The prophetic book of Ezekiel is rich with meaning understood by the Church Fathers, most notably St. Gregory the Great (who wrote voluminously on the opening of the book and on Chapter 40 near the end), as having both historical (literal) and symbolic readings, typical of Orthodox Christian exegesis.
Highlights from the book include the vision near its start (Ezekiel 1) of the four creatures (see iconography below), symbolizing the Four Evangelists, the Cherubim acting as a chariot for God, Christ, and seeming to operate in a different mystical dimension of time and space from our own fallen worldliness. This vision is mentioned again in later places in the book, as they in effect bear aloft the whole vision to Ezekiel, reminding us also of the book’s moral, allegorical, and anagogical (mystical meanings) for Orthodox Christians today. (The four creatures are understood as the Ox symbolic of Luke and the virtue of temperance and Christ’s Crucifixion, the Eagle symbolic of John and the virtue of contemplation or understanding and the Ascension, the Lion symbolic of Mark and courage and the Resurrection, and the Man symbolic of Matthew and prudence or wisdom and the Incarnation.)
Then there is also the “valley of bones” (Ezekiel Chapter 37) prophesying of the Resurrection of the Dead at the Second Coming of Christ and Final Judgement.
But two “anchors” for the prophetic book as a whole are near the start and end of the lengthy prophetic book: The accounts of the desolation of the Temple in Chapters 8-10, where the Glory of God is described as departing from the corrupted abominations of the Davidic Temple in Jerusalem that is to be destroyed by the Babylonians, and later the prophecy of the New Testament Church as the New Jerusalem (Chapter 40 to the end, Chapter 48), where the Glory of God returns to the Temple as the New Jerusalem or the Church. The latter vision is illustrated in this diagram based on the text in Ezekiel from the ESV Study Bible (a key to which is at this link).
Historically, there would come a restoration of the “Second Temple.” But St. Gregory the Great begins his commentary speaking of the spiritual meaning of the vision given to Ezekiel of this new temple-city. Into it will come the Glory of God (understood in Orthodoxy as the uncreated energies or grace of God) from the East Gate (also identified by Church Tradition with the womb of the Theotokos or Mother of God). He wrote around 600:
“Obviously it is by no means possible to accept the building of this city according to the letter…. All these things cannot be literally true. For how is the whole building measured at the same time with a reed, i.e. with six cubits and a hand-breadth, and how can the gates of the building cover fourteen cubits and verily the fronts of the gates sixty cubits? For the gate is in the city and the fronts surely on the gates. And reason does not allow belief that that which contains is less than that which is contained.”
And St. Gregory uses this as an opportunity to teach us how the primary reading of the city in Ezekiel 40-48 must be allegorical and spiritual. Historically, it can be taken as a vision from our Lord to the exiles in Babylon such as the Prophet Ezekiel himself of a coming rebuilding of the Temple, the so-called Second Temple allowed by Cyrus of Persia, which later would be destroyed AD 70 following the rejection of our Lord Jesus Christ by Jewish leaders. Yet the allegorical meaning would be the four-square city (whose meaning is unpacked fully in the Revelation of Jesus Christ to the Evangelist John more than a half millennium later) as the Church realizing Israel. The spiritual or mystical (anagogical) meaning would be that the city is the New Jerusalem, as noted in the Orthodox Study Bible (OSB) comment on the final verse of the text of Ezekiel, following the Septuagint version used by the Orthodox Church:
Ezekiel 48:35. The circumference shall be eighteen thousand cubits; and the name of the city from the day on which it takes place shall be its name.
OSB comment: “The name of the city is the New Jerusalem (Rev. 3:12), the Church, which has been and is now “continuing” (Heb. 13:14) from the day on which Christ took His place in her midst. On the final day when the Lord comes for his Bride, those who overcome will receive a “new name” (Rev. 2:17)–the name of Christ revealed–on their foreheads (Rev. 22:4).” The OSB also describes the reference to the New Jerusalem in Rev. 3:12 as representing “the union of heaven and earth and the liberation of all creation from bondage.” Common elements of the vision of the city in Ezekiel and of the New Jerusalem in Revelation include the four-square spatiality, the waters of life flowing from the center (understood as symbolizing baptism by St. Jerome and others), the twelve gates, and the related “healing of the nations.”
The historical or literal improbability of the details of the vision of Ezekiel described by St. Gregory extends not only to dimensions (to which he assigns symbolic meaning related to the fulfillment of the Old Testament in Orthodox Christian faith) but to the reuniting and restoration of the Twelve Tribes of Israel (related as in Revelation to the 12 gates, whose related 12 foundations are identified with the Twelve Apostles). Not only were most of the tribes lost to history following the earlier Assyrian exile, but the missionary work of the Twelve Apostles identified with the symbolism of the number in the New Testament was primarily in the nations of the Gentiles where most of them were martyred.
From the spiritual standpoint of prophecy, inheriting the land in Ezekiel 48 is not an objectified possession of the maximal boundaries of the historical Davidic kingdom, but the Church including peoples of all nations, in the spiritual land of Promise that involves a restoration of Paradise and the potential of beyond-Paradise lost in the Fall but restored to humanity through the coming of Jesus Christ and the establishment of His Church. The Church as the Body of Christ relates to the Greek term ekklesia, which in the Septuagint is used of the remnant of those worthy to enter the tabernacle, a continuity into the Church as Israel (not of course of biblical Israel as a modern national government as in heretical Protestant Dispensationalism).
