Ezekiel son of Buzi, a priest, was taken with the first deportation to Babylon in 597 BC. By the river Chebar, in the fifth year of his exile, the heavens opened and he saw the visions of God — the chariot-throne borne by four living creatures with four faces, the wheels within wheels filled with eyes (Ezek 1).
His prophecies announce both judgment and restoration. He saw the glory of the Lord depart from the Temple before its destruction (Ezek 10), and saw it return in a new Temple in his final vision (Ezek 43). He proclaimed the coming of a good shepherd over God's flock (Ezek 34), prefiguring Christ. The vision of the valley of dry bones (Ezek 37) is the Church's principal Old Testament reading on resurrection.
Tradition holds he was martyred in Babylon by a prince of the exiled people whom he had rebuked for idolatry. His tomb at Al-Kifl in modern Iraq, venerated by Jews and Muslims, has been a pilgrimage site for two and a half thousand years.