The Book of Ezekiel and the Speculative Design

Ezekiel is one of the most enigmatic books in the Tanakh. For centuries upon centuries, it has inspired the mystical imagination and given commentators a speculative framework to contemplate the meaning and purpose of exile, while attempting to interpret the Image and Spirit of G-d. It can also be read as a meditation in Speculative Design. Speculative Design, like Speculative Fiction and other related literary genres, including prophetic literature, imagines how things could be in contrast to how things are. [1]

The Book of Ezekiel begins by describing, in superlative terms, a kind of machine, the function of which has been much discussed and debated for the past 2500 years. [2] It lays out, in lucid detail, architectural dimensions for a building, as well as the plans for a city in which that building is situated. This city is not called Jerusalem. But, according to the text, all of these design elements establish the conditions for a culture and society that is to manifest in those places, like a spirit to a body.

The first chapter describes what the contemporary imagination might interpret as a “machine,” the design of which is given in esoteric detail, and traditionally represented as a “chariot.” The function of this supernal device clears a space for contemplative speculation, and more generally, gives a speculative framework for imagining the relationship between what is above and what is below, between what is abstract and what is concrete, between what is physical and what is metaphysical; between G-d and man.

Speculation about the design of this “chariot” is the foundation of Merkabah (Chariot) mysticism in the Rabbinical tradition. This “chariot” is described as having the features of both animal and machine. This may seem less strange to the modern reader when considering the design of many everyday objects that also embody a dialectic between “living beings” and the instrumental material stuff of machines.

Consider the four-legged design of a table, which could just as easily be made with three or five legs; four legs confer a subtle and unconscious association with the familiar forms of domesticated animals. Consider the conventional four walls of most rooms, and the manner in which they orient fixed space. Consider the modern “chariot” — the automobile — which like furniture, carry the vestigial features of animals, including headlight for “eyes” and wheels for “feet.”

But wheels are quite different from feet. No animal moves by means of wheels. They are technological, emergent only within a culture and historically contingent. The wheels that are described by the prophet act on the imaginative faculties of the reader, and if nothing else, remind us that all matters of metaphysics are exercises of the imagination.

Wheels are features of machines, both modern and antique alike. Unlike furniture, architecture, or even the plan of an entire city, which by their nature are fixed intimately to a site, wheels are mobile. They move from one place to another, like a people in exile, like the Mishkan (tabernacle) described in the Pentateuch, which followed the Israelites in the desert. This machine goes where the people go. It goes where the Spirit takes it, and the Spirit was in the wheels (ophanim).


“Wherever the spirit impelled them to go, they went — wherever the spirit impelled them — and the wheels were borne alongside them; for the spirit of the creatures was in the wheels. When those moved, these moved; and when those stood still, these stood still; and when those were borne above the earth, the wheels were borne alongside them — for the spirit of the creatures was in the wheels.”

Ezekiel 1:20–21

The upper portion of the “machine,” is constituted by the four “living beings,” (chayot), the description of which recall Lumasi and other similar creatures that were an already well established visual traditions in the region to where Ezekiel and his co-religionist were exiled just before the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in 587 BCE. The description of these “living creatures,” and the space above them and below them, might evoke in the mind of the modern exegete associations with the design of devices for communication, such as radios or telephones, with signals that bounce off of heaven.

The visual imagery is abstract, and resists concreteness. [3] A representation is presented to the prophet, appearing above the machine as an oblique reflection of the divine source. The prophet is cautious not to explicitly describe the divine image, but rather indicates that this machine, if we can call it that, produces “the appearance of the semblance of the Presence of the L-rd.”

The design of the machine/chariot mirrors the architectural features of the temple, city, and nation described in the final chapters of the text. Architectural imagery is found throughout. Passages of the text evoke concentration camps to a modern reader looking backward on history, which provide contrast to, and act as the antithesis of, the building being described in later chapters. Exile, persecution, and destruction are replaced with a new design, a speculative design.

“The winding passage of the side chambers widened from story to story; and since the structure was furnished all over with winding passages from story to story, the structure itself became wider from story to story. It was by this means that one ascended from the bottom story to the top one by way of the middle one.”

Ezekiel 41:7

Every detail of this architectural marvel is accounted for. The dimensions are carefully measured out, like a blueprint, echoing the four-sided “machine” described in the opening chapters. If the machine/chariot was designed with an affordance for the Spirit to follow the Israelites into exile, then this is the place to which the Spirit returns. And this place, this building, is placed at the center of a society and community; the physical manifestation of the laws and culture within which it operates. It is here that we witness most explicitly, a prophetic design — a speculative design — of a vessel for History.

Let us ask then, what is the function of this machine? Can we speculate about designs in which the Spirit of History plays out?

In his essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin imagines an angel, which is reminiscent of the angels found in the book of Ezekiel manifested in the design of the living creatures and the wheels.[4] He describes this Spirit of History in the following terms:

“His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress”

Benjamin’s angel of history is a manifestation of Spirit, which can be interpreted in both a Hegelian and a Biblical sense. [5] Looking backward on history, just as the angel of history does, from the everlasting present back onto the first exile, we are struck both by the violence of the historical process and the speculative imagination that drives it forward… like a chariot, like a machine. It is Spirit working itself out through a historical process. It is the mind of G-d as Culture.

Further Reading

[1] “Speculative Everything” by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
[2] “The Book of Ezekiel” Sefaria Edition
[3] “Translating the Torah into Light” by Ian Gonsher
[4] “Theses on the Philosophy of History” by Walter Benjamin
[5] “The Phenomenology of Spirit” by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel