You're listening to season 10 of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of sci fi mega franchise Mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.
This is episode 10.46 B, Wheels on Wheels within Wheels, and we're your hosts. I'm Tom, longtime fan of Wheels for their rotary motion, but still not sold on the new collaboration with the internal combustion engine.
And I'm Nina, now wondering if the angel Halo, upon reaching Earth, will roll around Duker eek style or continue to float menacingly. Mobile Suit Breakdown is made possible by our jaunty, jazzy and jovial paying subscribers. We don't have new patrons this week, but thank you all the same, especially returning patrons and those of you who've increased your pledges. You keep us Genki.
This week we are joined by a new guest. Wheels is a friend of ours who has been helping out with editing on the talkbacks this season. And a few weeks ago I, after listening to one of those talkbacks, I got a message from Wheels, which in much more polite language, basically said, hey dummy, you just referred to this angel Halo thing, this contraption of wheels within wheels, as a biblically accurate angel, but actually that's not what it is at all. It's this other different thing called an ophanim. And I said, well, that's really interesting. Please come on the podcast and tell us all about it. So welcome to the podcast Wheels.
Thank you. I'm Vivian Wheeler. I also go by Wheels. I make a show called Very Random Encounters where we play tabletop role playing games and randomly determine as much as is possible. And I edit a lot of podcasts. But relevant for this, I am studying to become a biblical scholar, which is funny enough that you have an editor that's a biblical scholar, but if you had had an editor that was a theologian, which is even more funny to imagine, they might have not disagreed with the biblically accurate angel descriptor, because in most modern theologies the ophanim are considered angels. But if we're looking at the text itself of the Book of Ezekiel, he just calls them Wheels. And the Hebrew word for wheels is ophanim. That's all that he says. It's only later texts that associate the Ophanim with angels. But if we're looking at Ezekiel itself or even the Bible itself, nowhere does it call them angels. And we're going to get into that.
If we're talking about convenient coincidences, the fact that we have an editor who is a biblical scholar in training and is also named Wheels is so serendipitous that it almost seems divine.
It's really funny. Clearly this was fated.
You were sent to us by the wheels in the sky to teach us about their ways.
Do you want to dive into the Book of Ezekiel with me?
I would love to. Nina, what do you think?
Let's do it.
Open your Bibles to the Book of Ezekiel, Chapter one. You don't have to. I'll have it for you. The relevant chapters here are 1 and 10, mostly chapter 1. So I'm just going to start with reading chapter 1 of Ezekiel, where the Ophanim appear. This is the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition, or the nrsvue, which is my recommended translation for if you're looking for a word for word translation of the Bible where accuracy of each word is capped. Rather than focusing on the message of an entire sentence or paragraph, Ezekiel introduces the book. And then in chapter one he says, as I looked, a stormy wind came out of the north, a great cloud with brightness around it, and fire flashing forth continually. And in the middle of the fire, something like gleaming amber. In the middle of it was something like four living creatures. Then he goes on to describe their appearance. They have four faces. They have four sets of wings. These are cherubim. There are similar figures described in Genesis that he's then describing now in his book. Genesis was written before this. But then after he goes to describe these cherubim which we have seen in other books. He says, as I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel on the earth beside the living creatures. One each for the four of them. As for the appearance of the wheels in their construction, their appearance was like the gleaming of beryl. Beryl, I guess, is like the family of minerals that emerald is a part of. And the four had the same form, their construction being something like a wheel within a wheel. When they moved, they moved in any of the four directions without veering. As they moved, their rims were tall and awesome, for the rims of all four were full of eyes all around. It goes on to describe them a little more, but you'll notice it never uses the word angel there. And in fact, the word, the Hebrew word that gets translated as angel just means messenger. And so sometimes that word is actually translated just as messenger, because sometimes it's talking about a human messenger. But these don't seem to be the messengers at all. Usually those angel messengers are human shaped and very bright and shiny, but these are entirely different things. There's only one bit that even describes them as living. It's verse 21, when they moved, the others moved. When they stopped, the others stopped. And when they rose from the earth, the wheels rose along with them. For a living spirit was in the wheels. So that's the relevance section. Any, any thoughts before I go on into Gundam? Relevance.
