Catholic Commentary
The Wooden Altar — The Table Before the Lord
21The door posts of the nave were squared. As for the face of the nave, its appearance was as the appearance of the temple.22The altar was of wood, three cubits high, and its length two cubits. Its corners, its base, and its walls were of wood. He said to me, “This is the table that is before Yahweh.”
Ezekiel 41:21–22 describes the architectural details of the visionary temple's nave, featuring squared doorposts that signify cosmic order, and a wooden altar-table three cubits high standing before Yahweh. The passage identifies this wooden structure simultaneously as both an altar and a table, fusing the concepts of sacrifice and meal into a single sacred object that prefigures Christ's redemptive work.
In the grandest visionary temple in all of Scripture, God draws closest at a small wooden table—not through bronze monuments, but through humble, organic matter.
Ezekiel 41:21 — Squared Doorposts and the Face of the Nave
The visionary temple described in Ezekiel 40–48 is one of the most architecturally precise passages in all of Scripture. In verse 21, the prophet notes that "the doorposts of the nave were squared" — that is, they were foursquare, perfectly rectangular in form. The Hebrew word for "squared" (merubbā') carries connotations of completion, order, and solidity. The fourfold square is a recurring feature of sacred space in Ezekiel's vision: the outer court, the altar, the temple platform, and the city itself (48:20) all share this geometry. This is not mere architectural description. In the ancient Near East, the squared form of sacred thresholds signified that one was entering a realm of cosmic order set apart from the chaos of the profane world.
The phrase "the face of the nave" — its appearance — mirrors "the appearance of the temple." Ezekiel repeatedly uses the word mar'eh (appearance, vision) throughout his book (cf. 1:1; 8:4; 40:3), signaling that what he sees is both real and revelatory: it participates in divine reality without being exhausted by the material form. The nave (hêkāl) is the outer holy place, the room fronting the Holy of Holies, and the correspondence between its appearance and the temple as a whole signals a fractal holiness — each part reflects and contains the whole.
Ezekiel 41:22 — The Wooden Altar: Dimensions, Materials, and Identity
The altar described here — three cubits high, two cubits long — is conspicuously modest compared to the great bronze altar of burnt offering in the outer court (Ezek 43:13–17). Its defining feature is its material: wood ('ēṣ), mentioned three times in the verse with unmistakable emphasis: "its corners, its base, and its walls were of wood." This repetition is deliberate. The wooden altar stands in contrast to the stone and bronze elsewhere in the visionary temple.
Interpreters have long identified this altar with the table of showbread (Exod 25:23–30) or the incense altar (Exod 30:1–5) of the Mosaic tabernacle, both of which were also made of acacia wood. The angelic identification seals the matter: "This is the table (shulḥān) that is before Yahweh." The shift from "altar" (mizbeaḥ) to "table" (shulḥān) within the same verse is theologically electric. What had been called an altar is named a table. The two concepts — sacrifice and meal, offering and nourishment — are here fused in a single wooden structure standing in the presence of God.
Typological and Spiritual Senses
The wood of this altar-table resonates across the entire biblical canon. Wood is the material of sacred encounter: Noah's ark, the acacia wood of the Ark of the Covenant and the tabernacle furniture, and, supremely, the wood of the Cross. The Fathers consistently read the wooden instruments of the Old Testament as prefiguring the Cross of Christ. If this wooden table stands "before Yahweh" in Ezekiel's vision, it points forward to the altar-table of every Catholic church, itself understood as both the place of sacrificial offering (altar) and the table of the Eucharistic banquet (table). Catholic liturgical tradition has preserved both designations precisely because the Mass is simultaneously sacrifice and meal — the one inseparable from the other.
The three cubits of height may be read spiritually as the Trinity into whose name the Eucharistic sacrifice is offered, though such numerological readings must remain subordinate to the literal and typological senses. More concretely, the smallness and simplicity of this wooden structure within the grandest visionary temple in prophecy suggests that the most intimate encounter with God is mediated not through monumental bronze and stone, but through humble, organic wood — the wood that will one day become the instrument of salvation.
Catholic tradition illuminates this passage with particular richness through its theology of the altar as simultaneously sacrificial table and locus of Real Presence. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "the altar, around which the Church is gathered in the celebration of the Eucharist, represents the two aspects of the same mystery: the altar of the sacrifice and the table of the Lord" (CCC §1383). Ezekiel's visionary altar-table, explicitly called both mizbeaḥ and shulḥān, is a striking Old Testament adumbration of precisely this twofold Catholic doctrine.
St. Cyprian of Carthage and later St. John Chrysostom both reflected on the altar as the table of Christ's body, drawing direct connections between the Old Testament altar of presence and the Eucharistic table. Origen, in his homilies on Ezekiel (Hom. in Ez. XIV), reads the inner sanctuary furnishings as figures of the spiritual worship of the New Covenant, in which the priest-prophet offers not animal sacrifice but the pure oblation of the Logos.
The Second Vatican Council's Sacrosanctum Concilium (§48) renewed emphasis on full, active, conscious participation in the Eucharistic sacrifice — and the image of a wooden table set intimately "before Yahweh" supports this vision of liturgy as close, personal, covenantal encounter rather than distant ceremonialism. Malachi's prophecy of a "pure offering" offered in every place (Mal 1:11), traditionally read in Catholic liturgical commentary as referring to the Mass, finds its Old Testament architectural symbol in this small wooden altar set within Ezekiel's eschatological temple.
The wood itself carries Christological weight in patristic typology. St. Justin Martyr and St. Irenaeus both saw the wood of Old Testament sacred furnishings as figures of the Cross (Adversus Haereses V.17). The wooden altar "before Yahweh" thus becomes a prophetic silhouette of Christ crucified, whose sacrificed body is simultaneously the altar, the offering, and the food of the new Israel.
For a Catholic today, Ezekiel's vision of a small wooden table standing quietly "before Yahweh" amid the grandeur of a visionary temple is a profound corrective to both liturgical aestheticism and spiritual minimalism. Every Catholic church contains its own version of this wooden altar-table: the altar at which the Mass is celebrated, at once the place of Christ's sacrifice and the table of His Body and Blood. Too often, regular Mass attendance can dull the worshipper to the staggering reality of what that table is.
Ezekiel's angel does not say, "This is a piece of furniture," or "This is a ritual station." He says, "This is the table before Yahweh" — it is defined entirely by its orientation toward God. This challenges each Catholic to approach the altar, and the Eucharist received from it, with renewed intentionality: Am I arriving at Mass conscious that I am approaching the table of the living God? The simplicity of the wood — not gold, not marble — also speaks: the most sacred encounter in Catholic life happens not through spectacle, but through humble, incarnate matter elevated by divine presence. Regular, attentive, reverent participation in the Mass is the concrete application this passage demands.
Commentary