Merkabah Mysticism

Overview

• Merkabah ("chariot") mysticism was a strand of Second Temple Jewish spirituality centred on the vision of God's throne-chariot in Ezekiel 1 — the throne borne by the four living creatures. It was the mystical world St. Paul was formed in, and Orthodoxy sees its true heir not in later Rabbinic Judaism but in the Church.

Summary

The Merkabah or "Chariot" tradition takes its name from Ezekiel's vision of the LORD's throne-chariot, carried in flight by four living creatures bearing the faces of an ox, a lion, an eagle, and a man (Ezekiel 1). In the Second Temple period this vision became the pattern by which later encounters with God were understood — a glimpse of Israel's God "insofar as a human person could experience it without losing his life."[^1] As the biblical scholar Fr. Stephen De Young notes, St. Paul "lived during the earliest period of development of what would later be called Merkabah mysticism," a mystical element of first-century Judaism that "would later be pruned from the Rabbinic Jewish tradition, surviving only within Christianity."[^1] In the Church that living inheritance continues, in a fuller form, in the tradition of Hesychasm.

Sources

[^1]: Fr. Stephen De Young, The Religion of the Apostles — Merkabah mysticism as a Second Temple Jewish throne-chariot tradition (Ezekiel 1), the world St. Paul lived in, later pruned from Rabbinic Judaism and surviving within Christianity.