I feel like I've seen a lot of people joke about the quote unquote biblically accurate angel and that it's covered in eyes.
Yeah.
Is there special significance to things being described as covered in eyes?
It's tough to say because it literally just is. Using the word for eyes that elsewhere in the Bible talks about people opening their eyes or closing their eyes, it's not easy to tell exactly what Ezekiel is going for. I've heard people say that the eyes that Ezekiel sees on the rim are more like a mechanical piece, like a rivet or something, but I haven't really seen any scholarly evidence of that. It seems like these things just have eyes and they look around.
Okay.
I mean the idea of an all seeing creature I think is often expressed by a preponderance of eyes. That there's certainly some of that in the Greek myth.
These things as we can see, they're like. They're a vehicle. Right. Did you all get that from reading the passage that these four cherubim are each riding on one of these wheels and atop the cherubim? I didn't really get to that part. But above the cherubim are God. And God is about to talk to Ezekiel. And most of the rest of the book is of Ezekiel is saying what God told him. But this first chapter is describing God's appearance to Ezekiel and it involves these cherubim, creatures with animal parts and four human faces and all of these wings. And underneath them, seemingly the vehicle that brought them here is those ophanim, the wheels.
Mm. Does the underneath in that context directly specify like a spatial relationship that the cherubim is physically on top of the wheel structure as we would understand it. Or could the cherubim actually be within the wheels structure and the beneath is sort of metaphorical for like when you, you know, ride in a car, it's beneath you.
He's not exceptionally clear about. I say he this the book of Ezekiel probably is. Some of the words are the actual prophet Ezekiel's, but things have probably been edited or redacted, etc. In the hundred, 200 years after. But the text just says that. Well, it's not very clear. Sometimes it says it's beside them, sometimes it says it's underneath them. I don't get the impression that whatever Ezekiel's vision was, that it was that clear. It seems like things are kind of just moving about.
You know, you said before we got to Gundam, but I'm terminally Gundam pilled. So I'm immediately imagining, not just that the wheels, not just that the Ophanim inspired the angel Halo, but perhaps to some degree, all of these mobile suits that we see riding around inside. Wheels.
Are you talking about the, like, the. The tire? The guys with the tires?
Yeah, exactly.
The Ain Rads. And yeah, it could be.
That's a very interesting point. This kind of gets to the thematic or rhetorical purposes of the Ophanim in Ezekiel, or at least how I see it. This is written in the time of the Babylonian exile. So Israel is conquered by Babylon, and they take all of the elite with them back to Babylon, exiling them from the land of Israel. And so the temple in Jerusalem is an incredibly important part of ancient Judaism. It's where the whole religion is centered. But now we're all over here in Babylon, way, way far away from the temple, not even anywhere near the land. How are we supposed to continue worshiping our God, exhibiting our identity in this strange circumstance in this strange land? And a lot of Ezekiel goes on to describe how we're supposed to do that, but this beginning part seems to be a literal explanation of how could God get to us all the way over here? Well, he rides a chariot pulled by cherubim and wheeled by these Ophanim. It's actually. It's like a vehicle that God is using to leave his dwelling place in the temple to come to Babylon where the elite are, to minister to them, basically.
And for a different perspective on the history of all of this, listeners are invited to check out our season on Formula 91 and the series of research pieces we did on Babylonia, which did talk about this a little bit. Besides the physical process of moving God from one place to another, the Ophanim and the cherubim also serve the ceremonial purpose of preceding and announcing and preparing the way for the great personage.
You are absolutely correct. In fact, this book, Ezekiel, is very influential on the literature that would follow in the next couple hundred years. One of those strains becomes apocalypticism, which we don't really have time to get into. But another strain that doesn't really exist anymore is called Merkabah mysticism. Merkabah means chariot. Chariot is not a word that actually appears in Ezekiel, but. But it does seem to be that that's what he's describing is God on a chariot. And Merkabah mysticism is all about how to, with a different state of mind, how to perceive and maybe even communicate with God in his chariot, in his thrones. And within that and some other traditions, the Ophanim are associated with another class of beings, just called thrones, which are themselves associated with the chariot. You want me to get into why I think they picked this for Gundam?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Just from your description of what it physically looks like, it's very easy to see how we might have made that connection, since while the angel halo is not actually literally covered in eyes, it does really look like it's covered in eyes.
