Ezekiel.
Ezekiel.
§ 154. Ezekiel, 
, means “strength of God.” Theodoret (commentary on Ezek. 1:3) notes that he could boast of two gifts: both “priesthood and prophecy.” He prophesied at the same time as Jeremiah, but he lived in the city of Babylon, while Jeremiah lived in Jerusalem. The author of the preface to Marsilius Patavinus’s Defens. writes the following about him:
By revelation of the Holy Spirit he foresaw the four Gospels about six hundred years before Christ’s incarnation. He uttered a perfect prophecy of the four Gospels with a similitude of four animals, the first of which was a man; the second, a lion; the third, a calf; and the fourth, an eagle. In each of these, each mystery regarding Christ is figured: in the face of a man, His birth in the flesh; in that of the lion, the roaring of the preaching of the Gospel or the mystery of His resurrection; in that of the calf, the eternal priesthood; in that of the eagle, the mystery of spreading His divinity, which had to be published to the Church throughout the world.
Gregory’s statement is in harmony with this: “Our Redeemer: a man by His birth, a calf by His death, a lion by His resurrection, an eagle by His ascension.” Nevertheless others explain that prophetic vision in other ways. (See Justin, Quaest. et resp. ad orthod., q. 44, p. 325.)
** Ezekiel died in Chaldea at the hands of a leading man of his own people whom he had reproached because of his idolatry. After his slaying, he was buried in the land of the Spyrii [Spyriorum] in the district of Maur in the tomb of Shem and Arphaxad, the ancestor of Abraham. **
According to Jerome (Epistle ad Paulin. and the introduction to bk. 1 of his commentary on Ezekiel), among the Jews, no one is allowed to read the beginning of Genesis or the Song of Songs or the beginning and end of Ezekiel until he has reached the age of the priestly ministry, that is, his thirtieth year.
It has forty-eight chapters in which we have, with the exception of a prologue, a prophecy partly rebuking, partly comforting.