by Various
We will come to the word firmament again, but notice that this is, "... the likeness of the firmament ...", not the firmament itself. Later verses speak only of the "firmament".
23. And under the firmaments were their wings straight, the one toward the other: every one had two, which covered on this side, and every one had two which covered on that side, their bodies.
If you changed "... under the firmament ..." to, "... below the sky" you would get a clearer picture. If you look at the picture of a house, the roof is, "below the sky," if you start at the top and work down. If you start at the ground and work up, the roof is, "at the top" of the house. Ezekiel's description of the wings, which is continued in this verse, concerns the wings "at the top." They are (connected), "... one toward the other, about like in figure one."
24. And when they went, I heard the noise of their wings, like the noise of great waters, like the voice of the Almighty, the voice of speech, as the noise of the host: when they stood they let down their wings.
If you have ever stood near a running tip-jet, or any jet engine, I think you will know what Ezekiel means. The last statement is most interesting. It seems that when the creatures landed again they detached the helicopter mechanisms and set them down, as anyone will with a heavy back-pack who is resting or waiting.
25. And there was a voice from the firmament that was over their heads, when they stood, and had let down their wings.
This voice, or sound, was not from the likeness of the firmament, but from the sky, as they stood there with their wings off.
This is the end of Ezekiel's attention to the four creatures.
26. And above the firmament that was over their heads was the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone; and upon the likeness of the throne was the likeness as the appearance of a man above upon it.
Out of the sky comes a man on a green seat. But a throne is more than a chair. It is usually associated with a platform. This may be some kind of flying platform similar to those being tested for the transporting of infantry.
27. And I saw as the colour of amber, as the appearance of fire round about within it, from the appearance of his loins even upward, and from the appearance of his loins even downward, I saw as it were the appearance of fire, and it had brightness round about.
Since this thing was high over their heads, and he saw fire round about it, the fire may have been on the under side. What he says about the man is very like what he said about the other four, except that he describes the man from the waist, up and down, as if he could not see the area near the man's waist.
28. As the appearance of the bow that is in the cloud in the day of rain, so was the appearance of the brightness round about. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the Lord. And when I saw it, I fell upon my face, and I heard a voice of one who spake.
What prismatic effect, brighter than the outdoor desert sunshine is hard to imagine, but a large shining object close at hand would be pretty terrifying. It seems strange that Ezekiel would not throw himself upon the ground, after withstanding all he had seen up till now, but we must remember that a man seated on a throne, a flying throne at that might have a lot more meaning for him than it would for you and me. If this object happened to come down closer to him than the other creatures had, he might well have broken.
We have now covered every verse of the first chapter quite thoroughly. Since the Book of Ezekiel contains forty-eight chapters, we might fear that this is just the beginning of a long and tiring study. Fortunately or unfortunately this is not the case. The second chapter begins:
804.
And he said unto me, Son of man, stand upon they feet, and I will speak to thee.
2. And the spirit entered into me when he spake unto me, and set me upon my feet, that I heard him that spake unto me.
3. And he said unto me, Son of man, I send thee to the children of Israel, to a rebellious nation that hath rebelled against me: they and their fathers have transgressed against me, even unto this very day.
This typically prophetic writing goes on for many pages, telling the woes and sins of the Israelites. Reference is made in a few places to the material in the first chapter, but even this dies out before the end of the book.
No mention is made again of the living creatures till chapter three where the following verse is found:
13. I heard also the noise of the wings of the living creatures that touched one another, and the noise of the wheels over against them, and a noise of great rushing.
This combines some of the ideas of earlier verses without adding any new information. Notice that writer has the notion that the wings of one creature touched those of another, or that the creatures touched one another.
This verse is typical of several more scattered throughout the first third of the book. All the verses mentioning the living creatures after the first chapter are more dramatic and all fail to continue the style of a careful reporter. No new ideas are advanced, but some rather unusual contradictions are introduced, by using several parts of several verses of Chapter One. Chapter Ten reads like an attempt at rephrasing Chapter One and Chapter Eleven is the last mention of the living creatures in the entire book.
Although it contains no further information on the living creatures, Chapter Three has a verse that should be mentioned. Verse fifteen sounds like a fitting conclusion to the first chapter:
15. Then I came to them of the captivity at Tel-Abib, that dwelt by the river Chebar, and I sat where they sat, and remained there astonished among them for seven days.
Just what do we have? We have a description of four spacesuited and helicopter-equipped men, getting off of, or out of something that landed in a cloud of dust or smoke. The four men start their helicopters, take off and fly to some height. On returning to the ground they remove their flying gear and wait. They are met by a fifth man, riding on a flying platform. Such an event would cause some interest in any community today, but in those times it could only be interpreted as supernatural—a miracle. The miracle may well be that the story has been preserved for us, twenty-six centuries later.
