Word
Most people are under the impression that it is the dictionary that defines words. The truth is that it is the way people use a word that defines a word. Words are defined on playgrounds, in the media and on our movie screens. Anywhere conversation takes place words are being defined. Nothing satisfies a rapper, for example, more than having invented a new word or redefined an old one. A rapper is not worthy of the name until he has achieved this lofty goal. No poet is worthy of the name if he has not breathed new life into a dead word.

What dictionary writers really do is evaluate the ways society uses words and then attempts to summarize their meanings. New words are added, old words are excised and new usages are noted. The purpose of a dictionary is to be on hand as a reference so that we can communicate intelligibly with others in society. Then along come people like Dennis Miller to mangle the lexicon and make a mockery of everything Webster stands for.

Actually words have incredible power. They always have. Take George Bush II for instance. Had he been a better speaker he might have gone down as one of the best American Presidents to come down the pike. Instead because he couldn’t speak well he chose to hardly speak at all. As a result The People felt, with good reason, that they were pretty much leaderless. The silence was so morbid that in the recent election we chose a stranger to lead us primarily because he could speak. He never said anything but he talked a lot and he talked good.

The Bible is the ultimate example of the power of words. All of the kings and barbarians in history did not have the kind of power over people that the authors of the Bible exercised and still exercise through their written words. I found this out twice in my life; once when I was a believer and again when I discovered who the authors truly were and what they were really saying. One of the things the Bible did for me, believe it or not, was to prove that extra-terrestrial visitation is a fact. They did it with the power of a very few words.

I have always been able to maintain a healthy skepticism toward Ufology. I was fascinated by it and had studied it in some depth but I had always refused to buy into a conviction as to its reality one way or the other. In the course of investigating the subject I went to the Bible to see what it had to say on UFOs. I found that it was definitely saying something but I realized very quickly that I was not going to be able to unravel what it was saying until I knew a whole lot more than I did about the Bible. At that time I decided I was going to have to set aside questions about the UFO phenomenon and do a thorough investigation of the phenomenon of the Bible.

After 25 years of that I decided it was time to try to apply what I’d learned about the Bible to UFO’s again.

The thing that’s important to know about UFO close encounters is that each one is a unique experience. As such the language a witness uses to describe his experience will also be unique. You will know that the claim of a UFO encounter is genuine by the struggle the claimant has in describing his experience. Reports that are imaginary or phony are creations of the mind and therefore fit naturally into the inventor’s vocabulary. But for the true eye-witness the event comes unexpectedly and the witness often has no words to adequately describe what he’s seen. Colors, material descriptions, emotional experiences and physical effects are beyond his or any human’s ability to reconstruct in language. These dynamics are clearly visible in a number of UFO-like encounters in the Bible; none more so than the experiences of Ezekiel.

In the first chapter of Ezekiel we see that virtually ever physical facet of a common UFO experience is described; the whirlwind (the cigar shaped mother ship), the saucers (wheels within wheels) the aliens (the living creatures who directed the movement of the wheels). Skeptics of Ufology have been haw-hawing these descriptive elements as coincidental ever since it was first suggested that the Book of Ezekiel was essentially a UFO report. Despite that skepticism it is not hard to see that the author of these passages was having a hell of a struggle trying to find words to describe the bizarre experiences Ezekiel claimed he’d had.

When a critical Bible scholar wishes to define a word from the Bible he does not resort to any dictionary. His tool for that job is a concordance. A concordance takes words from the Bible and lines them up in alphabetical order much the same as a dictionary. But instead of giving a definition for a word it lists every passage of the Bible that contains it. By that process we can refer to each passage and see how the word is used in all of its contexts. In short it gives us an easy way to define a word according to its usage.

It is necessary to operate on biblical language this way because the Bible is not the work of a single person living at a single time in a single place. The Bible had many authors living over an expanse of a thousand years and in locations scattered across thousands of square miles. Languages change dramatically over time and are often specific to customs, cultures and environments separated by a mere ten or twenty miles. This is the practical truth and no scholar is worth beans who does not recognize the subtle nuances in language variation.

Chapter One of Ezekiel contains a prime example of language variance. A scholar would have noticed that the beings who come down on Ezekiel are not called men. They are not even called angels as they surely would have been if this story had been a fabrication from a writer’s imagination. These beings are called ‘living creatures’. Specifically they are called ‘chai’ – a word that appears nowhere else in the Bible except in Ezekiel. When we go to our concordance to compare this word to its uses elsewhere in the Bible we find there are no other uses beside those in Ezekiel. We know almost nothing about what a chai might look like because the Book of Ezekiel gives us virtually no description. This highlights a pattern of word usage that is consistent with not only this specific author but with other authors who recorded biblical UFO events. The words used to describe the events are unique because the experiences are unique. It is a quirk that adds to the ring of truth when evaluating whether an “event” in the Bible is supernatural or extra-terrestrial.

