The Kabbalah, a body of Jewish traditional knowledge, was kept secret until the 13th Century AD, it s content was regarded from the magical-mystical point of view particularly so with respect to the Ancient of Days. This was considered to be a Jewish demi-god until in 1978 two English engineers, George Sassoon and Rodney Dale, concluded that the description of the Ancient of Days in the Zohar, one of the books of the Kabbalah, was not of an ominous god-figure, but rather a machine. A close investigation of the text convinced them that the machine produced the biblical manna which fed the Israelites during their forty-year wandering in the desert and was probably of extraterrestrial origin
The machine, called the Othiq Yomin in the Zohar, worked on the basis of the cultivation and processing of an algae-culture, probably one of the chlorella species, which was maintained by a supply of dew, or water, and of radiation from a nuclear-powered light-source.
The Zohar description is so exact that Sassoon and Dale were able to reconstruct the machine in all its details. At the top was a dew-distilling apparatus, which consisted of a curved, cooled surface. Air flowed over this, and from it water condensed. This water was the basic material for the vessel at the centre, which contained the light source and the algae itself, which circulated in various pipes, permitting an exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide with the atmosphere and also dissipated heat.
The chlorella sludge was then taken to another vessel, where the starch content was partically hydrolysed to malt-like substances (hence the honey and wafer taste of the manna), and the dried matter was then finally stored in two collection containers from which it was later drawn off.
To reconstruct such a complex machine from the text of the Zohar necessitated a fresh translation of the original text, which was accomplished by Sassoon, a linguist and computer expert, as well as an electronics engineer. While the textual description of the machine is extremely detailed, it is not immediately apparent that it is a technical service manual because the parts of the Othiq Yomin (originally translated as Ancient of Days, when the Transportable One of the Tanks would be more accurate) are designated with the terminology in use about 1000 B.C. For example, in the Zohar we read passages such as the following:
There are three upper heads; two, and one which contains them.
At the time the Zohar was written, there were no words for Perspex dome, or algae-cultivation-vessel, so they used head, skull and very often face, such as in the following extract:
The dew of the white head drops into the skull of the Small-faces One
and there is it stored.
To enable regeneration of the algae-culture, it was made to flow through a transparent circulation system, which is known in the Zohar as the venerable beard, through which went the oil of the great goodness, that is, the algal sludge. These pipes are discussed thusly:
And those parts which are found in the beard,
they are shaped and lead downwards in many directions.
The machine was equipped with a considerable number of control lamps, which are called shining eyes in the Zohar text, and which light up in various colors:
In his lower eyes there are a left and a right eye,
and these two have two colours,
except when they are seen in the white light of the upper eye.
The complete machine was regarded as a deity or demi-deity consisting of male and female parts. It was given to the Israelites at the beginning of their wandering in the wilderness, possibly by extraterrestrials and produced the manna which enabled them to survive. By all accounts, the machine was kept in the so-called Ark of the Covenant, which served as a transport container for the nuclear-powered machine, which was easily damaged under desert conditions. In the time of David an Solomon it found its place in the Holy of Holies in Solomon’s
