From the Vault: The Electric Ark

more just a giant battery. This was I remember, I had some of the weirdest stuff we've ever read proposed by Nicola tesla Um. So yeah, anyway, we hope you enjoy. And Nate ab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, took either of them his censer and put fire therein, and put incense there on, and offered strange fire before the Lord, which he commended them not. And there went out fire from the Lord and devoured them, and they died before

the Lord. Now the Lord spoke to Moses after the death of the two sons of Aaron, when they had approached the presence of the Lord and died. The Lord said to Moses, tell your brother Aaron that he shall not enter at any time into the Holy Place inside the veil before the mercy seat, which is on the Ark, or he will die, or I will appear in the cloud over the mercy seat. Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, welcome

to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're back for Arc too Electric Boogaloo, our second exploration of a bunch of weird sort of bronze punk, takes on the stories of the Ark of the Covenant from the Hebrew Bible. Right, It's it's kind of perfect because is this is a kind of this is kind of Hanaka content for Stuff

to Blow your mind. Oh, I didn't think about the timing. Yeah, we're publishing these episodes the week of Hanaka almost entirely by by by accident, but but a pleasant accident, I would say. So. Last time we talked about the stories about say, the Philistine captivity of the Ark of the Covenant and the immrods and what all that meant. But there is another aspect to the ark of God's story that tends to tempt people into the techno mythology realm.

Not only was the Arc said to bring vast destructions and plagues of m rods, there are also these Bible stories that tell of the Arc lashing out with blasts of power that kill offenders in an instant. Uh. And so there are a couple of examples. One is the story we just told about Erin's two sons. We don't get a whole lot of details, but it seems like Erin's two sons entered the presence of the Arc with

some kind of strange fire. Essentially that it sounds like they were not doing the rituals of the tavern ackle as they had been commanded. They were doing something incorrect. Fun fact I I actually traveled home and attended a Sunday School class at my mom's church recently, and this was the passage they were discussing really well in the last episode. I thought we were talking about how they almost never bring these stories up in Sunday School, at

least when we were kidding. I saw a great example of why. Because it's it's kind of difficult for folks to have a like a casual, real life oriented conversation about a passage like this about the strange fire of the Lord, which apparently sometimes translated is alien fire. Yeah, alien fire. They brought alien fire and the sensors before the Lord, and the Lord did not like it, and he lashed out and struck them dead, consumed them with

fire from the mercy seat. Now, before we get into the bronze punk discussions today, we should tell at least one more story of this kind. How about the story of Uza. So remember how the arc was taken to the land of the Philistines. That's one of the stories and Bible about it. The Philistines. Uh, there's a battle and Philistines take the arc and they put it in the temple of Dagon until the arc messes them up

and it topples the statue of the god Dagon. And eventually the Philistines repenteth and the Israelites get the arc back. And so when the Israelites under King David are they're bringing the arc back to their land that we get

to this passage quote. They placed the Ark of God on a new cart that they might bring it from the house of a ben a Dab, which was on the hill, and Usa and Ahio, the sons of a ben Adab, were leading the new cart, so they brought it with the Ark of God from the house of a ben Adab, which was on the hill, and Ahio

was walking ahead of the arc. Meanwhile, David and all the house of Israel were celebrating before the Lord with all kinds of instruments made of fir wood, with liars, harps, tambourines, castanets, and symbols. But when they came to the threshing floor of Nakon, Usa reached out toward the Ark of God and took hold of it. For the oxen nearly upset it, and the anger of the Lord burned against Usa, and God struck him down there for this irreverence, and he

died there by the Ark of God. And then there's a story that apparently this place comes to be named what roughly translates to the breakthrough of Usa or the bursting out at Usa, as we discussed at length in the last episode. Uh, if you look at any of these stories of the Ark of the Covenant, or if you look at, of course, in the classic film Raiders of the Lost Arc, you see great depictions of this general fact that the Ark of the Covenant is considered

a dangerous item in the stories about it. It is it is a thing that that manifests the presence in the voice of God and uh, and therefore there are a lot of dangers associated with misuse um even even touching it, well, even even well meaning touching. Like the idea here is that Usa wasn't trying to do, you know, a blasphemy to the ark. He just reached out to keep it from falling over because the oxen we're getting all tipped around and so the arc might have fallen

on the ground. He reached out to steady it, and that was enough that got him struck dead. So anyway, I think, as with the arc stories that we discussed last time, the most fruitful way of understanding these stories is that they are legendary narratives, not based on actual events,

but rather to communicate values by telling a story. And in this case, I think one of the values that's primary here is that the commands of the Lord are to be taken very seriously, and that even deviating from God's commands in an accidental or well meaning way can be met with extremely harsh consequences. Like Aaron's sons, they screw up the rights of the tabernacle by offering alien fire. They burned something in the sensor in a way they

