The Word Out of the Midst of the Fire

Chashmal is the substance Ezekiel names at the very beginning of his vision. A stormwind comes out of the north with a great cloud and fire flashing back on itself, and out of the middle of the fire there is something the text calls the eye of chashmal. The word returns twice more in the book, once describing the appearance of the figure on the throne and once at the opening of the eighth chapter, and it appears nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible.

What it means has never been settled. The Greek translators rendered it elektron, which in ancient usage covers both amber and the pale alloy of gold and silver, and the Latin followed with electrum; the English versions that say amber are following that line. The rabbinic tradition treated the word as among the most dangerous in scripture to expound, and a passage in the Talmud's discussion of the chariot vision tells of a child who studied the chashmal and was consumed by fire that came out of it.

Modern Hebrew took the same word for electricity, which is a revival choice of the last two centuries rather than anything the prophet meant, though an association with brightness and with a substance that is neither quite metal nor quite fire made it an easy one. The angelic rank named from it inherits all of this: the chashmalim are the order named after a word whose sense the tradition itself declined to fix.