The windows.
And it does sparkle with the light of Beryl.
Absolutely. For me, I think that the reason they choose this is because it essentially allows Maria to extend her influence farther in the same way that it allows God to reach his people further. Obviously this is a much darker application of that idea because the people don't necessarily want Maria in their brains, but it's still exerting the same purpose. It's extending her influence in the same way that the chariot, the Cherubim and the Ophanim in Ezekiel are allowing God to extend his influence all the way to them in Babylon.
I had actually wondered, based on your description, whether Maria, rather than being God in this metaphor, is a cherubim. She is being transported in that way.
Actually, speaking of eyes, there is that bit in USO dances, in hallucinations, where Maria's eyes seem to be projected into the battlefield.
Oh, interesting.
As though from her eyes her power is projected.
I. I'm certainly not going to say you're wrong. That sounds right to me. This is the part where I get into why maybe you were right all along. Because very shortly after other writings start to call these things angels. Those writings did not appear in the Bible. But y'all know the Dead Sea Scrolls, right?
Yeah.
In addition to scrolls that have contents that would eventually become part of the Bible, they also had other things in their library. The community at Qumran, these sort of break off Israelites who thought the end of the world was coming. And I mean, Rome was coming, so it might as well have been. And so they die in the cave. They leave all of their writings behind. And most important to us, they have some of the earliest forms of the books of the Bible, but they also have other stuff that didn't make it into our Bible. And some of that other stuff does identify the Ophanim as angels. And in fact, most theologies today describe the Ophanim, the cherubim, the seraphim, all as different kinds of angels. But if we are being strict to the text of the Bible, it never calls the Cherubim the Seraphim or the Ophanim angels. It only calls the messengers messengers, which we translate as angels. And all those other beings seem to be an entirely different class. But it is true that all of those different classes have been grouped together by modern theologians.
You did mention that at one point they're identified as having a living spirit. Yeah, but more than that, they seem to function as an artifact that is representative of the power of God.
Yes.
Which makes them an interesting parallel to the Vajra in Hinduism, which represents the strength and power of the gods and which the Zanskar Empire had also used for one of their big super weapons. So it makes the. The Angel Halo a kind of direct, artistic and mythological successor to the Kailash Gili.
I think that's right. And in chapter 10, verse 17, it reiterates that there was a living spirit in these wheels. And I think the reason that that's reiterated is close to what you're saying, that it is a thing through which a living spirit can be channeled, whether or not it has a life in and of itself. At least for our purposes as how it's adapted into Victory Gundam. The Angel Halo is a tool through which living energy is channeled, right? I guess. Psychic. I don't know if psychic energy, we can call that the same as like a life force or a spirit, but it does seem to be an object, or like you're saying, an artifact that can be inspirited with this type of energy to be able to do something, in the case of the Bible, to move. But in the case of Gundam, to project these psychic commands.
I haven't seen the end of the series yet, so no spoilers please, anybody. But I do find myself wondering. We have Maria, we have Shakti, we have uso. The Victory Gundam has angel wings of light that we've seen many times already. Having heard that description of the cherubim as having four faces and four sets of wings, I wonder if each of them is meant to be like a different aspect of one cherubim, or one of the initial four cherubim sort of fighting over this single wheel rather than each having their own.
Austerity has gotten out of control.
Lots of interesting implications that I don't think I have seen enough of the series yet to say anything definitive about whether I think the show is going.
There, but definitely something to keep an eye on.
Maybe you'll need me to look more into the cherubim because they appear more than just in one book. So that would be a deeper study project, I think.