weren't supposed to, and they get burned up themselves. USA touches the arc even meaning well, just to prevent it from falling over, and he gets blasted dead. I think the lesson is pretty clear, right, Yeah, It's like it's a basic Dungeons and Dragon's lesson as well. There is a high, high level magical item in your presence, don't touch it, don't don't, don't, don't do anything until you've at least cast a few, you know, provisional spells, just

to see what's happening. Right is be very careful with

the commands of God to do everything you're told. But in the last episode we discussed the concept of this historical hermoneutic we were calling bronze punk, the desire to for of modern interpreters with a little knowledge about science and technology under their belt to look back at legends like this assume that maybe they're based on some kind of actual event, whether directly or in some exaggerated form, and instead of assuming a magical explanation for the event

behind the story postulates some kind of lost world of advanced technology hidden in the dust storms of history, which again is of course risky because this is the place where history and mythology can converge. So it's difficult to really lean too heavily on anything that is described in

these stories. But at the same time we can't help but do it right with the great example from the last episode was was looking at the the plague of mice and uh and tumors or emads and trying to figure out, well, as this bubonic plague is that, what is that? What's being described here? That's one of the ways in which the Bronze punk hereameneutic, while not usually a good method of explaining the origins of these legendary tales and myths, does open up some interesting things to

consider about the ancient world. Like one of the things we talked about in the last episode was, Okay, it probably does not make sense to say that the legends of the arc are caused by it actually being some ancient bioweapon, But could there have been bioweapons in the ancient world? Was their germ warfare before people had a germ theory of disease, and we decided, you know, it does seem like it's possible that that happened, and there's even some evidence of specific cases where it looks like

it happened. Maybe not in this case, And for our purposes here on the show, it's also just a great excuse to talk about some of these things at the end of the episode, and at the end of this episode as well, we're probably gonna say, you know, I don't think we should really um put a lot of faith in this particular idea, but it does forces to ask questions about about the inner workings of the world in ancient times, applying what we know about science today

and sort of unwrapping it through an analysis of the past. Well, there's an interesting question that's going to come out of today's episode about what what causes major breakthroughs in the progress of science in history. So we'll get back to that towards the end of the episode. So last time, we talked about the idea who could have been a weapon of germ warfare. That's unlikely, but it's fun to consider. Um, we talked about the pretty much impossible idea that it

was a bearer of some sort of radiation hazard. And this has been popular with people like Eric von Danikin and I don't know about him specifically, but some of those ancient aliens. Yeah, anytime where you're like, oh, there's some sort of of of crazy piece of technology. It's

a nuclear reactor or something. Uh. And then we of course talked about the psychology of artifacts, like the arc being a focal point for worship and how that affects the altered states of consciousness, the mind and so forth. But today we wanted to explore another very strange bronze punk rabbit trail that many many authors have taken over the years to explain stories like Errand's two Sons in the Story of Uza, these people who are struck dead in the presence of the arc, and that is the

idea of the electric arc. Yes, this is this is a pretty fabulous notion because it doesn't really it doesn't depend on aliens, it doesn't depend on any um, you know, the alternative view of the evolution of consciousness or anything. It basically just depends it basically asked questions about like what were the what was the knowledge of electricity at the time, and what were the capabilities and material capabilities

in many cases to construct a primitive device? I would like to read with some abridgements, from an article published in the Chicago Daily Tribune March five, ninety three by the Reverend John Evans, called Scientists, says Sacred Box was a condenser. Robert, will you help me read some sections from this? Certainly, would you like to take the beginning here? I shall It was a charge of some ten thousand volts of static electricity, and not the wrath of God

that killed Uza when he touched the Ark of the Covenant. Such, at least is the scientific conjecture of Dean Frederick Rogers of the Department of Engineering at Lewis Institute of Technology, concerning the mysterious powers of the Arc, which was not only an object of reverence to the Israelites, but also a troublesome possession. Right. So the article then goes on to tell the story of Usa. As we told before, the arc goes unsteady. Oxen were about to knock it over.

He touches it, he gets struck dead. Uh, And Evans writes, quote Professor Rogers made a study of the construction of the arc and discovered. Its design called for a perfectly constructed simple electric condenser or Leiden john Are. And then the article also goes on to tell the story of the construction of the Ark of the Covenant. We talked

about that in the last episode. But basically the design specifications are it's a big wooden box with gold on the inside and the outside, and not just any wood at shipham would right, Yeah, it's which I believe is supposed to be the Acacia tree Acacia would uh. They called it ship him wood and it's got gold on the inside, gold on the outside, and then these gold

representative figures of Cherubim on the top. So going back to the article, the scientific interest in the construction pointed out by Professor Rogers was that the Acacia would box, about forty inches long and slightly less than thirty inches in width and depth, not only was lined with gold

leaf on the inside, but overlaid with the same metal without. This, according to Professor Rodgers, is the first step that any modern boy with a flare for electrical experimentation will take to create a light in jar, and girls don't be discouraged there. You can create ldon jars too. Also, I don't never created a light in jar. I did the potato battery, and that's about as far as I went towards creating the arc. I never even made a potato battery.

But I should also say, boys and girls alike, if you are actually constructing a light in jar, do some with with proper safety precautions and adult supervision, because they can actually be dangerous depending on their capacity. But anyway, moving on, except that in a light in jar, a glass receptacle is coated on the inside and the outside

with tinfoil instead of gold. Then with the aid of a rod and a small knob at the top, and a short chain at the bottom, which is inserted through the cork so that the chain may make contact with the bottom of the jar, a young experimenter is ready to collect small charges of bottled lightning. Robert, would you like to take over? In the section subtitled a condenser of electricity? But the Ark of the Covenant was a much larger condenser and thought by Professor Rogers to have

been capable of collecting death dealing charges. They divined erections called for the creation of two chair, of them pure gold, to be placed on a gold slab or mercy seat atop the arc. These chairbim Professor Rodgers explained what he believes to have been the positive pole of the circuit, similar to the knob on the top of the light

and jar. When he was asked how the static charge of electricity got into the arc, Professor Rogers admitted that there was very little accepted authority among scientists concerning the action and control of atmospheric electricity. He explained, however, that it is known among physicists that a difference of potential exists between the Earth and the air, which may be collected in electrical charges under certain favorable conditions. The design

of the arc, at least as described in Exodus. Undoubtedly, I love this certainty of people writing about these kinds of kind of hair brained interpretations. Clearly there's no room for for discussion here. That's what it was. Yeah. So the article goes on to state that Rogers believes the arc could have been electrically charged by air currents created by smoke from the burning of incense and sacrifices, which

the Bible says often happened close to the arc. He also says this could charge the light in arc enough to allow it to deal fatal bolts of electricity, and he cites a Hebrew commentary tradition that states that quote, the wings of the golden Cherubim not only emitted fire, but also an aura known among electricians as brush glow. The fire emitted by the Cherubim could have been well

known electrical arc resulting from overcharge. Professor Rogers beliefs that a number of accounts of destruction attributed by the scriptures to the arc might be explained as being results of purely natural phenomena, and he gives some examples that like we talked about last time, the destruction of the Philistine idol of Dagon quote a divinity supposed to be half

fish and half man. And just a side note, apparently that association of the Canaanite god Dagon with fish that I think that is supposed to be exonymic in origin, meaning that the the ancient Hebrews related the name of this god to the Hebrew word for fish. The original Philistine Dagon appears to be more likely some kind of

grain and fertility gods. Sorry Lovecraft fans, Oh yeah, that is kind of disappointment, because Dagon, of course is a part of the Lovecraft mythos and uh and and then it's one of those cool gods where you read about it there, then you read about it in the Bible. And if you, like I was, if you were a you know, a high schooler who's who suddenly discovered Lovecraft and then found one of these deities in the Bible

as well, it was a pretty awesome moment. Oh. I can't help but think of the creatures of the sea as the children of Dagon. I'm always going to go there, even knowing what I know now that he probably wasn't actually a fish god, right, But at the same time, we do have a lot of We've discussed some tremendous

ancient fish gods on the show before, right. But anyway, So they tell the story in the article of this philistine idol repeatedly getting knocked over or off of the arc, and Roger says, quote, if the idol had been constructed out of some poorer metal in combination with wood, an electrical charge arched far below the capacity of the arc would have been enough to have accomplished the destruction. So I think they're saying that the arc could have knocked

over the the idol just by discharging electricity. I'm I'm not sure about that, but okay, yeah, I'm gonna try to include some art that I found on the landing page for this episode a stuff to blow your mind dot com, because they are a number of wonderful depictions of like the glowing arc and a top old uh statue of the deity Dagon sometimes with a fish tail that of course is now broken because it fell over and uh and of course this is uh. This kind of thing was was also referenced in Rages of the

Lost Arc. Again, that's scene where the Ark of the Covenant burns through the swastika on the crate that contains it. Yeah, like like destroying another false idle. Yeah. Uh. So to continue, and we're getting close to the end of this article, but there's some other good stuff here. So Evans talks about how all these kinds of miracles could be attributed to electricity, and he talks about the tendency of people to attribute, you know, processes they don't understand, to divine intervention.

And then he says, thus, if Moses accidentally stumbled upon the principle of the leiden Jar, the device would instantly be accepted as the conveying medium of divine favor or disfavor.

Sounds again like a little bit too much certainty in this interpretation here, but the author tells a bunch more stories of the arc, and then also points out that the ark of the Covenant was not the only arc given sacred significance in the ancient world, and he discusses ancient Egyptian arcs, speculating that Moses could have learned about the creation of electrical arcs from the Egyptians when he

was growing up in the pharaoh's court. Again, that's that's a nice story, but I think once again the problem is just that it's taking the biblical source at face value. And what's more likely is that the biography of Moses is a legend. But but yeah, there there. He does point out that there are other arc like things in other cultures around the ancient Near East, and and and the Egyptians are a great example, right. But then again we have to come back to perhaps the simpler explanation

that an arc like thing is a box. Yeah, and and therefore, yes, the technology of box making was very much in effect at the time, right uh. And so finally, Robert do you want to read this very last paragraph here? Certainly, while no historian would engage in such speculation, yet it is the right of any man to fancy that it was in Egypt that the properties of the gold coated box were discovered by some hapless craftsman. He paid for his discovery with his life, but gave his kinsmen a

home for a new and powerful god. Okay, so they've got a theory here. Some Egyptian craftsman accidentally discovered how to build alidon Jar by building boxes and covering them with gold, and then that information was transmitted to Moses, and then Moses carried the secret of how to build alidon Jar, and that became the Ark of the Covenant, and thus it gives us all these stories of like

people touching it and getting struck dead. Now, I think it would be ridiculous to say that if the arc actually existed, we're assuming something like it may have if it existed, that it was best explained in these terms. But well, I don't think we need to resort to this to explain the Arc legend. I don't find it implausible at all that someone in the ancient world and someone in the ancient Mediterranean could have at some point accidentally created a capacitor, which is what alidon jar is,

and that it could have injured or killed people. And that is a really interesting thing to consider, right because not I mean, not only, of course, the the accidental creation of such a thing, but then the recreation such a thing and the utilization of such a thing, either as essentially a tool of divination, like what's going to

happen when I touch it? Like a fatal shock, as a no, not dying as yes, you know that that sort of thing, which which a lot of ancient practices of religion and even modern practices of religion really boiled down to that give me something to provide an answer for some question I have, or or provide some sort of a random answer to something that I am incapable of generating my own random answer too. Yeah, and again I think it's not hard to believe that that someone

could have accidentally discovered how to build something like this. Again, like the discovery of the actual liden Jar was also accidental somewhat and frightening someone. Maybe we should explore that after a break. Thank alright, we're back. Okay, So we mentioned before the break that in fact, the discovery of

the liden Jar itself. We've got these people saying that the Ark of the Covenant was some kind of ancient liden Jar, some kind of capacitor or condenser that would store up electric charge and then discharge it all at once, maybe killing somebody who touched it in the wrong way. Uh. So, in Set there was this German Lutheran bishop named you all, Georg von Kleist. I've also seen his name represented as

you want, Jurgen von Klist. I don't know if those are variations on the same name or if that's discrepancy. I don't know, but either way, whatever his middle name was, von Kleist was performing experiments with an electrostatic generator. At the time, this would have been something like the spinning globe generator of Francis Howkesby or of Benjamin Franklin, which was essentially like a glass sphere that you would rotate rapidly against a wool cloth by turning a crank, charging

the sphere by friction, essentially gathering up electrons from the cloth. Now, once this principle had been demonstrated, uh, lots of people were messing around with them, and von Kleist had a glass medicine bottle that was filled with liquid. It was water or alcohol, with a cork top and a nail driven through the cork, poking down into the liquid inside.

And while he was doing his experiments, Von Kleist held the outside of the bottle with his hand and he touched the nail to the generator that was, you know, the friction generator. And after charging the inside of the bottle, he found that when he held the bottle with one hand and touched the nail with his other hand, he received a shock. Why because he just used his body

to complete a circuit and thus the spark the shock. Yes. Uh. And then there's another guy around the same time, Peter van mussen Brook of Leiden, Holland, who discovered the same principle the following year, which is where the Lyden jar gets its name. It's it's spelled like l e y d e N. But I think Leiden Holland is with like an ei, so I'm saying Lyden. I've heard people say Leyden. I think I read it in my mind is laden for years and years I may have said

laid in the past. Whichever way it is, I'm going to be saying, lyden. If you don't like that, you can email and complain. So von mussen Bruck was able to charge up a glass jar full of water with a metal rod plunging inside it. And he also discovered that when you touched the rod while holding the outside of the jar, you got this terrific shock. So the principle here is the one of creating this electrical potential difference.

You know, by charging it up in this way and having the insulator of the glass there between the inside and the outside, you're creating this difference potential where one side is positively charged, one side is negatively charged, and they desperately want to equalize. And whenever you complete that circuit circuit, they will equalize. And if you are the thing that completes that circuit, that equalization can be unpleasant

for you. It can be bad for your body. Now let's talk about how unpleasant because uh, we we experience static shock all the time, especially during the winter in

our modern world. My son and I when we go to a playground, we always do this thing called electric high five where if there's if there's you know, static electricity is generated when he goes down the slide because because of friction, I wait at the bottom and he gives me a high five, and sometimes there is an alarming shock to it, like it's it's it's pretty intense, but it's fun, right, It's not something that I would attribute to the to the wrath of of of an

ancient god. When he goes down slide, he's becoming an electrostatic generator and you, you are the You are the ground terminal. So yeah, the question though, is could that high five be dangerous or fatal? You bet? Actually, well, not on the slide, but given given how much charge you could store up under various circumstances, yeah, it's entirely possible. Van Musson Brook reportedly said I would not take a

second shock for the Kingdom of France. And Benjamin Franklin, We've talked about this on the show before, but the year old American hero Benjamin Franklin, hanging out in Philadelphia,

loved experimenting with light in jars. He began to get more power by chaining them together in a circuit so that their combined capacity could be discharged all at the same time, giving even more power, and Franklin kind of turned into a mad scientist in this regard, he became temporarily enthralled with the idea of using the powerful shock from this parade of jars to deal lethal shocks to animals.

And he compared this row of lden jars all strung together to a battery of cannons or military artillery, giving us the term we still used today for a slightly different form of storage for electrical potential. The battery is like a you know, it's a battery. In the seventeen forties, Benjamin Franklin told a friend of his that he had figured out that the discharge of two lden jars was

quote sufficient to kill common hens outright. He even said that since the electric shock killed so quickly, it might become a more humane way of slaughter for butchers, so that the birds that they butchered suffered less. And he proposed that a butcher could kill a turkey by stringing together six Lden jars into a battery, and then tied the chain, which was one terminal, around the turkey's legs, and then lift the turkey so that its head touched

the other terminal. Whether or not this was actually more humane as a method of butchery. It probably wasn't the safest method for butchers to use, because when Franklin himself was trying to perform experiments like this, like there was a time he wanted to have a turkey barbecue where he was trying to kill turkeys with liden jars, he ended up accidentally shocking himself horribly and he was like knocked back and he felt bruised for days. Uh he and he explicitly said that he was afraid that a

blow like that could easily kill a man. Yeah, I mean, Benjamin Franklin here is really sounding like a man who has never observed, who has never watched someone who knows what they're doing kill a chicken or a duck, because generally it is just I've seen like food documentaries where you see like a loving, caring a duck farmer just you know, one second they're holding the duck and then it's like just a quick twist of the wrist and they've rung its neck and it's dead. Yes, far better

than risking your own death. And it's like burning the house down in the process. Well, and then it didn't even always work, because he said so he was trying to instantly and humanely kill turkeys this way, but he would like knock them unconscious and sometimes they'd come back, they'd be kind of woozed. Uh. It just sounds horrible, what are you doing, Ben? But anyway, so eventually people figured out that there are multiple ways of constructing alidon jar.

You can make one with a simple conductive foil on the inside and the outside of a glass jar, or you can make one with water on the inside. In the eighteenth century, it became common to cram the inside of the jar with gold leaf, and they're just a bunch of ways to do it. But essentially what you need is a thin layer of what's known as a dielectric, which is an insulating non conductive material like glass, with a way of charging up the potential difference between the

conductors on each side of that dielectric layer. You've got the negative charge on the inside and the positive charge on the outside. And so back to the idea of of our friend professor Frederick Rodgers. He was saying, Okay, that's how the arc is working. Right. You've got dielectric, which is the wood, and then you've got the gold layering, the gold plating on the inside and on the outside, and those are forming the conductive foils like in a

liden jar. All you really need is like a way of charging up the inside and having that potential difference. And it's very possible that you have a lethal electro static discharge machine capable of killing people who touch it the wrong way. Now, our friend professor Frederick Rogers, who oh, I just realized he's Fred Rogers, this is Mr Rogers. Well, it's a beautiful day in the neighborhood, a beautiful day

for electrocution. Uh So, Mr Rogers wasn't the first person to propose that the arc was a capacitor or a liden jar. Actually found earlier evidence of different versions of this theory, including one from one of my favorite discourse communities of all time, late nineteenth century American Spiritualism. Remember our old friend John Murray Spear, of course, Yes, yeah, the spiritualist agitator for the spirit Land building that tremendous contraption that was going to was was that a radio

for speaking to God? Yes? Essentially, I mean it was

very complicated his theology about that. But John Murray Spear was a spiritualist who thought he was getting messages from the spirits of the dead telling him how to build an electro mechanical Messiah called the New Motor, which would be a channel for the new motive power, which was God's energy poured into the universe through the lens of the Sun, which would be enlightening and would cause wisdom and a new human that would be created by essentially,

what this machine was was like a coffee table with like a bunch of metal stuff on top of it. I remember looking at illustrations of this and it was no arc, that's for certain. I remember exactly what you said about it, which is that you said it looked like if a coffee table mate it with a dalek. Yeah. Yeah, it's pretty much what it looked like. No chair of him. But anyway, I think we should explore some spiritualist bronze punk.

So I wasn't able to find an original version of this article, but I want to talk about an article that's reproduced in a book by the spiritualist author Moses Hull. Whole quotes the entirety of this article, which was published sometime in the eighteen nineties and a spiritualist periodical called The Progressive Thinker, which has a great little subtitle, it's science supplemented by an exalted morality, the Bible of the future.

And so you've got all these strange currents in nineteenth century American spiritualism, which as in this case, often featured like a combination of belief in the existence of spirits and our ability to receive communications from them, but then also like progressive politics, often abolition of slavery, women's suffrage, that kind of thing, a kind of futuristic embrace of scientific and technological progress, skepticism about some traditional doctrines of

religion while still embracing others. Given all this kind of stuff, it's not surprising to me that spiritualist authors would be embracing an electrical theory of the arc legend. They sometimes had this sort of rationalism supernaturalism hybrid that made them want to read the Bible as in some ways literally true and in other ways like revealing hints of technologies that we would later discover, maybe through the revelations of spirits.

