Amber Alert

Ezekiel (Michaelangelo, Sistine Chapel)

I spend a little bit of time in Yahoo Chat, spreading what hours I have available between the Jewish Chat and the various political rooms. I think I am going to begin gleaning more material from those rooms for this blog. On one hand, there are some brilliant people, offering amazing ideas on a wide range of subjects, yet on the other, some of the dumbest and most vile nonsense imaginable passes as subject matter in those forums. Like all things, one takes the good with the bad, and the bad can also be quite entertaining. Today’s posting comes from one of the better conversations.

The biggest problem one faces in a Yahoo chatroom is logistic. There is seldom the time to explain an idea well enough to convey it properly. This, in addition to the usual interruption of other chatters, makes it really tough to prove a point or carry on any meaningful conversation. By blogging the issues, however, I can go into greater depth with each matter. Besides, I can be more passive about my selection of topic, allowing them to come to me rather than having to conjure the ideas from scratch.

Ezekiel’s Vision

ד וארא והנה רוח סערה באה מן-הצפון, ענן גדול ואש מתלקחת, ונגה לו, סביב; ומתוכה--כעין החשמל, מתוך האש

(Ezekiel 1:4) “And I beheld a stormy wind coming from the north, a great cloud and flashing fire, surrounded by glowing light. From within it a gleam, like the appearance of amber, came out from the fire.”

This verse is part of what is commonly referred to as the Merkava (Chariot), or the Maras Yechezkiel (Vision of Ezekiel), and is one of the primary prophetic visions in Torah. The metaphor of chariot and rider is use extensively in rabbinic literature because of its usage here in Ezekiel, and it forms the basis for much of Kabalistic thought. A priest taken to Babylonia, Ezekiel became a prophet to the community of Judean refugees living there in the sixth century B.C. Although the Torah strictly forbids (Exodus 20:4) the Jews from forming any mental image of God, Ezekiel in this vision (1:26) sees God as a ‘likeness’ of human form, sitting on a very fancy throne.

That’s not the issue here, however, though I wouldn’t mind getting into that at another time. The real problem comes from the word Chashmal which in our context, is translated as amber, but in modern Hebrew used for electricity. The assumption is that Ezekiel, or the authors of this book, were familiar with electricity, and that familiarity proves the veracity of the Torah and the Vision of Ezekiel. I am here now to address that claim and debunk it.

Amber is the fossilized resin of ancient trees which forms through a natural polymerization (little molecules forming big molecules) of the original organic compounds. Most of the world's amber is in the range of 30-90 million years old. Amber is known to mineralogists as succinite, from the Latin succinum. Heating amber will soften it and eventually it will burn, a fact that has given rise to the name bernstein, by which the Germans know amber. Amber can occur in a variety of colors, but mostly in the range between brown and yellow. Many insect and plant fossils became naturally preserved encased in amber, and much of our fossil record can be attributed to this little fact. Rubbing amber with a cloth will give it a charge, attracting bits of paper. The Greek name for amber is elektron, or the origin of our word electricity. This shows the connection between amber and electricity, though amber is known to be a poor conductor. Could the ancients have known about electricity, or did they only know about the special properties of amber?

Let’s go back to the translation of Chashmal as amber. In modern Hebrew, the word for amber is anbar, and not Chashmal, which is now used exclusively to refer to electricity. So why do most translate Chashmal in Ezekiel as amber? The reason can be found in the context of the Ezekiel’s vision, where much of the description is related back to precious stones and metals, with flashing lights and images hovering within and around these.

Ezekiel, if he did have this vision, was attempting to explain it in terms that common people might understand. Imagine yourself seeing something that no one else had ever witnessed. You would end up having to describe this object by using other objects more familiar to your audience. We have no record that the ancients knew anything about electricity, but we do know that they knew about amber, and Ezekiel, in his vision, used this familiar mineral as a descriptive tool. It is likely that the color of amber led Ezekiel to allude to it in his narrative, much as he spoke of beryl, sapphire, and polished bronze.

The reasonable explanation is merely a matter of language. The translators of the verse, who themselves knew nothing of electricity, translated chashmal as amber because of context and lack of any other word or idea to describe it. They may have known, like the Greeks and others before them, that amber possessed this ‘electric’ property, in the same way that they knew about magnets, but they had no idea beyond that as to the nature of electrical force, lightning, or electron flow. It was not until Ben Franklin that we knew even a little bit what we were dealing with. I highly doubt that the author(s) of the Book of Ezekiel did their work to light supplied by a Leyden jar.

Ben-Yehudah, the father of modern Hebrew, probably needed to borrow and adapt many words from the Biblical Hebrew that had no modern equivalent. Electricity, like other modern discoveries, posed a problem for the revival of an old language, having not advanced much from its Biblical format since ancient times. In an effort to equate terms and words better, the word Chashmal, originally meant as the fossilized resin called amber, became the word used to describe the phenomena that was long associated with that particular stone. After all, the Greeks had already made the association part of their language and it seemed fitting to do the same for Hebrew. The association of Chashmal to electricity, rather than to amber itself is not made by Ezekiel, but by Ben-Yehudah. I hardly imagine today’s Orthodoxy calling Ben-Yehudah a prophet!

Retrofitting

Orthodox Jews believe that each and every word of the Torah is divine, perfect, and eternal; being full of science, history, spirituality, and moral value. The Torah is the word of God, and that word contains all things. Therefore, when they see the word Chashmal used by a 6^th century B.C. prophet, they assume that space-time and context no longer apply, and the modern Hebrew meaning was, in fact, within the original intent of Ezekiel.

This type of interpretation is called ‘retrofitting’ a new meaning into old words. It is similar to many forms of Biblical exegesis where prophecies are concerned. Words and phrases can be twisted out of their plain meaning to fit almost any interpretation. In our case, the assumption that the ancient Jews, and probably everyone else by that time, knew about electricity, is contradicted by the context of Ezekiel’s vision, the conveyance of that vision, and the obvious fact that no knowledge of the inner workings of electricity (or amber for that matter) were ever proven to be available to those cultures. If they didn’t know the various and intricate details of amber or how it came to be, then how could they know that much about electricity, something they couldn’t touch or analyze?

Retrofitting is not only a Biblical problem. In psychology, this kind of association might be akin to projection, where one interprets each and every event or circumstance solely upon one’s own intents and motives, thus ignoring the most probable cause of such events. As an adult, I may be angry at something my parents did or said to me when a child, but until I ask them their motive, I will always be interpreting the event according to my own desires of it. For the religious mind, any idea that contradicts the divinity of their belief is heresy, and any new idea must be incorporated within the existing dogma to keep the dogma true at all costs. This is why the Bible thumpers follow close on the heels of modern science, taking bits and pieces of every cosmological model and attempting to fit each theory into the Creation story.

There are much simpler and reasonable explanations for things than offered by mysticism. We should get beyond thinking that our ancestors were supermen, angels, or any more or less divinely inspired than we are today. They probably made heroes out of ‘retrofitted’ fools, too, and there is no reason to assume that they were endowed with special knowledge or insight equivalent to or beyond what we possess today.

“The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.” (John Ruskin, 1819 - 1900)