It was, of course, not this mountain or that river or that sea exclusively that was reddened, thus earning the name Red or Bloody, as distinguished from other mountains and seas. But crowds of men, wherever they were, who witnessed the cosmic upheaval and escaped with their lives, ascribed the name Haemus or Red to particular places.
* The Seven Tablets of Creation, ed. L. W. King (1902). 8 Kalevala, Rune 9. 0 U. Holmberg, Finno-Ugric, Siberian Mythology (1927), p. 370.
10 "To Minerva" in Orphic Hymns (transl. A. Buckley), ed. with the Odyssey of Homer (1861).
11 H. S. Palmer, Sinai (1892). Probably at that time the mountainous land of Seir, upon which the Israelites wandered, received the name Edom (Red), and Erythrea (erythraios—red in Greek) its name; Erythrean Sea was in antiquity the name of the Arabian Gulf of the Indian Ocean, applied also to the Red Sea.
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robin-bobin
The phenomenon of "blood" raining from the sky has also been observed in limited areas and on a small scale in more recent times. One of these occasions, according to Pliny, was during the consulship of Manius Acilius and Gaius Porcius.12 Babylonians, too, recorded red dust and rain falling from the sky;13 instances of "bloody rain" have been recorded in divers countries.14 The red dust, soluble in water, falling from the sky in water drops, does not originate in clouds, but must come from volcanic eruptions or from cosmic spaces. The fall of meteorite dust is a phenomenon generally known to take place mainly after the passage of meteorites; this dust is found on the snow of mountains and in polar regions.15
The Hail of Stones
Following the red dust, a "small dust," like "ashes of the furnace," fell "in all the land of Egypt"
(Exodus 9:8), and then a shower of meteorites flew toward the earth. Our planet entered deeper into the tail of the comet. The dust was a forerunner of the gravel. There fell "a very grievous hail, such as has not been in Egypt since its foundations" (Exodus 9 : 18). Stones of "barad," here translated "hail," is, as in most places where mentioned in the Scriptures, the term for meteorites.
We are also informed by Midrashic and Tal-mudic sources that the stones which fell on Egypt were hot;J this fits only meteorites, not a hail of ice.2 In the Scriptures it is said that 12 Pliny. Natural History, ii, 57. Another instance, according to Plutarch, occurred in the reign of Romulus.
13 F. X. Kugler, "Babylonische Zeitordnung" (Vol. II of his Sternkunde und Sterndienst in Babel) (1909-1910), p. 114.
14 D. F. Arago, Astronomie populaire (1854-1857), IV, 209 f.; Abel-Remusat, Catalogue des bolides et des a4rolith.es observes d la Chine et dans les pays voisins (1819), p. 6.
15 It is estimated that approximately one ton of meteorite dust falls daily on the globe.
1 The Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Berakhot 54b; other sources in Ginzberg, Legends, VI, 178.
2 In the Book of Joshua it is said that "great stones" fell from the sky, and then they are referred to as "stones of barad."
"The ancient Egyptian word for 'hail,' ar, is also applied to a driving shower of sand and stones; in the contest between Horus and Set, Isis is described as
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these stones fell "mingled with fire" (Exodus 9 :24), the meaning of which I shall discuss in the following section, and that their fall was accompanied by "loud noises" (kolot), rendered as
"thunder-ings," a translation which is only figurative, and not literally correct, because the word for "thunder" is raam, which is not used here. The fall of meteorites is accompanied by crashes or explosion-like noises, and in this case they were so "mighty," that, according to the Scriptural narrative, the people in the palace were terrified as much by the din of the falling stones as by the destruction they caused (Exodus 9:28).
^>The red dust had frightened the people, and a warning to keep men and cattle under shelter had been issued: "Gather thy cattle and all that thou hast in the field; for upon every man and beast which shall be found in the field, and shall not be brought home, the hailstones shall come down upon them, and they shall die" (Exodus 9 : 19). "And he that regarded not the word of the Lord left his servants and his cattle in the field" (Exodus 9 : 21). >Similarly, the Egyptian eyewitness: "Cattle are left to stray, and there is none to gather them together. Each man fetches for himself those that are branded with his name." 3 Falling stones and fire made the frightened cattle flee.
--»Ipuwer also wrote: "Trees are destroyed," "No fruits, no herbs are found," "Grain has perished on every side," "That has perished which yesterday was seen. The land is left to its weariness like the cutting of flax." 4 In one day fields were turned to wasteland. In the Book of Exodus (9 : 25) it is written: "And the hail [stones of barad] smote every herb of the field, and brake every tree of the field."
The description of such a catastrophe is found in the Visuddhi-Magga, a Buddhist text on the world cycles. "When a world cycle is destroyed by wind . . . there arises in the beginning a cycle-destroying great cloud. . . . There arises a wind to destroy the world cycle, and first it raises a robin-bobin
fine dust, and then coarse dust, and then fine sand, and then coarse sand, and then grit, stones, up to boulders as large
sending upon the latter ar n sa, 'a hail of sand.'" A. Macalister, "Hail," in Hastings, Dictionary of the Bible (1901-1904).
« Papyrus Ipuwer 9 : 2-3. * Ibid., 4 : 14; 6 : 1; 6 : 3; 5 : 12.
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53
... as mighty trees on the hill tops." The wind "turns the ground upside down," large areas "crack and are thrown upwards," "all the mansions on earth" are destroyed in a catastrophe when
"worlds clash with worlds." 5
The Mexican Annals of Cuauhtitlan describe how a cosmic catastrophe was accompanied by a hail of stones; in the oral tradition of the Indians, too, the motif is repeated time and again: In some ancient epoch the sky "rained, not water, but fire and red-hot stones," 8 which is not different from the Hebrew tradition.
Naphtha
Crude petroleum is composed of two elements, carbon and hydrogen. The main theories of the origin of petroleum are:
1. The inorganic theory: Hydrogen and carbon were brought together in the rock formations of the earth under great heat and pressure.
2. The organic theory: Both the hydrogen and carbon which compose petroleum come from the remains of plant and animal life, in the main from microscopic marine and swamp life.
The organic theory implies that the process started after life was already abundant, at least at the bottom of the ocean.1
The tails of comets are composed mainly of carbon and hydrogen gases. Lacking oxygen, they do not burn in flight, but the inflammable gases, passing through an atmosphere containing oxygen, will be set on fire. If carbon and hydrogen gases, or vapor of a composition of these two elements, enter the atmosphere in huge masses, a part of them will burn, binding all the oxygen available at the moment; the
6 "World Cycles," Visuddhi-Magga, in Warren, Buddhism in Translations, p. 328. 6 Alexander, Latin American Mythology, p. 72.
1 Even before Plutarch the problem of the origin of petroleum was much discussed. Speaking of the visit of Alexander to the petroleum sources of Iraq, Plutarch said: 'There has been much discussion about the origin of [this naphtha]." But in the extant text of Plutarch a sentence containing one of two rival views is missing. The remaining text reads: ". . . or whether rather the liquid substance that feeds the flame flows out from the soil which is rich and productive of fire."
Plutarch, Lives (transl. B. Perrin, 1919), "The Life of Alexander," xxv.
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rest will escape combustion, but in swift transition will become liquid. Falling on the ground, the substance, if liquid, would sink into the pores of the sand and into clefts between the rocks; falling on water, it would remain floating if the fire in the air is extinguished before new supplies of oxygen arrive from other regions.