Like remember John murray Spears belief that he was getting messages from the Association of Electrizers. Who were these people like Benjamin Franklin and all these dead people who were giving him technological messages from beyond the grave. But anyway, let's look at this article from the Progressive Thinker. So the the author of this article says, there is nothing new on the face of the earth, and there is no doubt that electricity was well known to the Israelites

and probably to the Phoenicians. Again, no doubt. Why why is it always no doubt uncertainty? We'll come back to that particular question. Because on one hand, yes, there was some knowledge of electricity, but was it working. I don't

know if we know that it was known to the Israelites. Yeah, because I mean I have to admit I don't really know what the what the weather, weather patterns are necessarily like uh, in the Middle Middle East, like it to what extent lightning is observed, But the observation of lightning would be one slight level of knowledge of electricity, not necessarily, I mean, not a working knowledge. You can look at at a lightning storm, you can be impressed by it and have no idea what it is. Sure given a

broad definition, okay, yeah, yeah, uh. And there's certainly what the Greeks knew, which we'll get to a little bit. So The author explains the story of the construction of the arc, points out that the special type of wood that was that was used to build the arc. They say, quote, was this choice accidental on account of the great value of the resinous would or was it in the choice of the best known nonconductor among the great number of

various timbers. I don't know if that is correct. I sort of doubt that premise, but you know who knows um. I was wondering, is would a good insulator? And I looked this up. It basically depends on factors about the wood itself, such as the type of wood and the moisture content. So, of course, the author points out correctly that it is said that the inside and outside of the arc were covered in beaten gold, and that this is a good conductor of electricity. It is true that

gold is a good conductor of electricity. Quote. So much is certain that if Edison or Tesla had lived in those days, they could not have improved upon the choice of material, and the result was a powerful leiden Jar. I think they actually could have improved on it. For instance, silver is an even better conductor than gold. Also, Sarah the them a higher rank of angel saying they could go from Cherban oh Toche. So the author also claims that the arc was charged by the smoke of burnt offerings,

which is the same thing Roger said. Uh. The author says that after Moses died, others improved upon the design of the electrical arc by placing it in a temple surrounded by a hundred and fifty foot poles covered in gold to charge the arc with electrical storms. And then we get to my favorite part, which is that the author says that he essentially implies that Aaron in the Bible stories used the arc as a murder weapon. Robert,

would you like to read this passage? I've got here, certainly, and we'll just pretend that we threw in the law and order sound effect right here, or maybe maybe we can do that. I don't know. We'll see any coroner's jury of today if it were to sit on an inquest over the bodies of Aaron's sons, would it once bring a verdict of death by discharge of electricity. Aaron

knew this power, and to make it effective. All he had to do to deal death from this apparatus was to remove the costly camel's hair carpet, which are almost perfect non conductors of electricity and make the culprit stand on terra FIRMA death would result instantly by fire breaking out and leave no wounds or burns to account for his death. That several members of revolting tribes of israel Lites were thus electrocuted is also a matter of record

in the Bible. I wouldn't call them revolting necessarily. That seems a little harsh. Oh means rebel, Yes, that is again matter of record. It is just a certainty. What what is with this? Well, I mean there's probably a

lot to unpack their interns. I mean, we haven't packed this to a certain extent, uh, for instance, looking at the uh the Great flood and the idea of a biblical great flood and its effect on the study of geology for so long, you know, I mean, the the Biblical record as it was uh certainly influenced even scientific

understanding of the world for for quite a while. Well, I just think it's so interesting that you've got this weird hybrid approach of looking at the Bible here where the person is saying, I'm going to question and interrogate the source of this power. But I'm going to absolutely take the story at face value except where it sort of doesn't really match what I'm saying. But also I'm going to take God completely out of the equation or

replace it with a device. But I'm also going to treat the text this, uh, this translated text as if it is a pleet historical records, as if it's just a security cam footage of the Ark of the Covenant. Yeah, that is exactly what I was, maybe inarticulately trying to say. And then they in the article by saying, Franklin, the electric chair in the state of New York, and the discovery of the light in Jar itself in light in Germany are all back numbers. History only repeats itself, whether

recorded or not. And then here's a here's an even crazier one. It seems that none other than Nicola Tesla toyed with this idea as well. In a nineteen fifteen essay called The wonder World to be Created by Electricity, Tesla wrote, the superstitious belief of the ancients, if it existed at all, can therefore not be taken as a reliable proof of their ignorance. But just how much they knew about electricity can only be conjectured. A curious fact is that the ray or torpedo fish was used by

them in electrotherapy. Some old coins show twins, stars, or sparks, such as might be produced by a galvanic battery. The records, though scanty, are of a nature to fill us with conviction that a few initiated at least had a deeper knowledge of amber phenomena. To mention one, Moses was undoubtedly a practical and skillful electrician, far in advance of his time.

