What do you think about this?
In the sixth century BC, by the river Chebar in Babylon, a Hebrew prophet named Ezekiel had a vision. He wrote it down with the precision of someone who knew he was being asked to remember it exactly.
He saw a great cloud out of the north, with brightness around it and fire flashing from it. Inside the cloud were four living creatures, each with four faces, the face of a man, an eagle, a lion, and an ox. Above them was a crystal expanse, what he called a firmament. Below them, on the earth, was a wheel.
It was not one wheel. It was a wheel within a wheel, and its rims were full of eyes. The wheels moved with the creatures, lifting from the ground when they lifted, and the sound of them was like rushing water.
This is in the King James Bible, Ezekiel chapter one.
In 1974, a NASA engineer named Josef Blumrich, an Austrian who had worked on the Saturn V rocket, set out to debunk a popular reading that called Ezekiel’s wheel a spacecraft. He published a book called The Spaceships of Ezekiel. He had switched sides. He concluded the description was an engineering specification consistent with a vertical landing craft and helicopter style ground transport.
For three thousand years the prophets and the rabbis read Ezekiel as a vision of God. For fifty years a working aerospace engineer read the same passage as a technical drawing.
Could it be both readings are looking at exactly what Ezekiel saw, from different sides of an answer we have not figured out how to write yet?
