And yet alongside this caution there also existed considerable enthusiasm. The Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach refers explicitly to Ezekiel’s vision of God (Sir 49:8). The heavenly chariot became an important inspiration for the merkabah (“chariot”) mysticism of later Jewish piety, in which the chariot began to figure as a symbol in the instructions given to the devout in order to achieve heavenly visions; this explains why the chariot appears in various apocalypses (Dan 7–8, the Apocalypse of Abraham
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