A word for word interpretation is only part of the oddity of this chapter. Several other aspects are worth pondering. The whole chapter has a well-worn feeling, as though the author had told and re-told it many times. It reads like a deposition, taken down by a police officer, after the witness, who prides himself on truthfulness, has told the story over and over to his incredulous friends. It has a certain poetic beauty. It has the style of one who is telling you the truth, no matter whether you are going to believe it or not. It is the presentation of a tableau that makes no sense to the man who witnessed it, or to those to whom he is describing it.
The product of a man's imagination is tied to his own experience, his own time. A wonderful tale of the supernatural may sound very imaginative to the contemporary of the teller, but it will date itself to a later generation. The lives of the Greek gods are related to the lives of the early Greeks. An imaginative science-fiction writer such as Jules Verne is limited in the same way. As good as he was, experience has set an outer limit to his imagination. Ezekiel's tale is not in this class. To his contemporaries, it was out of step with reality. To us it is real enough, but out of step with time. The most credible explanation is that it really happened.
Perhaps there are some points of my interpretation that you do not agree with, but as a whole the story does hang together rather well. If you have the feeling that it would be easy to fit the words around an entirely different set of circumstances, I suggest that you try.
It is interesting to know that some years ago a verbal battle raged in theological circles as to whether Ezekiel wrote the Book of Ezekiel. One school of thought held that he did, while the other school held that the first chapter was a "forgery," written in the third century before Christ, and tacked on as a sort of "leader" to Ezekiel's book. For our purposes it cannot be a forgery. It makes little difference how long ago it was written
, so long as it was not since World War II!
Suppose Ezekiel or some ancient man actually saw what I have proposed. What are the possible explanations? Is it possible that some ancient race, unknown to us, could have developed such equipment? It is not likely. During the last one hundred years we have been prodding about in the earth and finding so many ancient records that someone else besides Ezekiel would certainly have left us a report on them.
The things that were science fiction twenty years ago are solid fact now. We know that a landing on the Moon is only a question of time, a few years at the most. The planets of our Solar System will follow, at least some before the turn of the century, probably. As for the planets of neighboring stars we cannot say. We have no way of exploring them at present, but that is not the same as saying that we never will. If the past performance of the human race is any measure, they will likely fall to exploration within two hundred years.
If you concede that it is possible that we can visit other star systems in a future not too distant, why then could we not have been visited some time in the past? It may tend to deflate our ego to think that there may be intelligent beings not too different from us who are advanced beyond us. It need not. One of the most striking features of Ezekiel's story, if it has been decoded correctly, is that these beings are very much like we are, right at the present time. That puts them three or four thousand years ahead of us, a very small amount indeed when we consider the long sweep of human life and development before the dawn of written history.
We are so used to stories of "Bug-eyed Monsters" coming to Earth, that the idea of beings from other worlds looking and acting human seems fantastic. It should not. There is good sound scientific reason to believe that there is little chance of it being any other way. Life is a delicate and fragile thing when compared to cosmic extremes of temperature and environment in our universe. If life formed on earth as science now believes that it did, we must have had just the right size planet at just the right distance from a particular type of star. While such extremely narrow limits are going to reduce the number of places in the universe where life can develop, it is also going to limit the differences. In our creation things operate by rule. The rule is that in similar circumstance there are similar solutions to a problem. Man is the solution of the problem of building the highest form of life on Earth. On a similar planet we can expect to find a similar solution. This is simply the extension of the theory of parallel evolution to a cosmic scale.
If then, we were visited by people from another world, what were they doing here? Strangely enough, there is considerable evidence of what they were up to from Ezekiel's own testimony. Let us suppose that these creatures were very much like we expect to be in five hundred years. They have come from some other star system in a ship whose principle of operation is as yet unknown to us. We can assume that it was a rather large ship, being that there were five beings on board at once, and we can presume that enough of a crew remained aboard to return it home in case something happened to the explorers. How would we proceed in such a case?
It is not likely that such a large ship would be brought down to the surface of the earth. After arriving in the neighborhood of the earth, it would be put into orbit, and the surface of the earth would be studied through telescopes for days or weeks. The entire radio spectrum would be scanned to determine if there were inhabitants below, capable of operating electrical equipment. A small—manned or unmanned—flyer would be sent down into the upper atmosphere to determine the level of radioactivity, air components, spore and bacteria count and radio signals incapable of penetrating the atmosphere. From the ship the land areas would be mapped and studied. Any large object on the ground that appeared to be of an artificial nature would be given particular attention. During the night-time hours below, these objects and areas would be very carefully observed for signs of light.
