The Stones Worn as a Covering and the Stones Laid as a Foundation
Old Testament: Ezechiel 28:13
Thou wast in the pleasures of the paradise of God: every precious stone was thy covering: the sardius, the topaz, and the jasper, the chrysolite, and the onyx, and the beryl, the sapphire, and the carbuncle, and the emerald: gold the work of thy beauty: and thy pipes were prepared in the day that thou wast created.
Old Testament, also: Genesis 2:12
And the gold of that land is very good: there is found bdellium, and the onyx stone.
New Testament: Apocalypse 21:19-20
And the foundations of the wall of the city were adorned with all manner of precious stones. The first foundation was jasper: the second, sapphire: the third, a chalcedony: the fourth, an emerald: The fifth, sardonyx: the sixth, sardius: the seventh, chrysolite: the eighth, beryl: the ninth, a topaz: the tenth, a chrysoprasus: the eleventh, a jacinth: the twelfth, an amethyst.
The connection
Ezechiel dresses the king of Tyre in the garden itself. The prophet sets him "in the pleasures of the paradise of God" and lists what he had on: "every precious stone was thy covering", sardion and topazion and smaragdos, anthrax and sappheiros and iaspis, with onychion among them (Ezechiel 28:13). The prophet's word is covering. The stones are not ornaments hung on a creature; they are what he was wrapped in, so that the wealth the garden held became the thing he wore, and wore until he fell. The Apocalypse takes that same list and puts it to the opposite use. Seven of Ezechiel's stones reappear in the twelve foundations of the city wall, sappheiros, sardion, smaragdos, topazion, chrysolithos, amethystos and iaspis, with beryl there in a second form (Apocalypse 21:19-20). They cover no one now. They are what the city stands on. The same wealth that clothed one creature until his pride undid him is set underneath a city that cannot fall, bearing weight instead of being borne. The difference between the two uses is the entry. A covering is worn for the sake of the one wearing it, and it is the outermost thing, the part everyone sees. A foundation is laid for the sake of everything above it, and it is the one part nobody sees at all. Between the two stands the priesthood, which is how the wealth of the garden is meant to be carried: Exodus sets onyx not on a creature's back for display but engraved with the names of the twelve tribes and borne on the high priest's shoulders before God (Exodus 28:9-12), and David later gathers the same stones for a Temple he will not live to see (1 Paralipomenon 29:2). In each case the stone is worth exactly what it is carrying. The onyx that this entry was once built on runs through the Hebrew rather than the Greek. Genesis 2:12 and Ezechiel 28:13 do read one and the same word, shoham, which the Latin and the Douay render onyx, so in Hebrew the stone of Eden really is the stone on the fallen cherub. The Septuagint declines to carry it that far: at Genesis 2:12 it reads anthrax and a green stone, with no onyx at all, and although it does keep onychion in Ezechiel's list, the Apocalypse drops that stone and sets sardonyx in its place. So the thread running from the garden to the City is carried by the stones as a body, and not by one word.
Moral sense
The same stone can be a covering worn for its own sake or a foundation laid under other people, and nothing about the stone decides which; what decides it is whether the thing is carrying anyone, so that gifts held for display and gifts spent holding others up are made of exactly the same material.
Anagogical sense
The wealth of the garden is not abolished at the end but moved: taken out from under one creature's covering and set beneath a city, so that what was lost in paradise returns not as adornment on anyone but as the ground everyone walks on.
Warrant
The tier is interpretive because Apocalypse 21:19-20 names neither Ezechiel 28:13 nor Genesis 2:12. What the Greek does establish, and this was checked rather than assumed, is the shared list: seven stones stand in both Ezechiel 28:13 in the Septuagint and Apocalypse 21:19-20, sappheiros, sardion, smaragdos, topazion, chrysolithos, amethystos and iaspis, with berullion and berullos as two forms of one stone. Four of Ezechiel's are dropped and four of the Apocalypse's are new. An earlier version of this entry rested instead on the word onyx recurring from Eden to the City, and the Greek does not support that: Genesis 2:12 in the Septuagint reads anthrax and a green stone rather than onyx, and the Apocalypse sets sardonyx where Ezechiel had onychion. The onyx thread is genuine in the Hebrew, where shoham stands at both Genesis 2:12 and Ezechiel 28:13, and it is kept on that footing. Ecclesiasticus 24:21, which also reads onyx in the Douay, refers to onycha, an aromatic gum and not the gemstone, and was never part of this connection. On the era: this entry is placed at Creation although its primary reference is now Ezechiel, whose other entries all sit at Exile. That is deliberate and follows the same rule as Job. The subject is Eden's own wealth, and Ezechiel 28:13 is an exile-era oracle about the garden, so the entry belongs on the timeline where its subject belongs.
The verses
Ezechiel 28:13 · Genesis 2:12 · Apocalypse 21:19 · Apocalypse 21:20
