The First Emergency Response Vehicle? The First Emergency Response Associated With the Number 911?
In the United States we refer to a telephone call requesting an emergency response to the caller's location (usually the caller's location, anyway) as a '911 call'. If you dial '911' in the United States...just those 3 digits...you set some pretty serious wheels in motion. You will have reached a professional dispatcher who dispatches police or emergency response vehicles of the various types in very quick fashion, though they do ask you questions first to determine your needs. You teach your kids this number very early, and the seriousness of using it. You do not ever make prank calls to 911! You do not fool around with that number. If we accidentally dial it and then hang up, dispatchers usually will call you right back. If you don't answer they will frequently send a police person to your phone number's registered location. So, 911 is a phone number that is treated very seriously, one only called when you have extremely urgent needs.
The use of the phone number was reportedly conceived in '66. That is to say, in 1966. But the number 66 has strangely been associated with getting help which you desperately need just in the nick of time. That is especially so in the Bible. It is beyond eerie how many times the number 66 shows up in one fashion or another associating itself with 'God's people being rescued just in time!' One of the most popular accounts on the Deeds of God website is focused on this strange number 66, in fact. Oddly, it shows up like that outside of the Bible in the same context...great rescue, especially rescues involving God's people... with the same otherworldly frequency. It is as if it is purposefully used in this fashion by God Almighty, the great guider of all of history. Anyway, the new 1966 idea for a standardized emergency number usable no matter where in the nation you needed to call from was well received. A standardized one-call-fits-all nationwide emergency services number! No matter where you were in the nation you wouldn't have to find out what the local police or ambulance number was...you'd just call 911. Brilliant!! Time saved is lives saved in so many emergency cases.
Here is an excerpt from an article found at 911.gov at https://www.911.gov/about/the-national-911-program-celebrates-50-years-of-911/#:~:text=The%20History%20of%20911&text=The%20first%20call%20to%20911,police%2C%20fire%20or%20emergency%20services.
"The first call to 911 was placed in February of 1968. Thanks to 911, throughout the country, a call to 911 can quickly connect you with the help you need.
Before that first call, citizens needed to dial local 7-digit phone numbers to reach police, fire or emergency services. In 1966, the National Academy of Sciences published "Accidental Death and Disability: The Neglected Disease of Modern Society,” a landmark report highlighting how accidental death and injury, particularly from motor vehicle crashes, had become an epidemic in the U.S. The report urged a series of steps to reduce these needless deaths and injuries, including exploring the “feasibility of designating a single, nationwide, telephone number to summon an ambulance.”
Two years later, a Senator in Haleyville, Alabama placed the first 911 call. It wasn’t long before other cities followed. Only six days later, the second 911 call was placed in Nome, Alaska. Since then, the system expanded nationwide and is continuously improving to keep pace with advancing technology."
End quote.
The first 'emergency vehicle' noted in Biblical history may have been the Ark of Noah, depending upon how you interpret scripture. It pretty much was an emergency rescue vehicle, whose purpose very much was to save lives. In Genesis chapter 6 we learn that the world had grown so wicked that it was highly displeasing to God. He decided to wipe out the world. But in Genesis Chapter 6, around verse 6 (See the 66? It is the first 6 6 in the Bible if I am not mistaken. And it is focused on how to save God's people just when they will desperately need it.) God decides that there is one single family that still pleases Him, and He decides to save them. So He has them build the Ark. Here below is how Genesis chapter 6 puts it. Do these few verses constitute God's earliest rescue plan for His imperiled people that have remained loyal to him in a time of great disloyalty and rebellion? There are a good many such situations throughout the annals of the Bible, unfortunately, because mankind keeps returning to wickedness. Our hearts are evil and unworthy:
4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days—and also afterward—when the sons of God went to the daughters of humans and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.
5 The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. 6 The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. 7 So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” 8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.
End Quote.