Well, while we've got you here to talk about the Ophanim, I want to revisit something you said earlier when you were talking about the role of the Ophanim as it relates to the Babylonian exile and to go back into Gundam's history before for this. In some of the planning documents for Gundam, Zeta Tomino compares the role of the Earth in the Universal Century directly to the Jewish homeland. So I wonder if here there is a sense that the colonists who have been sent out into space are like, in exile. They are experiencing the Babylonian exile and the Earth is the Holy Land to which they long to return. Well, and it is. It is the vehicle by which she hopes to return to Earth.
They're like disconnected from a spiritual life, and Maria is taking the place of that. And only through the Angel Halo can she actually spread that influence to a significant number of people to actually make a real religion out of this.
It's also very in keeping with previous Gundam shows. This idea of religion and of a deity of God and God's power as being very tied to a place. It's not that God is omnipresent, it's that we associate particular gods with particular places. And when we leave those places, we have to find some way to bring that. To bring our religion with us, to like bring that power with us or to transport it, that it doesn't just come on its own.
And this is why they need to scour earth clean, because Earth is full of local gods, shrines and temples and holy places, and gods who conflict with the Maria Ist God. And they all have to be destroyed, scoured clean, before the one true God of Zanskar can return to the Holy Land.
That's fitting, because when the Israelite elite return to Israel after, you know, Cyrus conquers Babylon, lets them free, I have heard it articulated that that's kind of where monotheism is created. The elite come back and they. Anyone who happens to have moved into the land while they were out, they say our God is omnipotent, doesn't matter where you are, doesn't matter. Omnipresent, I should say. And so that's where that turn happens, because they have been interacting with this God outside of its natural place. And so it's a logical evolution that in fact, our God can be anywhere and is anywhere, and that it's this experience of exile and then return that spurs on monotheism. As opposed to, I guess you would call it the henotheism of we worship one God, but we know that other people have theirs, that starts to go away in favor of our God is the only one. Like you're saying that Maria is sort of cleansing the Earth of all of this belief.
That's fascinating.
I'm just quickly looking up. At some point, the Dead Sea Scrolls came up in another research piece I did, and I wanted to check. All right. So I found what I was looking for. Your mention of the Dead Sea Scrolls reminded me that they had come up in some research topic or other in a previous episode of msb. And where they came up was actually the zero episode for Victory Gundam. Because I like to do a little sort of historical survey of what was going on in the world when a series came out. And it was in the early 90s that the dead Sea Scrolls were suddenly being treated much less secretively. And you started to see more articles and books sort of for lay people who were curious about them, about the contents of the scrolls.
There's a lot of cool stuff in there. In addition to just oldest copies of biblical books, there's a lot of oddities in there that are really fun to read as a modern reader.
And we've noticed in so many different dimensions that the writers for Gundam like sort of referring to strange fringe religious and mythological texts.
Yeah.
Books of demonology. And it would not at all surprise me if someone involved had read some books about the Dead Sea Scrolls and been particularly interested in incorporating some of what they read into this show.
One of the fragments from the Dead Sea Scrolls has been called Pseudo Ezekiel because it seems to be a copy of Ezekiel that someone changed. And some of the changes that they make relate to the Ophanim. Let me pull up exactly what those are. I need to pull up an article here.
While you're doing that, let me just note real quickly that we do know absolutely for certain that the Dead Sea Scrolls would inspire at least some Mecha anime. So it seems very plausible.
You're gonna bring up Escaflowne again, where we.
Well, I was thinking about Evangelion.
Ah, sure, yes.
Which is going to come out in just a couple of years.
