Living Creatures

Marc Chagall’s striking portrayal of the living creatures of Ezekiel 1 is one of a sequence on biblical themes. Though he has not been without his nuanced critics (e.g. Rosen 2009), Chagall has been widely regarded as ‘the quintessential Jewish artist of the 20th century’ (Hughes 1988). The passage presents a vision of the God of Israel in alien Babylonia, the place of Jewish exile: ‘as I was among the exiles … the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God’ (1:1). The chapter is an important one within Christianity and even more so within Judaism. It is the tap root of a mystical tradition and fundamental to the apocalyptic tradition. Ezekiel’s vision recounts a great cloud with brightness and fire, in the midst of which are four mysterious ‘living creatures’ (v.5), perhaps angels of some kind. Over their heads is a dome, above that a throne, and seated above the throne ‘a likeness as it were of a human form’ (v.26), which is said to be the ‘appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD’ (v.28). The living creatures are of human form (v.5), with human hands (v.8), and the face of a human being (v.10). But they also have wings (v.6), feet like calves (v.7), and a plurality of faces: those of a lion, an ox, and an eagle, as well as of a human. The most distinctive feature of Chagall’s presentation is that he gives breasts to the figure with the human face. The Hebrew word for ‘living creature’ is feminine, as indeed is the word for ‘wing’, and this grammatical feature may be part of the explanation. But the language is intriguing; when in verse 9 we read ‘Their wings touched one another’, the Hebrew for ‘one another’ is literally ‘a woman to her sister’. Though the living creatures do not directly represent the deity (that comes in vv.26–28), it may be relevant that the Hebrew Bible employs female imagery of the divine in a number of places, and indeed in Genesis 1 the deity appears to transcend gender: ‘…in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them’ (Genesis 1:27). In giving his human figure breasts, Chagall shares something of the freedom and imagination of the Jewish tradition of midrash, going back long before feminist criticism and yet speaking to its sensibilities (see Norris 2007). References Hughes, Robert. 1988. ‘Fiddler on the Roof of Modernism: Marc Chagall: 1887–1985, 8 April 1988’, Time Magazine Norris, Sally E. 2007. ‘The Imaginative Effects of Ezekiel’s Merkavah Vision’, Between the Text and the Canvas: The Bible and Art in Dialogue, ed. by J. Cheryl Exum and Ela Nutu (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix), pp.80–94 Rosen, Aaron. 2009. Imagining Jewish Art: Encounters with the Masters in Chagall, Guston, and Kitai, Studies in Comparative Literature (London: Legenda)