But here is the odd reason I wrote this account. Noah and his family, along with the animals that are sent there by God to board the Ark, close the doors of the Ark and wait. A week later the rains begin and the fountains of the deep crack open and water blows to the surface and the great deluge, the great flood of Noah's time, begins. Only 8 humans are on the Ark: Noah and his wife, along with Noah's three sons, Ham, Shem, and Japheth, with their three wives. Theirs' are the three wombs that have led to the 8 billion people that we see today. No pressure, Ladies, no pressure. It's just that the survival of all humanity is riding on you, that's all! Those ladies had some responsibility on their...shoulders. I have not ever read any old text speaking of Noah's wife (some sources say her name was Na'amah) having additional children after the flood. She may have been too old. Noah turned 600 years old during this catastrophic period of the flood. (Curiously, she may also have been a quite large woman by today's standards. A bone from a grave in Turkey identified by American amateur archaeologist Ron Wyatt as being the mostly robbed grave of Noah's wife was found to contain a finger bone suggesting a woman of about 1.5 to over 2 times the height of a modern woman. You can look it up if you find it interesting, as there are quite a few pictures you can easily locate.) But, I digress, as they say. The reason I wrote this article is that it is kind of interesting that the first successful 911 sort of emergency vehicle (referring to the Ark of Noah) was able to successfully complete its first and only rescue mission of God's imperiled people, as we know. And that crucial accomplishment is celebrated and enshrined in human history, if you will, at the place in scripture where you find the Bible's first use of the number 911. (Genesis chapter 9, verse 11, shown below.) God is basically talking to Noah's family about what has just happened, about what they have just survived, as they stand on some mountain side in the mountains of Ararat on a planet freshly sterilized of all land life and of its old evil by God's great and terrible flood. There, where this first '911' is found in the Bible, and where history's first 911 mission was just successfully completed, God is pretty much telling them, 'It's gonna be OK. You are safe now. You have been rescued via my emergency vehicle that I had you build to my specifications, and mankind doesn't have to worry about this particular thing happening to them in this particular way again. I promise!' Noah's family probably stood in great need of some reassurance. They were the first people to survive the destruction of nearly all land life forms on an entire planet. They were probably feeling pretty close to traumatized as they looked out from that mountain upon a muddy and ruined world. Here it is, chapter 9, verse 11 shown in context, below:
9 Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. 2 The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. 3 Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.
4 “But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it. 5 And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal. And from each human being, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being.
6 “Whoever sheds human blood,
by humans shall their blood be shed;
for in the image of God
has God made mankind.
7 As for you, be fruitful and increase in number; multiply on the earth and increase upon it.”
8 Then God said to Noah and to his sons with him: 9 “I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you 10 and with every living creature that was with you—the birds, the livestock and all the wild animals, all those that came out of the ark with you—every living creature on earth. 11 I establish my covenant with you: Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth.”
12 And God said, “This is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come: 13 I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. 16 Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.”
17 So God said to Noah, “This is the sign of the covenant I have established between me and all life on the earth.”
End Quote
God, though terrifyingly strict at times, surely has a wonderful sense of humor and irony, greater than ours, even if He did make us in His own image. Whether or not He purposefully included a winking nod to the future number 911 in His holy word is only speculation. It does sound like kind of a reach. But, He certainly foresaw the future...all of the future, so He might have. (Our present time is around 4,350 years after the flood, per Bible chronology.) We humans, meaning me this time, might be connecting things in a way that He did not mean for them to connect, and I certainly acknowledge that and hope not to offend God or mislead anyone.
But there is also that connection with the ever mysterious number 66 to consider...right? At the least, it all constitutes a strange and oddly inter-related coincidence.
What remains ever true is that Jesus is the true Son of God made flesh, He came down and taught and died for our sins. He is our only approved Savior sent by the Holy Father, and only by asking Jesus to be Lord of our life, confessing our sins and being baptized, then following His teachings and the Holy Spirit's leadings while loving and serving those around us in Jesus' name can we one day attain salvation for our souls through His blood sacrifice, and enjoy an eternal life dwelling with our Lord in Heaven, happy servants all! Interesting speculations are not very important compared to that core truth.