Ezekiel stands apart from most other prophetic books in how confidently scholars, traditional and critical alike, attribute it to a single historical figure: the priest Ezekiel, deported to Babylon in an earlier wave of exile before Jerusalem's final fall, whose dated visions, tied to specific years of the exile beginning in 593 BCE, give the book an internal chronology unusually precise for prophetic literature. His priestly background shows throughout, in his exacting concern for the Temple's purity and precise architectural detail, and in his vision of a rebuilt sanctuary that closes the book, material that later became foundational for the Jewish mystical tradition known as Merkabah, or "chariot," mysticism, named directly for Ezekiel's opening throne vision.
The book's unusual concentration of bizarre, demanding symbolic imagery led the rabbis of the Mishnah to debate restricting who could study certain sections, particularly the opening chariot vision and the closing Temple vision, out of concern that untrained readers might misuse or misunderstand material they judged spiritually dangerous, a caution applied to Ezekiel more than to any other canonical book yet never amounting to exclusion from the canon itself. Critical scholarship's remaining debates concern less whether Ezekiel existed than how much of the book's final, highly organized structure reflects the prophet's own editing versus a later school working in his name and tradition.