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!