Tool Beta
The Gods of the Bible
Every named divine being in Scripture, what the text calls it, and what the ancient world thought it was.
Ophanim
The wheels full of eyes in Ezekiel's vision, which later tradition turned into a class of angel.
Ezekiel 1:15-21, in every translation this tool compares.
Wheels, full of eyes, moving alongside the creatures and sharing their spirit. Ezekiel never says whether they are beings or the machinery of the throne. Later Jewish tradition made the call for him and filed them as a rank of angel.
Wheels full of eyes that move with the living creatures and have the spirit of the creatures in them. Whether they are beings or throne machinery is unclear in Ezekiel and only gets settled in later tradition.
H212 (אוֹפָן), 35 occ (a common noun for "wheel"; 25 of the 35 are in Ezekiel, and the rest are ordinary chariot and potter's wheels)
1 Enoch 71:7 lists ophanim with cherubim and seraphim as a class of being ("the sleepless ones who guard the throne of his glory"), a later development and not Ezekiel's own framing.
Beings or machinery. Ezekiel gives the wheels the spirit of the living creatures and never settles which they are. 1 Enoch 71:7 lists them with cherubim and seraphim as a class of being, and that is a later step, not Ezekiel's own. DDD has no article on them, so the scholarly case on either side is thinner here than for most cards.
- Ezekiel 1:15-21
- Ezekiel 3:13
- Ezekiel 10:6-19
- Cooper, *Ezekiel*, NAC, 17:68
- Faithlife Study Bible on Ezekiel 1. DDD has no article for ophanim, only a bare cross-reference to "Angels" (648), and the wheels are under-theorized in the academic literature as well.
