Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
okay let's think a bit about
Ezekiel's mysterious figures in Chapter one
I first came across the spaceman
version of the story in a magazine
called Analog Science Fact and Science Fiction it was published in 61
buyt I saw it a bit later as a teenager and the time it was pretty convincing
or Orton, the author,
steps slowly through the story taking care to read verse by verse
and noticing details Orton was skillful reader
whatever his conclusions and
he fits the details of the story into his picture of a spaceman
and helicopter wings. I wasn't quite convinced even
back as a teenager. The helicopter picture
didn't seem to me all that plausible, I couldn't imagine it working
I still can't and when he ended up with that Mekon kind of thing
on it's flying platform, he lost me altogether
but a lot of the details were
pretty convincing so
why do I now think he was up the pole well
I go back to Ezekiel's time
and I think of the sort of pictures that could have been in Ezekiel's mind as
he wrote
I remembered
all over the Ancient Near East there were guardian
lions or guardian figures with lion's bodies and human heads
sometimes wings, sometimes other creatures involved
all them fearsome, all of them guarding
temples, palaces... and then I noticed what
these creatures in Ezekiel are doing guarding
God's presence and I put two and two together
and I think I make 4
it was these guardian creatures Ezekiel had in mind and not
American spaceman of the nineteen sixties. Pity that, really!