Undoubtedly the Bible describes precisely and minutely arrangements constituting a machine in which electricity was generated by friction of air against silk curtains and stored in a box constructed like a condenser. It is very plausible to assume that the sons of Aaron were killed by a high tension discharge, and that the vestal fires of the Romans were electrical.

The belt drive must have been known to engineers of that epoch, and it is difficult to see how the abundant evolution of static electricity could have escaped their notice. The words of Nicola Tesla impressive, I had no idea that he ever commented on this again is certainly undoubtedly, and then more recently, of course, the idea of the electric arc as. I think we've mentioned this at the beginning.

If not, you will not be surprised to learn that it seems popular with people operating in the ancient alien cinematic universe. Eric van dani Can claimed this, while also claiming that it was as part of his whole ancient alien technology thing. It was. It was alien gift motif. I think he said that it was like a radio. Somebody said that it was a nuclear reactor. I know Rile, the founder of the Aliens, had some idea that it

was a nuclear reactor or something like that. But to what end, What good does it do to have a nuclear reactor and just trot it about the desert. I'm not sure that it does, because really the whole point what makes this subject actually interesting is that building a form of a capacitor is technically possible for the ancients without supposing any kind of alien nonsense or intervention. That's true, and then ultimately the use of it as religious technology

is also reasonable as well. I mean, we've discussed religious technology in the show before. In the way that various religions throughout history have used some sort of new technology as ritual. All right, let's take one more quick break, and then when we come back, we'll finish up our discussion. Alright, we're back. So there are all these ideas people have had, as we've been talking about about the Ark of the

Covenant as a capacitor some form of electrical device. And while I think you don't need to go to these kind of bronze punk explanations to explain the origin of these legends, it is really interesting to think about the idea and the possibilities for electrical technology in the ancient world. Now, there isn't really much or any evidence of electrical technology in the ancient world, but there is some indication that there were the beginnings of understanding of electricity in the

ancient world. Yeah, I mean there again. Obviously, aspects of our electrical world that are unmistakable. Lightning is probably the strongest, clearest overt sign of electricity in our world. But of course merely observing lightning is a far cry from having a decent underst standing of what it is. Likewise, certain circumstances can cause us to produce our own electrostatic discharge. And the ancient Greeks knew about some of this. They

knew about the triboelectric effect. For instance, this occurs when materials become electrically charged after they come into frictional contact with a different material. This is the concept behind the electrostatic generator infraction generator. Yeah. Again, rub a balloon on someone's hair and you can witness this holy power. Uh, do the electric high five with a six year old

and you can also feel the divine spark. They may not have had our level of advanced playground equipment in ancient Greece, but they've probably had some stuff you could rub your butt on that would give you static discharge. Yeah, because there's a whole list of materials that can, under the right circumstances, produce this effect on the positive charge side of things. The list includes human skin, hair, leather, rabbit fur, cat fur, and wool. You know, think of

all those electric cats in ancient Easia. Right. And then on the other side of the equation you have would gold balloons and of course amber. We alluded to the amber effect earlier in one of the quotes that that I believe you were reading. Yeah, and amber is a big, big issue here. Yeah, the ancient Greeks certainly knew about the amber wool combination. Daileys of Melitis reported on this.

Uh He was a mathematician and astronomer from the Greek city of Militis in uh Ionia, which is modern day Turkey, and he lived from six four through five six b c. He discovered that static electricity could be generated by rubbing fur on a piece of amber, and the Greeks noted that the this through a charged amber buttons as well, especially because these could attract you know, light objects such

as hair. And I think this is this is key to thinking about what ancient people's knew about electricity is the materials they used and sort of the everyday circumstances in which they would, through continual usage, have the uh encounter the chance of creating that spark. Yeah, and it's still there in the language we used to discuss electricity today, like the word electron and electricity comes from the Greek

word electron, which means amber. Yeah, so you know some level of understanding regarding static discharge as a property of material interaction in the ancient world, even three thousand BC is certainly not crazy. It would seem just a natural result of, again, of working with those materials of human

invention and toolmaking exactly. Yeah, so the principles of friction generators for electricity, much like Franklin's and Hawksby's friction generators had it had basically already been discovered in ancient times and didn't require any modern materials or technology to produce.

And then you've also come you compound that with the rest of our discussion, which makes it seem that while these stories of the arc probably have nothing to do with this, the storage of electricity and some kind of crude capacitor could also have been managed in the acient world via basic types of Leiden jars. You've got to you know, dielectric insulator, and you've got some kind of like gold or something on either side of it. It might have even been built by accident at some point.

