Ezekiel’s crystal becomes a breakable cosmos
when the heavens were compared to the terrible crystal I can remember a shudder
The wording points specifically to Ezekiel 1:22 in the King James Version: the prophet sees a firmament ‘as the colour of the terrible crystal.’ This is a close verbal echo, not merely another instance of glass imagery. The scene is a vision of divine glory: living creatures and wheels appear below the firmament, a sapphire-like throne above it, and Ezekiel falls on his face at the culmination (1:22–28). Read the KJV passage.
The adjective belongs to the vision’s overwhelming majesty; the passage does not say that the firmament might break or that God might drop it. Chesterton transforms that awe into a remembered fear of cosmic fragility, continuing his movement from fairy-tale glass to the preciousness of existence. Translation matters: the Challoner-revised Douay-Rheims has ‘crystal terrible to behold,’ rather than the KJV’s distinctive phrase. The comparison strengthens identification of the English wording he echoes, without proving which Bible he consulted on this occasion. The witnesses inspected were Project Gutenberg #10 and #1581, not original printing copies. Compare the Douay-Rheims witness, Ezekiel 1:22.
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