Torrents of petroleum poured down upon the Caucasus and were consumed. The smoke of the Caucasus fire was still in the imaginative
15 N. de Garis Davies, The Tomb of Antefoker, Vizier of Sesostris I (1920), p. 5.
i« On the Eternity of the World, Vol. IX of Philo (transl. F. H. Colson, 1941), Sect. 146-147.
17 See A. Olrik, Ragnarok (German ed., 1922).
is The City of God, Bk. XVIII, Chap. 8. (transl. M. Dods, ed. P. Schaff, 1907).
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sight of Ovid, fifteen centuries later, when he described the burning of the world.
robin-bobin
The continuing fires in Siberia, the Caucasus, in the Arabian desert, and everywhere else were blazes that followed the great conflagration of the days when the earth was caught in vapors of carbon and hydrogen.
In the centuries that followed, petroleum was worshiped, burned in holy places; it was also used for domestic purposes. Then many ages passed when it was out of use. Only in the middle of the last century did man begin to exploit this oil, partly contributed by the comet of the time of the Exodus. He utilized its gifts, and today his highways are crowded with vehicles propelled by oil.
Into the heights rose man, and he accomplished the age-old dream of flying like a bird; for this, too, he uses the remnants of the intruding star that poured fire and sticky vapor upon his ancestors.
The Darkness
The earth entered deeper into the tail of the onrushing comet and approached its body. This approach, if one is to believe the sources, was followed by a disturbance in the rotation of the earth. Terrific hurricanes swept the earth because of the change or reversal of the angular velocity of rotation and because of the sweeping gases, dust, and cinders of the comet.
Numerous rabbinical sources describe the calamity of darkness; the material is collated as follows: x
An exceedingly strong wind endured seven days. All the time the land was shrouded in darkness.
"On the fourth, fifth, and sixth days, the darkness was so dense that they [the people of Egypt]
could not stir from their place." "The darkness was of such a nature that it could not be dispelled by artificial means. The light of the fire was either extinguished by the violence of storm, or else it was made invisible and swallowed up in the density of the darkness. . . . Nothing could be discerned. . . . None was able to speak or to hear, nor could anyone venture to take food, but they lay themselves down 1 Ginzberg, Legends, II, 360.
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, . . their outward senses in a trance. Thus they remained, overwhelmed by the affliction."
The darkness was of such kind that "their eyes were blinded by it and their breath choked"; 2 it was "not of ordinary earthy kind." 3 The rabbinical tradition, contradicting the spirit of the Scriptural narrative, states that during the plague of darkness the vast majority of the Israelites perished and that only a small fraction of the original Israelite population of Egypt was spared to leave Egypt. Forty-nine out of every fifty Israelites are said to have perished in this plague.4 wA shrine of black granite found at el-Arish on the border of Egypt and Palestine bears a long inscription in hieroglyphics. It reads: "The land was in great affliction. Evil fell on this earth. . . .
There was a great upheaval in the residence. . . . Nobody could leave the palace [there was no exit from the palace] during nine days, and during these nine days of upheaval there was such a tempest that neither men nor gods [the royal family] could see the faces of those beside them." 5
This record employs the same description of the darkness as Exodus 10 : 22: "And there was a thick darkness in all the land of Egypt three days. They saw not one another, neither rose any from his place for three days."
The difference in the number of the days (three and nine) of the darkness is reduced in the rabbinical sources, where the time is given as seven days. The difference between seven and nine days is negligible if one considers the subjectivity of the time estimation under such conditions.
Appraisal of the darkness with respect to its impenetrability is also subjective; rabbinical sources say that for part of the time there was a very slight visibility, but for the rest (three days) there was no visibility at all.
2 Josephus, Jewish Antiquities (transl. H. St. J. Thackeray, 1930), Bk. II, xiv. 5.
3 Ginzberg, Legends, II, 359.
4 Targum Yerushalmi, Exodus 10 : 23; Mekhilta (Frabbi Simon ben Jokhai (1905), p. 38.
5 F. L. Griffith. The Antiquities of Tel-el-Yahudiyeh and Miscellaneous Work in Lower Egypt in 1887-88 (1890); G. Goyon, '"Les Travaux de Chou et les tribulations de Geb d'apres Le Naos 2248 d'Ismailia," Kemi, Revue de Philol. et d'arch. egypt. (1936).
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robin-bobin
It should be kept in mind that, as in the case I have already discussed, a day and a night of darkness or light can be described as one day or as two days.
^ That both sources, the Hebrew and the Egyptian, refer to the same event can be established by another means also. Following the prolonged darkness and the hurricane, the pharaoh, according to the hieroglyphic text of the shrine, pursued the "evil-doers" to "the place called Pi-Khiroti."
The same place is mentioned in Exodus 14:9: "But the Egyptian pursued after them, all the horses and chariots of Pharaoh . . . and overtook them encamping by the sea, beside Pi-ha-khiroth." •
*VThe inscription on the shrine also narrates the death of the pharaoh during this pursuit under exceptional circumstances: "Now when the Majesty fought with the evil-doers in this pool, the place of the whirlpool, the evil-doers prevailed not over his Majesty. His Majesty leapt into the place of the whirlpool." This is the same apotheosis described in Exodus 15 :19: "For the horse of Pharaoh went in with his chariots and with his horsemen into the sea, and the Lord brought again the waters of the sea upon them." *-If "the Egyptian darkness" was caused by the earth's stasis or tilting of its axis, and was aggravated by a thin cinder dust from the comet, then the entire globe must have suffered from the effect of these two concurring phenomena; in either the eastern or the western parts of the world there must have been a very extended, gloomy day.
Nations and tribes in many places of the globe, to the south, to the north, and to the west of Egypt, have old traditions about a cosmic catastrophe during which the sun did not shine; but in some parts of the world the traditions maintain that the sun did not set for a period of time equal to a few days.
Tribes of the Sudan to the south of Egypt refer in their tales to a time when the night would not come to an end.7
Kalevala, the epos of the Finns, tells of a time when hailstones of
8 The syllable ha is the definite article in Hebrew and in this case belongs between "Pi" and
"Khiroth." 7 L. Frobenius, Dichten und Denken im Sudan (1925), p. 38.
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iron fell from the sky, and the sun and the moon disappeared (were stolen from the sky) and did not appear again; in their stead, after a period of darkness, a new sun and a new moon were placed in the sky.8 Caius Julius Solinus writes that "following the deluge which is reported to have occurred in the days of Ogyges, a heavy night spread over the globe." 9
In the manuscripts of Avila and Molina, who collected the traditions of the Indians of the New World, it is related that the sun did not appear for five days; a cosmic collision of stars preceded the cataclysm; people and animals tried to escape to mountain caves. "Scarcely had they reached there when the sea, breaking out of bounds following a terrifying shock, began to rise on the Pacific coast. But as the sea rose, filling the valleys and the plains around, the mountain of Ancasmarca rose, too, like a ship on the waves. During the five days that this cataclysm lasted, the sun did not show its face and the earth remained in darkness." 10