This also doesn't require any kind of great crazy bronze punk sci fi. So this kind of leads us to a big question. If the ancients had pretty much all they needed to generate and store electricity, at least in the crudest sense, why didn't they harness these earlier. Why didn't this lead them to to perform the step up in in the next experiments, in the next experiments like

it did in say the eighteenth century. Uh, that would lead to the subsequent development of electrically based technologies in the ancient world. What if by the time of the Roman Empire the world had electric power? How different would the world be? Well, that is at once a tantalizing question and a frightening question. Knowing knowing what inevitably occurs as humans new technological breakthroughs. Yeah, I don't know that I would have trusted the Romans with electricity. I got

I scarcely trust um any modern day cultures with electricity. Well, as Carl Sagan said, humanity has become powerful before humanity has become wise. And you know this is true even today, I'd say, I'd venture a guest. We were even less wise in the times of the Romans, or at least the Roman Empire was less wise. How many chickens would have been fried by by by by Roman Benjamin Franklin's at the time, One can only imagine. Yeah, so there

must be some kind of answer to this question. Like, it's not like there's some kind of magical ingredient they did not possess that would not allow them to start this chain of research to gain power over the electrical world. I have to guess that the main impediment. Maybe there's

something I'm not thinking of here. I have to think the main impediment is just like they didn't have the proper ecosystem of scientific investigation, like all these different people in different places doing their independent experiments and then all

coming together to compare notes. You know, this reminds me of a discussion that we had for our new show, our new podcast that is launching I believe next week, UH invention podcast, all about inventions where they come from, and uh, we're talking about the X ray, I believe, and we were talking about, Okay, you have the materials and the parts that were necessary to create the X ray, the understanding limited as it was at the time, uh,

to create this machine. And yet there were a few decades there before somebody actually really did, before they really cracked the mystery of what was going on. And kind of like the Leiden Yard, the discovery was partially an accident. I mean, somebody was Uh. The discoverer of the X

ray machine was messing around with with electrical equipment. So it wasn't like they were just like, you know, cleaning their garage and they discovered the X ray machine, but they weren't setting out to discover a way to look inside the body, right, And part of it too was like was also very literally where were they looking and there when they were creating some sort of an effect?

What how are they trying to understand it? And so I think there might be an answer there if and again we're making a few different leaps here, but if assuming for a second that the Arc of the Covenant was indeed a light in jar and uh, and then this was an electrostatic discharge that people were observing and experiencing, what were they observing? How were they trying to observe it? And what were they looking for? What answers were they

looking for in playing with this technology. Well, one of the things that the people who were doing this kind of like pseudohistory about the arc do is they say, well, okay, clearly Aaron started using the arc as a murder weapon, and they were using it as a weapon of war or something like that. I would tend to think if it actually were the case that there was an arc

and the arc was actually a light and jar. Again, I am not at all saying I think this is likely, but just suppose, I would think the most likely used for it would be a piece of religious technology. The purpose of it is to demonstrate some sort of supernatural power by letting off this discharge or whatever it is indication that something you don't understand that is powerful and is unexplained is happening. And this gives you a kind of like peek behind the curtain of reality and you

can see the powers that lie beyond. And really that would be the most powerful application of the technology at the time, because no matter what the stories are about the arc um, you wouldn't be able to bring down the walls of Jericho with this thing. You wouldn't be

able to stop the flow of the river Jordan's. Maybe you could murder your nephew, maybe, But that's kind of small potatoes compared to giving yourself some some powerful force that not only was able to help like shore up your religion, but also convince those that needed convincing that you were privy to the divine word of God through this device. Well, in fact, about the primary ways that lead in jars were used. When people first started making them,

they became like a parlor game, entertaing thing. Yes, it was entertainment. In fact, it was almost a form of religious technology. There would be the stories of people they get a bunch of light in jars together, or I don't know about a bunch, maybe just one. They'd have some kind of capacitor, and then they would get a bunch of monks to hold hands, and then they'd shock them all at the same time in a chain so that they all felt it at once. It was almost

like a strange ritual. Yeah, you get into the power of the performance, right, and it's it's it's a part of religion, it's a part of entertainment. It's just a part of the human experience. It was primarily useful, not for work it would do in the material world, before the work. It would do on the minds of the people taking part and observing. It was performative. Yeah, all right,

so there you have it. Um. I hope everyone leaves these episodes like maybe a little more interested and a little more enthralled by the arc, you know, because ultimately we can't explain what it actually was. If it was a thing. I mean, it's just again, this is a place where history and mythology converge. Yeah, but I do love it as a jumping off point. It's almost like it's the way station to all these strange bronze punk planets you can visit that that are revealing once you

start thinking about them. Indeed, and we would love to hear everyone else's thoughts on on the arc. Yeah, people who learned about it from Raiders of the Lost Arc first of all, and and from people who learned about it in uh, you know, uh their history class, or their Bible class, or uh, whatever kind of a religious study they were involved in. Um, perhaps you have a particular favorite theory. Perhaps you have your own brand new theory that we haven't thought of. Maybe it contained a

giant squid. I don't know. I will leave it to you to provide us with those new theories. But in the meantime, be sure to check out Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is the mothership. That's where you'll find all the episodes of the podcast. That's also

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