The Lord is here portrayed as the divine warrior, a familiar portrayal in ancient Near Eastern religion and art (and in the Bible as well, for example, in Ex 15; 1Kgs. 18,41-46; 19, 1-18). How much more effective and "true" is Ezekiel's mythic-historical report of his experience in 1, 3-3, 15 than a bare and unadorned statement that the Lord had appeared to him! Ezekiel's language conveys a sense of the transcendent. The mythic motifs are not mere decoration, however. They occur within a story, called by modern scholars " the combat myth," which was widely known in the ancient Near East from the third millennium BC to well into the common era. Ezekiel assumes that his hearers and readers know the story.
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