Wheels with eyes? Four-faced creatures with wings and human hands? Bones that morph into muscle and flesh? It's an acid trip! It's a David Lynch movie! It's…the Book of Ezekiel! Next to the Book of Revelation, Ezekiel's probably the weirdest and most dramatic book of the Hebrew Bible. It combines far-out visions, judgments of violent destruction and death, and predictions of peace and consolation into a spicy prophetic gumbo. Ezekiel makes the other prophets seem almost tame by comparison, with his mysterious four-faced creatures, strange sexual imagery, and giant wheels in the sky.

Like the other Major Prophets, Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ezekiel lived in turbulent times (around the beginning of the 6th century BCE) and was a witness to the Babylonian exile of the Judeans. His book likely contains many of his authentic prophecies, though there were probably contributions by a school of prophets who followed him as well. This makes him a little different from important prophets like Isaiah and Daniel, whose books are largely compilations created over time.

Ezekiel was trying to explain why God was letting this catastrophe happen to his people. His God-of-Wrath version of the Deity is seething with rage over Israel's cheatin' ways. He subjects Ezekiel to all kinds of strange experiences to demonstrate the doom that's going to befall Israel as punishment for idolatry and immorality. Ezekiel's really concerned with observance of the rituals and laws of the Temple. Yet at the same time, he's an intense visionary. His famous vision of God's chariot in Chapter 1 inspired countless mystics and poets in the Jewish and Christian traditions. His trances and behavior were so bizarre that some commentators thought he was psychotic and hallucinating.

Even the ancient sages who assembled the final form of the Hebrew Bible almost didn't include Ezekiel. It was just too strange and troubling, and it contradicted some of the rules in Leviticus. But they eventually thought it worth including, so here it is.

Can anyone who inspired Quentin Tarantino be completely in his right mind? Make no mistake; this is a pretty disturbing book. Check out Ezekiel's visions and see if you think he's a little crazy or the real deal. Fasten your seat belts, Shmoopers—it's gonna be a bumpy ride.

Remember that time when you thought you saw Elvis in the cafeteria? Or that time after pulling an all-nighter that you saw those four-faced flying creatures riding in chariots with strange mystical wheels? Ezekiel will probably help put that experience in perspective. The Book of Ezekiel describes what it's like to suddenly encounter someone or something completely strange and different from everything you've known and experienced up until that point. In Zeke's case, the encounter is with "the glory of God," which appears above that four-faced chariot wheel thing. This encounter might seem bizarre or like nonsense at first, but in studying it, you start to find hidden layers of meaning.

Ezekiel might help you confront the strange and uncanny in your own lives. Most of us only experience stuff this strange in our dreams. But unexplainable things and premonitions happen all the time, even if they're not as dramatic as hearing God talking to you or getting magically transported to a different city. Maybe you've just had a strong feeling that you should call a friend you haven't seen in a while. Or somehow had a really bad feeling about something for no apparent reason. What would you do if something hugely mysterious happened to you or a friend? After you were done freaking out, would you try to understand it? Forget about it? Blog about it? Maybe you'd become more religious because of it. It's human nature to try to make sense out of things that don't make sense.

Ezekiel's big on the cryptic and mysterious, but his book gets fairly shocking at times; very violent and some would even say pornographic. We're not saying that's a reason you should care about Ezekiel, but that imagery adds to the mind-blowing experience of reading it. Why hide a copy of "Tales from the Crypt" in your math textbook, like a 1950s school-kid, when you can sneak in a copy of Ezekiel?