The square, four-fold form of Ezekiel’s Temple jumps out at anyone who sees a diagram of its layout, such as those cycling on the Home Page of this website, and within its articles. Less apparent is how that same pattern is reflected in miniature in Ezekiel’s square, four-horned altar of burnt offering at the center of his Temple, where the two Temple axes cross in the inner court. This altar is not just central to the Temple in its physical position, but its significance as well. In Israel’s desert Tabernacle and later First Temple (destroyed during the time of Ezekiel’s ministry to the exiles in Babylon) the most significant place was the 20x20 cubit Holy of Holies, which held the Ark of the Covenant. That was where the blood of the sacrifices for sin and guilt was sprinkled on Yom Kippur, the annual Day of Atonement. But Ezekiel says nothing about Yom Kippur, or a high priest to sprinkle sacrificial blood, or an Ark, or gold cherubim, or anything else inside his Holy of Holies. It’s just an empty room in his prophetic plan.
Some commentators think we are supposed to “read into” Ezekiel those omitted things, saying he just “took them for granted.” However, many other things Ezekiel does mention are different from the Tabernacle or First Temple. His Temple’s square overall shape and unique bi-axial circulation system are only the beginning of a list that extends down into the details of its priesthood and sacrifices. Some will say that everything not specifically “updated” by these new details must remain the same, but there is also reason to think the omissions were purposeful, reflecting coming changes in covenant administration. The Tabernacle and First Temple were intended by God for the old Sinai covenant that Israel “broke” (Jeremiah 31:31-2). Jeremiah 3:16-17 foretold a day when the Ark of the Covenant would no longer be built or remembered—no longer be the centerpiece of Israel’s religion—in a day when Judah and Ephraim would be rejoined and Jerusalem would be called “the Throne of the LORD.” That is the very day Ezekiel spoke of (Ezek. 37:19, 43:7) as the day of his Ark-less Temple—the day of the “new covenant” of Jeremiah 31, a covenant “different from” the old one, for the “new spirit” of Ezekiel 36-37. Christians will see this as part of a progression leading to the New Jerusalem of Revelation 21-22, in which John sees no Temple at all, because God and the Lamb are its Temple.
According with that new spirit, Ezekiel’s central altar, which also measures 20x20 cubits (not across its top hearth, but its lower perimeter gutter and curbs), receives the emphasis in his description that the Holy of Holies did in the biblical passages about the Tabernacle and First Temple. His detailed description of this altar in his chapter 43 comes in the middle of his Temple Vision, the first thing following Ezekiel’s divine commission to tell Israel about his vision. And immediately before that, in 43:1-5, Ezekiel described seeing the divine Presence (which he’d first seen in his chapter 1 “Chariot” Vision) arriving at his visionary Temple and coming into its inner court and filling the Temple with God’s Glory.
Ezekiel’s four-horned central altar, described just after God’s Presence arrived, echoes the four-foldness of the divine chariot that faded from the vision upon delivering the Glory to the inner court. Ezekiel’s “chariot” had four cherubim below it, each with four wings—two covering its body and two extending to touch those of its two neighboring cherubs, much as the two gold cherubs in the First Temple spanned its Holy of Holies, wingtips touching in the center. And each of the cherubs had four faces. The Jewish Study Bible (p.1047) notes the relationship of Ezekiel’s four-fold altar to the chariot’s four-fold cherubim, saying the “number four” that characterizes the cherubim “presupposes the four horns of the Temple altar,” and by means of the “four winds” or cardinal directions represents “God’s presence in the Temple at the center of creation.” Christians in fact use the cross symbol to express the universality of the gospel, suggesting the “four winds” from which believers are drawn by God (Ezek. 37:9-10, Luke 13:29, John 12:32), and to which they take the Good News. And they do view Jesus’ cross at the earth’s “navel” (Ezek. 38:12) and “crossroads” as the “center of creation” from which the world’s reconciliation and ultimate re-creation comes (Col. 1:20)—as it recalls the shame He publicly endured on it, bearing its curse (Deut. 21:22-3), becoming a curse and sin for us (Gal. 3:13, 2 Cor. 5:21).
Jesus’ altar-cross of reconciliation is seen in Psalm 118:27—”Bind the festal offering to the horns of the altar with cords” (New JPS Tanakh, translated similarly in the ArtScroll and Koren Tanakhs, Robert Alter’s The Hebrew Bible, and many Christian Bible versions.) The Jewish Study Bible (p.1415) suggests this verse was a direction for Temple priests that got absorbed into the text of the psalm, though the late scholar Amos Hacham saw no evidence of a sacrifice being bound to the altar’s horns in the Bible or Talmud. The Judaica (Rosenberg) translation portrays the sacrificial animal as first being bound with ropes, then led to the altar’s corners (without saying why in any Temple ritual.) The Moznaim Living Nach gives the reader a choice: “Bind the festival offering with thick cords [and bring it] to the corners of the altar,” letting one select the first idea by disregarding the editor’s alternate suggestion in brackets.