So Pseudo Ezekiel seems to just add a few lines. It clarifies that it is in fact a chariot. Ophanim are the wheels of the chariot. Because this Dead Sea scroll that adds to Ezekiel says the vision which Ezekiel saw, it's fragmentary. So there are going to be bits we don't have. So the vision which Ezekiel saw a radiance of a chariot and four living creatures blank. And while walking they would not turn backwards upon two legs. Each living creature was walking and its two legs, dot, dot, dot, very long. There was spirit and their faces were one beside one another. So you get that little bit that does actually use the word chariot. So the Dead Sea Scrolls were written by. Boy, I don't remember what the community is called that ended up at Qumran, but this community is, like I said before, they're a break off group and they're convinced that the world is going to end soon. And so the article that I read, which is by Annette Evans, entitled Ezekiel's Living Beings in pseudo Ezekiel 4q385 a comparison with key Angelological verses. This article makes the argument that the Dead Sea Scrolls authors are changing how the cherubim, the ophanim and the whole chariot thing works so that it more fits with their rhetorical purposes. Ezekiel is kind of like a hopeful book of like, hey, we can still do our religion even though we've been exiled into Babylon, but for the community at Qumran, they're in their lands. That's not the problem. The problem is, you know, the enemy soldiers are bearing down on our door. So there needs to be some sort of change to how the, the chariot works if we're going to get any hope out of this. Seems to be the argument. A slightly different take on these wheels.
And the idea that the chariot is not a solution, or at least not a solution as it currently exists. Very much in keeping with this week's episode with Shakti's expression of the danger that the angel halo poses, Tassilo saying like, well, yeah, nobody will be fighting, but that's because they're all going to.
Die death by being turned into a baby. Weird stuff. Yeah, that's not how I plan to go.
What, in a sense, does not old age turn all of us into babies?
Is that what Benjamin Button was about?
This idea that taking away someone's fighting spirit kills them crops up more often in sci fi though. Like in the Firefly sequel movie Serenity, there was like a particular space colony that they were trying to prevent aggression in the population, basically by dosing them in some way in the air or the water, I don't remember. But this caused most of the population to simply lay down and die.
I suppose the idea is that it's our desire to continue living that drives us to fight, and you can't destroy one without destroying both wheels. I wonder if you might be able to speak at all about whether the Ophanim have a afterlife after the Bible. Do they get involved in Christian mysticism? Do they have a special role to play in any of that?
Yeah. So they figure in the form of early Jewish mysticism that I mentioned before. Merkabah, the chariot mysticism. I don't. I'm not an expert in it, but essentially you're going into a state of mind where actually most of them say that you're descending into God's throne. It's unclear if that's, like, literally how they thought that God was below them, or perhaps more likely, it was, like, too blasphemous to say that you ascended to God, and so instead they said that they descended to God. Unclear. But anyway, you go into this certain state of mind where you can approach God's chariot, and then you need to tell all of the celestial beings, the seraphim, the ophanim, the cherubim. You have to give each of them, like, very long passwords in the angel language. And the thought is like, if you're. If you know all of these special passphrases, you will be let in closer and closer to God. So the act of Merkabah mysticism is trying to figure out how. How to get all of these celestial figures to let you get closer to God. Rather than being overwhelmed by the brilliance and radiance of these secondary celestial figures, it's about stealing the mind so that you can continue on closer and closer to God. So they figure in there. They come up in art a lot. You'll see many depictions of the Ophanim because this depiction of a wheel within a wheel is with eyes, of course, is so strange, it's difficult to imagine exactly what Ezekiel was thinking. The thing Ezekiel mentions over and over again is that they don't have to turn in order to move in any direction. So to me, that. That makes me think that the wheels within wheels thing is just a description to say that, like, they can go. They can move forward and then instantly start moving to the right without turning. You know, they have, like, four cardinal directions of freedom. But the fact that they are so vaguely described leads to a lot of interpretations throughout history. The most prominent one in recent history is with aliens. A lot of, you know, ancient aliens type people will say that Ezekiel saw a UFO here and that the Ophanim that he describes are like some sort of engine at the bottom of the space spaceship that descended. That Ezekiel was just so silly that he thought it was God, but it was really a ufo. You'll find a fair number of people who think that today the modern theological understanding is that they are just a class of angels. They probably their job is to move around some sort of chariot that's associated with God's throne. But yeah, those are the main depictions. You've got artistic depictions, you have their, how they figure theologically. And then the more popular depictions of maybe it's a UFO or something.
What you were saying about Merkava mysticism makes it sound like a very, like it would make for a very fun video game descending through these layers of angels.