In the case of our visitors of twenty-six centuries ago, this is what they would have found: Quite a few artificial works could be seen. Cultivated fields and large buildings would be easily visible in many places around the eastern end of the Mediterranean. The Pyramids were old even then. (The Great Wall in China probably had not been started.) There would be no radio sounds, except for an occasional lightning click. We do not know how well their cities were lighted at night, but they were probably too dim to see. Tiny orange pinpoints of light from outdoor bonfires could probably be seen around the globe, but there would be more of them around the Mediterranean and in the East and Near East than anywhere else. The radioactivity level would be low. Our visitors would conclude that the inhabitants were either in the early stages of civilization, or were once highly civilized and now sunk back to a primitive stage. They would know that this was due to something other than atomic war.
We have to conclude that these were moral beings. If the conditions below were as they seemed to be, that of an early civilization, they would not want to interfere. They would want to observe without being observed, so even if it were technically possible they would not want to bring a large ship down. They would send down as small and inconspicuous a vehicle as possible.
We usually picture such a craft as a small version of the larger ship, or a large—by our standards—rocket, or an aircraft similar to our Dyna-soar. For people this advanced technologically something a lot simpler might be used. It might be an open vehicle, similar to our flying platforms, but with vastly more powerful nuclear power plants. The men going down would have to wear air-tight suits—spacesuits, and would have to leave them on all the time they were below, for fear of becoming infected with molds and viruses that the natives would long since have become immune to. One man, the pilot, would stay with the platform while the others did the observing and recording.
The flying platform would have no need for rapid forward motion, at least inside the atmosphere and therefore would have little need for streamlining or protective covering for the passengers, who would carry their equipment with them. Most of the equipment for the survey would be built into the suits. They would each carry a set of portable helicopter attachments so they could cover more ground in a hurry. Like small helicopters of our time, these probably would have a rather limited speed and range, but they would be extremely maneuverable.
The platform on the other hand, being nuclear powered, would probably be very powerful and have almost unlimited range, but it would be less maneuverable. The products of its exhaust might be radioactive and therefore its operators would be reluctant to operate it above or near the natives of the planet, or places that they frequented.
As they push away from the mother-ship the spacemen would be in free-fall and would tend to "float" nearby until they turned the bottom side of the platform toward the direction of their orbit and applied power. They would then drop toward the surface, but with almost unlimited power available they could keep the downward component of their fall within limits and prevent overheating. They could probably be on the surface in less than an hour.
The first and most likely area of exploration would be Egypt. The platform could be landed a few miles back from the Nile and be in completely unoccupied desert. The four helicopter-equipped explorers could put on their rotating-wing backpacks and by keeping low, come up very close to some center of civilization without being seen. By going up to a few thousand feet they could observe a fairly large area. Even if they were spotted, they would be small and unrecognizable, and cause a minimum amount of excitement.
Like any tourist in any age they would probably be most interested in the territory around the pyramids. When they had finished here they might want to look over the country around what is now Bagdad, but then only near the capital city of Nebuchadnezzar's empire. This is about eight hundred miles away, an impractical trip by helicopter, so they would return to the platform, climb to a few hundred thousand feet, and scoot over in a few minutes. Here they would land again in some uninhabited spot and repeat the maneuver. This country was probably sprinkled with more people than t
hey expected. Maybe that's why this is the legendary flying carpet country, or maybe not. At any rate, one lonely military prisoner, working by himself near the banks of a stream must have seen them. Even if they did notice him, what possible harm could he do? In the present state of the civilization who would remember what he said or even believe him? I do.
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Contents
THE HAPPY MAN
By Gerald W. Page
More's "Utopia" was isolated-- cut off--from the dreary world outside. All Utopias are....
Nelson saw the girl at the same time she saw him. He had just rounded an outcropping of rock about ten miles from the East Coast Mausoleum. They were facing each other, poised defensively, eyes alertly on each other, about twenty feet apart. She was blond and lean with the conditioning of outdoor life, almost to the point of thinness. And although not really beautiful, she was attractive and young, probably not yet twenty. Her features were even and smooth, her hair wild about her face. She wore a light blouse and faded brown shorts made from a coarse homespun material. Nelson had not expected to run into anyone and apparently, neither had she. They stood staring at each other for a long time; how long, Nelson was unable to decide, later.
A little foolishly, Nelson realized that something would have to be done by one of them. "I'm Hal Nelson," he said. It had been a long time since he had last spoken; his voice sounded strange in the wilderness. The girl moved tensely, but did not come any closer to him. Her eyes stayed fixed on him and he knew that her ears were straining for any sound that might warn her of a trap.
Nelson started to take a step, then checked himself, cursing himself for his eager blundering. The girl stepped back once, quickly, like an animal uncertain if it had been threatened. Nelson stepped back, slowly, and spoke again. "I'm a waker, like you. You can tell by my rags." It was true enough, but the girl only frowned. Her alertness did not relax.