Of everything described in scripture, the Ophanim are the hardest to picture. They are not humanoid. They have no face and no wings. They are wheels, and the wheels are covered in eyes.
Where they appear
Ezekiel sees them in his opening vision, beside the four living creatures. He describes a wheel on the ground next to each creature, and says each wheel appeared to be a wheel intersecting a wheel — the phrase usually rendered as a wheel within a wheel.
Their rims are described as high and awesome, and full of eyes all around.
They move with the creatures rather than under their own direction, rising when the creatures rise, because the spirit of the living creatures is in the wheels. They travel in any direction without turning.
The name
Ophanim comes from the Hebrew word for wheels. Ezekiel is not naming a species so much as describing an object, and later tradition turned the description into a title.
In the nine-order hierarchy assembled in the fifth or sixth century, they became the Thrones — the third order of the first sphere, sitting just below the Seraphim and Cherubim. The shift in name reflects a shift in reading: from wheels that carry a throne to beings that are themselves a kind of seat for divine presence.
The language strains
The most striking thing about Ezekiel chapter one is not the imagery. It is how often the prophet hedges.
He repeatedly says things looked like something — the appearance of, the likeness of, something with the look of. He is describing an object for which he has no adequate vocabulary, and he says so by implication on almost every line.
That hedging is why the Ophanim have been drawn so many different ways. There is no settled image, because the source text deliberately refuses to give one.
Eyes on the rims
The eyes are the detail that unsettles people most, and they are the detail most often left out of illustrations.
Read plainly, eyes all around means the thing sees in every direction at once, permanently. Combined with wheels that move any direction without turning, you get a being with no front, no back, and no blind spot. Nothing about it is oriented toward you, and nothing about it is oriented away.
A later vision in Revelation describes four living creatures covered with eyes in front and behind, which suggests the motif was doing consistent work: total awareness, rendered as an excess of eyes.
Why they are hard to draw
Most attempts fail in one of two ways. Either the artist makes a clean geometric diagram that loses all the dread, or they make something so chaotic it stops reading as an object at all.
The difficulty is that the text describes something both mechanical and alive. A wheel is an engineered thing. Eyes are not.
Our version
The Thrones design is the finest hatching in the collection. Interlocking rings rimmed with eyes, set inside a burst of radiating lines, drawn entirely by hand by Olivia over several weeks and printed large across the back.
It is the piece that took longest, and the one most likely to make someone look twice.
See the Thrones hoodie or the Thrones shirt.
For the full hierarchy and where the nine orders come from, see what biblically accurate angels actually look like.
Read it yourself
Ezekiel 1, verses 15 to 21, then Ezekiel 10, verses 9 to 17. Revelation 4 for the later vision. Daniel 7 describes a throne with wheels of burning fire, which is where some of the imagery overlaps.