The Divine Right to Bear Arms

Children of Ezekiel is a book destined to be frequently reviewed, partly because of its inherent interest and partly because Lieb has constructed it to involve so many sub-fields of literary and cultural studies: Miltonic prose and Paradise Lost, eighteenth- through twentieth-century histories of technology, and Israeli millennialism contribute to the first chapter alone, with seven more behind, including a detailed look at the eschatological and mystical underpinnings of the Nation of Islam. At the same time, though, the book also focuses quite narrowly on the “afterlife” of a potent image for humankind’s encounter with the power of God, the wheeled chariot of Ezekiel 1. From this combination of a minute textual foundation and wide-ranging application come both the strengths and weaknesses of the study as a whole.

Lieb is primarily interested in two reciprocal aspects of Ezekiel’s vision and its subsequent uses. The first is the way in which the chariot, with its wheels within wheels, uncanny motion, and dangerous brightness, provides an opportunity for interpreters (including the prophet himself) to imagine God’s own technology, and further, human technologies authorized by God. In Lieb’s formulation, the “children of Ezekiel” are “those who seek to harness the power that gives rise to technology” (3). Drawing from some of Heidegger’s writing on technê, Lieb argues that these technologies function for their creators as means of reconceiving or unveiling the true nature of the world, reading the universe through the principles of their own technological discoveries. Calling this process technomorphosis, Lieb understands it as fundamentally aggressive, a manifestation of a will to power. The second aspect of Ezekiel’s text that Lieb draws on is the apocalyptic, drawn mainly from chapter thirty-eight (in which the prophet describes the cataclysmic battle between Israel and Gog, leading to the restoration of Israel and the Temple). This battle, he argues, is the source of modern-day prophecy belief and the engine of contemporary apocalypticisms. For Lieb, this narrative itself impels certain fantasies about end-time technology, especially the role of nuclear weapons, but also interacts with the initial vision of the chariot to suggest a machinery of God’s wrath.

In his acute analysis of the Miltonic Ezekiel, Lieb concentrates on the “Chariot of Paternal Deitie” from which the Son vanquishes the fallen angels in Book Six of Paradise Lost. (This chapter is revised from two articles published in 1985 and 1986.) Reading this recontextualized version of Ezekiel’s chariot specifically as an allegorization of Milton’s Reformation polemic, Lieb connects the eschatological resonances of this episode with Matt. 24 (and, I would add, Revelation 19) to a post-Restoration vision of God’s millennial promise. Simultaneously, though, this divine vehicle seems to be tainted by its resemblance to Satan’s infernal engines and the impulse to rely on machines in order to wreak destruction on the enemy. Lieb then goes on, in the remainder of the chapter, to discuss moments of technological imagination that parallel and in some cases cite Milton’s chariot—the eighteenth-century flying machine of Melchior Bauer, nineteenth-century tracts about the British railroad, and the Israeli-manufactured Merkava tank.

One thing these echoes appear to demonstrate is that Milton’s “Chariot of Paternal Deitie” is much clearer and more imaginable than Ezekiel’s originary vision, and therefore a useful gloss, if not replacement, for the bizarre specifications for the great wheel in the biblical text. Crediting Milton with more actively forming later conceptions, as Lieb seems somewhat ambiguously to do, is attractive—how lovely to claim Milton as relevant to contemporary cultural upheav als!—but improbable. The rest of Children of Ezekiel, divided between an selection of ufology, cyberpunk, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and evangelical end-times predictions in the first half and a focused examination of the Nation of Islam in the second, is of interest to Reformation scholars largely as a crazed mirror for the apocalyptic aspirations of...