive instructions from the Lord when he made the statues. It is likely that he was following a tradition that, after Moses founded it, had slowly altered over the course of the generations. The four wings became two, the four faces became one, and the multitude of eyes and the strange wheels were dropped altogether. Beauty always lies in the familiar as far as human beings are concerned, and little by little, without any real ill intent, they decorated the Lord’s watchmen and fashioned them more closely to their own tastes. From being a four-winged, many-eyed creature with animal, bird, and human faces, inexplicably linked to a wheel of topaz, the image of them gradually came closer to that of human beings themselves, in which the only alien element retained was the wings, whose swanlike grace could be accepted as beautiful.

That Moses was familiar with the appearance of the cherubim, but not Solomon, can only mean that their manifestations had become rarer, Bellori writes. That Solomon was actually convinced that his false picture of the cherubim was correct indicates that a long time, perhaps several centuries, had elapsed since they’d last shown themselves. And this makes Ezekiel’s vision even more significant.

What was it about this event that was so important that it could make the cherubim return to earth after an absence of several hundred years?

The extraordinary thing about Ezekiel’s revelation, apart from the presence of the cherubim, was the consumption of the scroll. Nothing of the kind had ever happened before, and never would again. Traditionally this is interpreted as Ezekiel becoming one with God’s word, which of course is correct, but just as significant is the reverse perspective, emphasized by Bellori, that God’s word became one with him. The fact that Ezekiel became one with God’s word turns him into a prophet. But what happened to God’s word when it became one with Ezekiel? How should we understand God’s word being incarnate in a body, becoming flesh and blood, heart and lungs, sinew and tissue, and for a time moving about on the earth? Not figuratively, most definitely not that, for if there is one thing that characterizes the transaction between God and Ezekiel, it is its concrete and physical nature: he actually eats God’s words.

Until then the contact between God and man had always followed the same pattern. God showed himself to certain chosen individuals, like Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, Solomon, and informed them of his will, which they in turn relayed to the people around them. After that the Lord rewarded or punished them, according to whether his will had been followed or not. Whether this occurred on a grand scale, as when he sent the great flood and, with very few exceptions, exterminated all living things, or on a small one, as when he killed Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu because, contrary to his instructions, they had presented illicit fire to him, the distance was always the same. To mankind God’s anger was visible only as sudden death and dire catastrophe, and therefore as something external that came down upon them. Ezekiel’s revelation represents something quite new in this regard. The scroll the Lord gives him contains dirges and laments and words of woe, and by consuming it, it isn’t just God’s words in a general sense that become one with Ezekiel (whom God consistently calls “man”), but quite specifically God’s sorrow and God’s wrath — in other words, his feelings . And so God’s feelings about mankind no longer exist outside them, at a divine remove, but have been transplanted into their very midst, by the Lord’s incarnation of the word.

The weight of this new perspective was further brought home by what happened to Ezekiel the following year. After he’d eaten the scroll, he received several injunctions from the Lord before being lifted up by what he later termed “a spirit” and behind him heard the cherubim’s high, clear voices shouting, “Praise be to the Lord’s glory from his place!” The voices mingled with the noises of the creatures as their wings touched, the crunching of the sand from the four wheels at the side of them, which must have begun moving, and a fierce rushing sound, not unlike the noise when the Lord first showed himself. Then he was borne away full of exaltation , all the way to Tel Aviv. There he stayed with the exiles, struck dumb, for seven days.

On the seventh day God’s word returned to him, this time in the form of an inner voice. Rise up; go out into the plain , it said, and there I will speak to you . And Ezekiel did. He got up, walked out of the city and out into the plain. It was night and pitch-black, and even at a great distance he could make out the radiance of the revelation, it rippled like a veil across the inky sky. The sight made him feel his blood pounding heavily inside him, and he began to walk more slowly. As before, it was the cherubim he caught sight of first. They floated motionless high up in the darkness, like the burning pillars Moses had once described, and when they gradually came down toward him, the flames trailed behind them like tails of fire. Once again he threw himself face downward when God appeared, and once again was immediately told to stand to receive the word of the Lord.