Copper Sky and Iron Earth

“All in a hot and copper sky,
The bloody sun, at noon,
Right up above the mast did stand,
No bigger than the moon.”

English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge penned these lines in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. They foreshadow the curse on the ancient mariner after he has killed the albatross. The copper sky as a sign of imminent doom and destruction dates back to the Bible.

There are two sections in the Old Testament known as the portions of rebuke, one in Leviticus and one in Deuteronomy. In them, God lays out in brutal detail what will happen to the children of Israel should they stray from the proper path. It’s not pretty. A keen student of the Bible will notice that each section employs a similar phrase, but with a crucial difference.

Leviticus 26:19
I will also make your sky like iron and your earth like copper.

Deuteronomy 28:23
The heaven which is over your head shall be copper, and the earth which is under you, iron.

Did you catch it? The descriptions are switched! In the first, the sky is like iron and the earth like copper, and in the second, the sky is like copper and the earth like iron.

Many English translations translate the Hebrew word NeChoSheT as brass or bronze, which are both alloys of copper, but the literal translation is copper.

From the fact that the descriptions are switched, we can infer that it’s not important whether the sky is identified as copper and the earth as iron or vice versa. What’s important is that the sky is one and the earth is the other. What is going on here? Ancient Jewish wisdom teaches us that the sky is a metaphor for something far away and out of reach.

With this understanding, we see that the curse isn’t that the sky is iron and the ground is copper, or even that the sky is copper and the ground is iron, rather the curse is that copper and iron will be distant from each other.

Why is it a curse for copper and iron to be far away from each other? Do copper and iron close together form a blessing? Well, interestingly enough, due to the relationship between copper and iron, if you were to take a copper nail and an iron nail and stick them into a lemon, you would be able to light a small light bulb with the current that’s generated. Copper and iron together have the capacity to produce electricity. Now, if you put iron in one lemon and copper in another you would produce nothing, they need to be in proximity to one another to create energy.

You see, energy is God’s way of letting us see that there is an escape to drudgery. Animals need to gather or hunt day in and day out to stay alive. There is no day of rest for them. We, on the other hand, created in God’s image, can use energy that has been stored in creation for us, such as wood, coal, oil, and uranium to not have to constantly work.

Ancient Jewish wisdom teaches us that as the sun set on Adam for the first time he grew afraid of the animals. God presented him with two stones, which he rubbed together, and voila fire was created. Contrast this with the Greek myth of how Prometheus stole the fire from the gods, and in return was punished by being chained to a rock and having his regenerating liver eaten daily by a vulture. The Judeo-Christian tradition teaches us that God gave man energy as a gift for his use to elevate himself above the animals, whereas the Greek approach is that man stole fire from the gods and his punishment is to be placed subservient to an animal, the vulture.

The message of the verses in the portions of rebuke is that at a time of declining morality copper will be separated from iron meaning there will be less energy available. Furthermore this means that we will buy in, even start subscribing to the Greek view of energy, namely that we have stolen it from the gods and must feel guilty and ashamed of using it, rather than the Judeo-Christian approach that energy is a gift from God for us to use and benefit from.

At the present time, the fastest growing belief system in the world is socialism. Like a bizarre virus infection, it races from country to country, from university to government, from entertainment to business, infecting ever-more of the population. Few actually announce “I’ve become a socialist”. Most believe they’ve found a new morality. They sanctimoniously condemn tradition and denounce long-standing social and religious institutions, confident that they are brave revolutionaries standing up to dangerous conservatives. Such is the nature of socialism. It cannot countenance Judeo-Christian Bible-based faith with which it cannot coexist. Strident anti-religion is not a flaw of socialism, it’s one of its main features. What makes it so dangerous to citizens who love their country is that it replaces traditional beliefs with its own set of incompatible beliefs which result in rapid reduction in quality of life for everyone. We have reissued an early best seller, our book America’s Real War which carefully describes each identifiable step in this war on life as it is, and provides you the tools to combat it. Like it or not, you are in a war of ideas and if you don’t want to show up unarmed, please carefully read America’s Real War (on sale this week) and highlight the paragraphs which you will enjoy hurling at the next screeching socialist you encounter.

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