Yeah, yeah. Or like, or a D and D adventure. Like a. What's that terrible D and D dungeon that's just supposed to kill you? It's like one of the hardest D and D modules. That's the miracle of mysticism. You gotta really go into. You gotta get past all of these high level angels. Tough encounters for sure.
To me it sounds like a fromsoft game.
Oh sure, yeah. You have to beat the angel to be able to get the shortcut, to be able to get the password. Absolutely. This, it's called a theodicy, this appearance of God, the term for that, when God appears to someone, it's a theodicy. So this, the Odyssey that Ezekiel experiences is also very influential on apocalypticism. Without getting too far into it, the Greek word apocalypse or apocalypse just means revelation. That's why the biblical, the New Testament Book of Revelation, its Greek title is Apokalypso. So we associate now the idea of apocalypse with the end of the world. But originally that term just meant God was revealing something to you. It so happens that a lot of people that wrote about, that wrote about God revealing the end of the world to them. And now apocalypse to us means the end of the world. But originally it just meant God was revealing something that you could see. And this was kind of a change in how prophecy worked because in the major prophets of the Bible, that's all God telling a prophet something that then the prophet tells to the people. It's an oral revelation, but the O R A L, I guess it's also our all because you're here anyway. But now with a theodicy like this, God's message could be revealed to us visually. And so that is also how this influences later texts. So Ezekiel has an influence on the Book of Daniel, which most religious scholars think was written later, especially the apocalyptic parts of Daniel. And then the apocalyptic book of the New Testament is Revelation, which absolutely is inspired by Ezekiel. And this, this chapter where God appears on the, on this throne, this idea of God appearing to you visually is a very striking idea in Ezekiel that gets repeated elsewhere. And so the Ophanim are in a pretty important chapter of the Bible, pretty.
Influential since it's directly related to the Babylonian exile. Do you know of any scholarship which connects sort of looking for signs from God in the heavens with the very strong Babylonian astrological tradition?
So there definitely was some sharing of ideas between the Israelite elite who are exiled in Babylon. I mean that's just the nature of being around different people and new ideas. We do see some Babylonian ideas start to figure into their writing or even just like terms that they wouldn't have used before being exiled that would have been in the Babylonian lexicon basically. I don't know in particular about. I'm not super knowledgeable about astrology and that sort of thing, but I wouldn't be astonished if there's some evidence that there was Babylonian astrological influence on some of the post exilic writings. But I don't have any specifics.
I don't know if this is something that you can address sort of impromptu and it's fine if it isn't. But I find myself wondering whether USO's conflict with Zanskar is meant to be like an inter religious conflict. They represent two different conceptions of religion or whether it's intra religious and this is like a fight between two different types of angel or something along that line.
It's tough, I think like there's so much on the League Militaire side of things and actually it's on both sides of things this, this obsession with like natalism and having kids. I think it's, it's more on that side of things that it's like natural reproduction versus this new artificially Maria inspired Maria cult. It seems more like a back to nature as opposed to Maria's off to space argument. Not really solid argument there, but that's at least how I see it.
Well, it occurs to me that the narrative framing of this as a conflict between Maria and Shakti with the League Militaire on Shakti's side and Zanskar on Maria's side suggests like a religious reform movement based around elevating this subsidiary part of the pantheon. That in a religion focused on mother and daughter where mother is primary and daughter secondary, the. The League Militaire is a sort of like Shaktiist faction that says actually the daughter should be primary.
I think that's right. Especially with stuff that I can't talk about because Nina hasn't seen it. But I Think that gets borne out in the in the future episodes especially.
Nice.
Well, and the. The implications of Maria in being mother to Alzhear is really no mother at all. She didn't raise her daughter right. Whereas Shakti, at the ripe old age of 11 or however old she's supposed to be, has been a mother for months in taking care of Carlman. And that the angel halo in reducing people to a sense of infancy. It's implied that also means no sex and no babies, because everyone's a baby. Everyone has been put in a state of innocence. But in putting everyone in this state of innocence, you're like ending the species. You're ending society.
Mm. You know, I figured out the eyes problem.
Oh yeah?
I've been thinking about it this whole time. Oh, there's 10,000 psychikers in those rings. Most of them probably have two eyes.