The description of the Temple-mountain in Ezekiel’s final vision, at the center of the city, involves an orientation to the Eastern gate, the direction from which the Prince (understood in Church Tradition as a type of Christ), will come to worship. The Eastern gate, which is shut except for the entry of the Lord God, is also understood by the Church Fathers as the womb of the Ever-Virgin Theotokos.
There is a paradox in the directions, in that the faithful in the vision are directed to enter the inner Temple facing west, a direction traditionally associated with the sunset and death (on the West side, the direction of the altar, there is no entry into the Temple, following the pattern given to Moses for the tabernacle on Mount Sinai). The inner temple, as Gregory and other Church Fathers note, can be taken not just in a collective sense of unity or sobornost of worship, but also in terms of the inner heart of the soul, as in the prayer of the heart kindling the spark of God’s love within us. St. Gregory describes the west-facing altar described in the vision in terms of the grace-filled sacrifices and virtues of the righteous man in the Church. He also identifies the altar of the inner temple with Jesus Christ.
Yet the faithful also must be oriented toward the East Gate, whence will come the glory of the Lord returning to the Temple, and from which stands the Prince, the type of Jesys Christ, facing west. With the establishment of the New Testament Church, the orientation of the Church Temple would be changed to be East-West: Orthodox Christian worshippers face East to the mystery of the altar area, now behind the iconostasis, but opened up for the Eucharist. From the East comes our Lord Jesus Christ in the Eucharist, and from there, the rising of the Sun, in living symbolism it is understand that He will come in His Second Coming as well. The entry of the believers (and also the clergy who come to say their entry prayers before going into the altar area) is now in the Christian Temple from the West. That is also a direction symbolically associated with mortality, and death as an outcome of the Fall, from which Christ redeems His followers in the Church.
St. Gregory also describes the relation of the North and East gates in his teaching on Ezekiel’s vision of the Temple complex in the four-square city. The North gate symbolically is associated with the coldness of demonic influence, with sinners and the Gentiles; the East with the remnant or ecclesia of Israel from which Jesus Christ in His human nature would come. The South gate symbolically is associated with the warm of the Holy Spirit. With the East closed, those entering the South must leave by the North, and vice versa, according to Ezekiel’s vision. Perhaps that indicates the unity of the Church, of missionary work, as well as the danger of apostasizing sin, in the type of multiple symbolic levels found by St. Gregory in the mystical vision of the Temple-city.
In terms of the way of worship described in Exekiel 46, the mention of the New Moon services beyond the Sabbath services may be a foreshadowing of the Christian Day of Resurrection on Sunday, the Eighth Day. The moon reflects the Sun’s light, like the Church reflecting the light of Christ, symbolized by the Sun.
The Orthodox Study Bible notes of details of worship mentioned in Ezekiel’s vision: “During the Divine Liturgy, the people gather to worship (v. 9) the Lord and to make a grain offering in the form of bread and wine. The oil (v. 14) signifies the presence of the Holy Spirit. In response, Christ the Prince (v. 8), theLamb of God, enters and is in our midst (v. 10). Just as the Prince goes in and out (v. 8) by the east gate, so Christ came into the world by taking His flesh from His Mother, the Most Holy Theotokos.” The eastern door is shut (44:1) because the Lord God will enter by it (44:2). St. Jerome wrote that in line with this, the womb of the Theotokos “is always shut and always shining, and either concealing or revealing the Holy of Holies; and through her ‘the Sun of Righteousness,’ our ‘high priest after the order of Melchizedek,’ goes in and out” (quoted in the OSB for 44:1-4). The Church’s commemoration of the Entry of the Theotokos into the Temple includes the verse: “Today the house of God receives the Gate through which no one may pass; so it has brought an end to the worship commanded by the shadow of the Law.” The identification of this prophecy with the Orthodox teaching of the ever-virginity of the Theotokos was even understood still by many early Protestant leaders (Luther, Calvin, John Wesley), although this Orthodox Tradition like much else has since been lost in heterodox Western sects.
The description of the water flowing from the Temple, fully realized later in the Apocalypse or Book of Revelation at the end of Scripture, involves as St. Jerome notes a prophecy of Holy Baptism in the Church, as he reminds us that the whole vision by God to Ezekiel rests on the cherubim of the four creatures fulfilled in the Four Evangelists and Gospels . “In the vision of the prophet Ezekiel there is seen above the cherubim a crystal stretched forth, that is, the compressed and denser waters. The first living beings come out of the waters; and believers soar out of the laver with wings to heaven [Exekiel 1:22-25]…. In Eden a garden is planted, and a fountain in the midst of it parts into four heads [Genesis 2:10]. This is the same fountain which Ezekiel later on describes as issuing out of the temple and flowing towards the rising of the sun, until it heals the bitter waters and quickens those that are dead” (quoted in the OSB, Ezekiel 47:1-23 note).
So the sacred threads of Holy Scripture in the Orthodox Church link Genesis through Ezekiel and all the way through the New Testament to Revelation, in readings guided by the Church Fathers that are at once historical, moral (in personal lessons of sacrifice for Christ), allegorical (about the Church as Israel), and anagogical (showing forth the New Jerusalem shown forth in the Church but yet to fully come).
Glory to God!
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See also the video summary of the St. John-Bucknell Orthodox Christian Community Bible Study on this section of Ezekiel below.