But as freaky as the events of Chapter One may have been the events described in Chapters 8, 9 and 10 of Ezekiel blow them away. In those chapters the UFOs return a second time. On this visit they abduct Ezekiel out of the middle of a group of his fellow priests in Babylon and transport him to Jerusalem. But here the author refers to the beings as ‘men’ (from the Hebrew ‘Ish’ in some verses and ‘adam’ in others). Both forms of the word are common to all O.T. books and their usage runs in the hundreds of times. Were these ‘men’ actually the same beings as the ‘creatures’ of Chapter One? We can’t know for certain. But we do know that the author has still not resorted to the literary device of angels and is therefore more likely to be reporting an event rather than weaving a tale.

What is clear about these “men” is that they operate as a crew; a military style crew. One of them is dressed differently from the other 5 and is their ranking member. The author singles him out as a man dressed in linen, carrying an inkhorn and acting as the leader of ground operations. In command of all 6 of the men on the ground is “the glory of the Lord of Israel” which does not seem to have actually landed. The author goes to great lengths to describe “the Lord” at the beginning of Ch. 8 but not so well that we can quite make sense of what he was talking about. Once more the language seems inadequate to the task.

“The Lord” calls the men forth and orders their leader to go around town and mark the foreheads of the unfaithful. He orders the other five to slaughter with their “slaughter weapons” those who have been marked by the leader. The word ‘slaughter-weapon’ is translated from the word ‘mappats’. It is one of those words that appear no other place in the Bible than in the Book of Ezekiel. We have no idea what a mappats was, what it looked like or how it functioned. All we know is what its function was. It was device that slaughtered human beings. Was it an ancient but unusual weapon or one brought to earth from elsewhere and was therefore beyond the author’s ability to describe it?

The singularity of words like this one is, as I’ve said, a common factor in biblical UFO encounters. Such words are often resorted to by authors when attempting to identify an object they are not familiar with. The thing that stands out for me in these instances is that they simply put labels on the objects and did little more than that to describe them. We saw this with the ‘chai’; the living creatures. Why didn’t the author tell us how many arms, legs or eyes they had? What color was their skin? How tall were they?

Nothing. They were chai; living creatures.

Now we have these mappats. How were they used? What did they look like? How did they cause death?

Nothing. They were mappats; slaughter weapons.

The absence of a specific description repeats itself in II King when Elijah is
“taken up” by a fiery chariot to a whirlwind headed for heaven. Details about this chariot would have been of great interest to the reader.

Nothing. It was a flying, burning chariot. What more do you need to know?

But there is another thread of consistency here that in my mind is significant. Each of the three items above is minimally described by the identity tag supplied by the author. These items are not tagged by there shape or their color or their size or by any physical attribute at all. They are identified by their functions. The creatures are living. The Mappats is for slaughtering. The fiery chariot is a machine for transportation.

And that brings us to the inkhorn carried by the ground force leader. The word inkhorn comes from the Hebrew “qeseth”. It’s another of those words that appear in no other place in the Bible than in the Book of Ezekiel. Does it fit the pattern of being tagged for its function rather than its form? As with the case of Elijah and the fiery chariot the author chose a known object to express a function. Chariot = a machine for transportation. Inkhorn = a device for long distance communication (i.e. letter writing). It is highly doubtful that Elijah was taken to heaven by an actual chariot or that the leader of the ground force was carrying an actual inkhorn. What we have is an author struggling to describe an object not by its appearance but by its function.

The ground force leader was carrying a communication device.

After carrying out the order to slaughter the unfaithful people of Jerusalem that device is put to use:

Ezek.9:11 – And, behold, the man clothed in linen, which had the inkhorn by
his side, reported the matter, saying, I have done as thou hast commanded me.

The leader is speaking to “the Lord” but the Lord is not within eye-sight let alone within hearing. But we know the Lord heard him because immediately after making his report:

Ezek. 10:1 – “…behold…there appeared…the likeness of a throne.”

A careful reading of these particular chapters shows that the man on the ground with the “inkhorn” was the only crew member in communication with the “Lord”.


Three topics were covered in this post:

1. How language affects social and personal perspectives.
2. How critical Bible scholars operate on the Bible.
3. How to recognize a biblical account of an extra-terrestrial visitation.

I hope you found something in that trove to whet your curiosity.