That's true.
But their eyes are all closed. They're little sleepypods, so who knows.
Ah, but they're. But their mind's eye.
True.
The third eye is wide open.
Wide open.
We got 10,000 mind's eyes up to 20,000 physical eyes, but they're closed. I think we solved it perfect. And that's probably a pretty good place to wrap.
I was going to ask if that.
Was your ending Wheels. Is there anything you found in your investigations into the Ophanim that is super cool and interesting, but did not come up in our discussion?
Yeah, sure. So another term for them that I didn't get to mention is the Gal. Galim.
That sounds like a mobile suit name.
Because in Ezekiel 10, that second chapter that I didn't really read all the way through like I did the first one, Ezekiel starts going back and forth between the Hebrew and Aramaic terms for wheels. So the Hebrew is Ophanima, the Aramaic is Galgolin. That I am is just making it plural. So it would be O fan for a single wheel, or gal. Gal for a single wheel in Aramaic. But he seems to be switching between the two languages even in the same sentence. And it seems like he's doing this for a reason. Like maybe he is naming them with the Aramaic term, but then just referring to the concept of wheels with the Hebrew term. Or maybe vice versa. But an interesting added connotation of the Aramaic term that the Hebrew doesn't is the Aramaic term, I guess can also be used to mean a whirlwind. So often this the chapter 10 instances where he uses the Aramaic in English, it'll be translated into whirling wheels. But anytime you see that, you can just know that Ezekiel is instead using the Aramaic Gal Galim as opposed to the Hebrew Ophanim. Not sure if that's relevant to the Gundam of it all, but it's a detail that I think is neat.
That is neat. Thanks for sharing it with us.
Absolutely.
And thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It has been very educational.
Thanks for having me. I hope you learned something. Hey, this is Wheels coming from the relative future with a correction on a few things I say in this episode. I'm tuning the Angel Halo to make you want to forgive me from this diversion from Gundam. The Book of Ezekiel, which we are looking at today was written in and around 580 before the common era, give or take. Which is right between when it would make the most sense to call this group of people ancient Israelites and when it would make more sense to call them ancient Jews. To make a long story as short as I can, about 150 years after the fall of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, the remaining southern Kingdom of Judah is the only one left claiming to be a successor of a more ancient united Kingdom of Israel. The southern kingdom is then itself conquered by the Neo Babylonian Empire, who destroy the First Temple in Jerusalem, Solomon's Temple, and take the elite out of the land and into exile in Babylon. The Book of Ezekiel that we're looking at is written during this exile. Within a generation, though, the Neo Babylonian Empire is itself conquered by Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, who allow the exiled Israelite elite to return to Jerusalem and they eventually rebuild the Temple, the Second Temple. There are a variety of views on where one name is more appropriate than the other, but at some point between the exile and the completion of the Second Temple in this episode, I should have stopped saying Israelite and said Ancient Jewish, especially by the time I'm talking about groups a few hundred years later, like those that wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls. It would have been much more precise to call them Ancient Jews. I apologize for the info dump. I just can't sleep if I'm wrong on the Internet. And being right requires all that context. So thank you. Bye.
Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded and produced by us, Tom and Nina in scenic New York City within the ancestral and unseen land of the Lenape people and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is WASP by Misha Dayoxin. The closing music is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio. The recap music is Slow by Lloyd Rogers. You can find links to the sources for our research. The music used in the episode additional information about the Lenape people and more in the show notes on our website gundampodcast.com if you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email hostsundompodcast.com or look for links to our social media accounts on our website. And if you would like to support the show, please share us with your friends. Leave a nice review wherever you listen to podcasts or support us financially@gundumpodcast.com Patreon you can find links and more ways to help out@gundumpodcast.com support. Thank you for listening. Well, not to give too much away but before too long. Well that's before too long in like 10 years of content wise we are going to be dealing with a series where the main protagonist organization is called and all of their mobile suits are named after different kinds of. There are some mobile suits called that show up in that one so we'll probably need you back on the regular to maybe specialize in that. Do a Ph.D.
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