But Ezekiel’s prophetic Temple plan offers a meaning for that verse that accounts for both the binding of the offering and the ritual significance of the horns. Ps. 118:27 comes just two verses before the end of the entire Hallel (Psalms 113-118) that is traditionally sung in the Haggadah for Passover Seders and services. Jesus would have closed His “last supper” Passover Seder the evening before He died by leading His disciples in singing that verse—about the binding of the sacrifice to the horns—at the end of the final Hallel psalm (Mark 14:12, 26). Shortly after that, He went to Gethsemane to pray about the coming morning, just hours away, when He as the Paschal Lamb of God would be “bound” as a “festal offering” to the four horns of Ezekiel’s altar, His four extremities bound to a wooden cross with the “cords” of Roman nails.
(A different translation of Ps. 118:27 in the older 1913 JPS Tanakh and Christian NIV assumes a Feast of Tabernacles context for the Hallel, involving processions with palm branch lulavs, and hence would tend to make that verse less relevant to Passover than to Sukkot.)
When Christians say Jesus’ death fulfilled Isaiah 53:10—the Suffering Servant becoming a guilt offering (asham) for Israel—some object that His blood would had to have been shed on a proper altar in accord with Leviticus chapter 4. But Ezekiel’s altar was such an altar, and His blood dripped from His two hands and two feet onto the “four horns” of that spiritual—but very real—altar, just as the Talmud (BT Yevachim 53a) says a priest sprinkled a finger’s worth of blood on each of the four horns. (Technically that was for the “sin” [hata’t] offering, but the Jewish Study Bible [p.217] suggests the blood application for the asham was the same.)
Consider then Psalm 22:17. After most translations say, “evil doers enclose me,” Christian Bibles then say (with the ancient Greek translation, the Septuagint), “they pierce my hands and my feet”—obviously suggesting the crucifixion. Jewish translations from the Hebrew Masoretic Text (NJPS, Living Nach, etc.) have, “Like a lion [they maul] my hands and feet.” To Christians, that also suggests Christ’s sufferings, bound to a cross, with the lion’s teeth or claws corresponding to the (maul-driven) nails tearing into His hands and feet. The Living Nach quotes the 19th century commentator Malbin’s paraphrase—”so that I can neither fight nor flee,” suggesting one pinned by the lion’s forceful attack. The Koren Tanakh translates 22:17, “they seize my hands and my feet like a lion” (italics added). Similarly, Alter translates, “a pack of the evil encircled me, they bound my hands and my feet” (italics added.)
Psalms 118 and 22 recall another binding, the Akedah, or binding of Isaac in Genesis 22. Most Jewish translations say God asked Abraham to bind and offer “your son, your only son, whom you love,” or “your son, your only one….” as a burnt offering. The Jewish Study Bible (p.46) notes the “enormous power” the story gets from Isaac carrying the wood for the fire, noting how the Genesis Rabbah midrash likened that to one “who carries his cross on his own shoulder.” Jesus started out carrying at least the beam of His cross to Calvary. If Maimonides was right that Ezekiel’s altar had to be at the very spot of the Akedah, then Jesus carried His wooden cross-piece where Isaac carried his wooden pieces. God stopped Abraham from slaying his only, beloved son, providing a ram caught in a thicket as a substitute. But God did not stop the binding and sacrifice of His only, beloved son on Ezekiel’s central altar of burnt offering.
As Jesus settled with His Father in Gethsemane, there was no other way He could win His people forgiveness for their sins and eternal life than by suffering and dying on Ezekiel’s altar at the spot where Isaac had been set free. There He won Christians, as believer-priests, the right to go in Him not only into the Temple’s priestly inner court, but its holiest spaces (Hebrews chs. 4,6,10), experiencing intimate fellowship with His Father in prayer and the Lord’s Supper that He instituted in that Passover Seder before the cross. In Him, with Him, believers are heirs of all things, knowing today the spiritual power of His resurrection (Rom. 8:32, Eph. 1:19-20). Dear reader, do you know that power in your life? Repent and trust Jesus today, and He promises you will.
The above post is largely excerpted from the first section of the author’s longer article, “Ezekiel’s Temple and the Christian Gospels” on the Free Articles page. Additional details are also in Part 2, “Jesus in the Temple” in his “Christian midrash” articles (also on the Free Articles page.)