That second drawing looks more like a guy who has a cool coat full of trinkets inside than actual wings. Look how they're not actually feathers, but several dis

That second drawing looks more like a guy who has a cool coat full of trinkets inside than actual wings. Look how they're not actually feathers, but several distinct objects inside the coat. Like pendants, coins and rings (some of the same he's wearing). I got the same more materialist-merchant impression from the Apocalypse of Abraham when I read it (if you squint really hard, Abraham is some sort of manufacturer that is fed up with the low quality of the things he make; the thing that is supposed to hold fire, maybe a lamp or something, catches fire and so on). I know both these interpretations are likely imprecise. We can't be precise about knowledge we lost (what some of those things really meant), and there's a real maintained more fantastical explanation drawn on top of it that produced a beautiful layered mythology that is also interesting to be preserved. However, I can't unsee the merchant and the thing-maker as more plausible depictions of what that era was all about and why they feel mundane now but could have been super important (worth mythologizing over some decades or centuries after it happened) then.