I’ve been reading the book of Ezekiel along with Robert Jenson’s excellent commentary. The text of Ezekiel opens with the prophet’s vision of God, a theophany. Ezekiel describes “a great cloud with fire flashing forth continually and a bright light around it, and in its midst something like glowing metal in the midst of the fire,” strange beasts with four wings and four faces, a series of sparkling wheels, an expanse above the creatures’ stretched out wings, and a throne occupied by a fiery human form. (Ezekiel 1:1-26.)
On a long drive this weekend, I listened to an audiobook of the Bhagavad Gita, and I was struck by the resonances between the theophany granted by Krishna / Vishnu to Arjuna in Chapter 11 of the Gita and the theophany given to Ezekiel. The text says “Arjuna saw in that universal form unlimited mouths, unlimited eyes, unlimited wonderful visions.” (BG 11:10-11.) Vishnu “spread throughout the sky and the planets and all space between” and Arjuna saw him “devouring all people in [his] flaming mouths and covering the universe with [his] immeasurable rays.” When Arjuna asks about Vishnu’s purpose, Vishnu replies, in the quote made famous in the modern west by Oppenheimer, “Time [or Death] I am, destroyer of the worlds, and I have come to engage all people.” (BG 11:32.)
It is obvious that Ezekiel draws its theophanic imagery from Assyrian and Babylonian symbolism, including figures such as this one that I photographed in the Ancient Near Eastern Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I’m not sure if the author of the Gita was influenced at all by Ancient Near Eastern sources. No one is sure who wrote the Gita, and scholars date it from 400 BCE to 200 CE, so its influences are unclear, but there certainly was commerce between the Indus and Euphrates valleys from ancient times.
Beyond any direct paralells, I think Ezekiel’s and Arjuna’s visions share a common sense of the ineffability of the Divine, particularly as the transcendent vision of the Divine breaks into history. For the Gita, the devouring mouths of Vishna represent how “time” consumes all human plans, dreams, ideals and hopes. Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, quoted a translation that rendered Vishna’s self-naming as “Death,” but my understanding is that the better translation is “Time.” At first I thought this could be significant. The Hindu cosmogeny involves endless cycles of death and rebirth, while the Hebrew comogeny, as taken up by Christianity, involves a creation, fall, and final redemption.
But that is perhaps too pat a comparison. In the Hindu cosmogeny reflected in the Gita, “Time” judges the pretensions of history by its infinite cycles in which all histories end and new histories begin. For Ezekiel’s vision, God judges history, particularly Israel’s history, by calling the pretensions of humanity to account before the inescapable fiery wheel of God’s presence. When parts of Ezekiel’s vision are taken up in the New Testament book of Revelation, Jesus is revealed as the true principle of “Time”: “‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, ‘who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty'” (Rev. 1:8) and “’It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end'” (Rev. 21:6) and “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end” (Rev. 22:13).
Both the Gita and the theophanies of Ezekiel and Revelation suggest that “Death” and “Time” are inseparable, but that both are swallowed by eternity. The real differences, though subtle, reside in how these texts understand incarnation and resurrection. In the Gita, Vishnu is incarnate in Krishna for the purpose of a revelation to Arjuna about the eternal cycles of reincarnation. In Ezekiel, God is not literally incarnate but is made present to Israel in the person of the prophet Ezekiel, who pronounces a judgment on Israel’s history. In Revelation, the incarnate Son surpasses Death and Time through a resurrection that is final and complete.
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Angels Image Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Vishnu Image Source: Based on Wikipedia content that has been reviewed, edited, and republished. Original image by Steve Jurvetson. Uploaded by Cristian Violatti, published on 05 September 2013 under the following license: Creative Commons: Attribution
