I was walking the lakefront with Denise last Saturday morning - one of those gray Chicago days where the lake looks like hammered pewter and you can smell rain coming - and I had Ezekiel playing through my earbuds. Denise asked me why I was making faces. I told her the prophet was describing a valley full of dry bones reassembling themselves, sinew by sinew, and God was asking, "Son of man, can these bones live?" She said, "That sounds like horror." And honestly? She's not wrong.
This is Ezekiel. It's the weirdest, most visually staggering book in the Old Testament, and if you've never actually sat with it - really sat with it, all 48 chapters - you're missing one of the most extraordinary pieces of ancient literature ever composed.
The Wheelwork of Ancient Surrealism
Let me be clear about what this is: a LibriVox recording of the King James Version of Ezekiel, read by J L Raimundo. That means it's free, it's volunteer-produced, and it's the KJV, which is itself a 400-year-old literary monument. The prose deserves to be savored, and at 3 hours and 7 minutes, it's a manageable commitment even for people who think the Bible is strictly Sunday morning territory.
What struck me - what always strikes me when I return to Ezekiel - is how cinematic the imagery is. Forget the flannel-graph Sunday School version. This is a book that opens with a vision of four living creatures, each with four faces (human, lion, ox, eagle), wheels within wheels covered in eyes, and something like a throne made of sapphire hovering above them. Chapters 1 and 10 read like science fiction. My students, the ones who devour fantasy novels but roll their eyes at anything "old," would lose their minds over these passages. The imagery is Lovecraftian before Lovecraft. It's Dante before Dante.
And then it pivots. Hard. Into prophetic judgment. City after city - Tyre, Sidon, Egypt - gets detailed, specific condemnation. The extended metaphor in chapter 16, where Jerusalem is compared to an abandoned infant raised by God only to become unfaithful? It's brutal, uncomfortable, and shockingly intimate. The violence isn't sanitized. This is why we still read the classics - because they refuse to look away from the ugly parts of being human.
What Raimundo Does (and Doesn't Do) With All That Fire
Here's where I have to be honest about the limitations. Raimundo's narration is steady and clear. You can understand every word, which with KJV syntax is no small thing - those nested clauses and archaic constructions can trip up even experienced readers. But the performance stays pretty level throughout. Ezekiel is a book of wild emotional swings - ecstatic vision, grinding lament, furious accusation, tender promise - and the reading doesn't always shift register to match.
The narrator understands that pause is punctuation in some places, particularly during the more declarative prophecies. The repeated "Thus saith the Lord GOD" lands with appropriate weight most of the time. I reviewed Unshakable Hope a while back, and one thing that book does well is sit with those declarative divine promises - though it never has to wrestle with anything remotely as strange as what comes next. But when you hit the valley of dry bones in chapter 37 - arguably the most dramatic scene in all of prophetic literature - I wanted more theater. More breath. More of the strangeness that the text itself demands. It's competent reading rather than interpretation, and with material this vivid, that feels like a missed opportunity.
That said, this is a free LibriVox recording, and comparing it to professionally produced dramatized versions isn't really fair. For what it is, it serves the text with respect and clarity.
The English Teacher's Confession
I assigned Ezekiel excerpts to my juniors last year as part of a unit on literary influence - tracing the imagery forward through Dante, Blake, Cormac McCarthy. (My students would hate this. I love it.) Half of them were genuinely disturbed by the wheel-creature visions. The other half wanted to know if Ezekiel was "on something." Both reactions, I'd argue, are the correct ones. The book is meant to unsettle you.
Listening to it straight through, rather than in cherry-picked passages, reveals something I'd forgotten: how much of it is architectural. Chapters 40 through 48 are essentially a blueprint for a restored temple, measured out in cubits with the precision of an engineer. It's dry. I won't pretend otherwise. But there's something almost meditative about hearing those measurements accumulate - this vision of sacred order emerging after forty chapters of judgment and catastrophe.
If you loved the KJV Psalms or Isaiah for their poetry, Ezekiel is their stranger, more unsettling cousin. If you're approaching this purely as literature - which is absolutely valid - it's a masterclass in sustained metaphor and prophetic rhetoric that influenced twenty-five centuries of Western writing.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For?
At 3 hours, this is a focused listen that rewards attention but won't consume your week. The narration is serviceable rather than revelatory, and the free price point means the barrier to entry is basically zero. For serious Bible listeners, literature nerds, or anyone who's ever been curious about where all those "wheel within a wheel" references come from - give it a morning walk. Just be prepared to make faces. Denise will understand.
