A sea rent apart was a marvelous spectacle and could not have been forgotten. It is mentioned in numerous passages in the Scriptures. "The pillars of heaven tremble. . . . He divideth the sea with his power." u "Marvelous things did he in the sight of their fathers. . . . He divided the sea, and caused them to pass through; and he made the waters to stand as a heap."12 "He gathereth the waters of
5 Exodus 14 : 20; Ginzberg, Legends, II, 359.
* "The waters were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left." Exodus 14 : 22.
7 A. Calmet, Commentaire, I'Exode (1708), p. 159: "Les eaux demeurent sus-pendues, comme une glace solide et massive."
8 Rashfs Commentary to Pentateuch (English transl. by M. Rosenbaum and A. M. Silberman, 1930).
9 Ginzberg, Legends, III, 22; Targum Yerushalmi, Exodus 14 : 22.
i« Psalms 104 : 6-8; 107 : 25-26. " Job 26 : 11-12. i2 Psalms 78 : 12-13.
WORLDS IN COLLISION 73
the sea together as a heap ... let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him." 1S
Then the Great Sea (the Mediterranean) broke into the Red Sea in an enormous tidal wave.14
It was an unusual event, and because it was unusual, it became the most impressive recollection in the very long history of this people. All peoples and nations were blasted by the same fire and shattered in the same fury. The tribes of Israel on the shore of a sea found in this annihilation their salvation from bondage. They escaped destruction but their oppressors perished before their eyes. They extolled the Creator, took upon themselves the burden of moral rules, and considered themselves chosen for a great destiny.
robin-bobin
When the Spaniards conquered Yucatan, Indians versed in their ancient literature related to the conquerors the tradition handed down to them by their ancestors: their forefathers were delivered from pursuit by some other people when the Lord opened for them a way in the midst of the sea.18
This tradition is so similar to the Jewish tradition of the Passage that some of the friars who came to America believed that the Indians of America were of Jewish origin. Friar Diego de Landa wrote: "Some old men of Yucatan say that they have heard from their ancestors that this country was peopled by a certain race who came from the east, whom God delivered by opening for them twelve roads through the sea. If this is true, all the inhabitants of the Indies must be of Jewish descent." 16
It may have been an echo of what happened at the Sea of Passage, or a description of a similar occurrence at the same time but in another place.
According to the Lapland cosmogonic story," "when the wickedness increased among the human beings," the midmost of the earth
13 Psalms 33 : 7-8.
14 Mekhilta Beshalla 6, 33a; other sources in Ginzberg, Legends, VI, 10.
15 Antonio de Herrera, Historia general de las Indias Occidentales, Vol. IV, Bk. 10, Chap. 2; Brasseur, Histoire des nations civilisees du Mexique, I, 66.
16 De Landa, Yucatan, p. 8.
it Leonne de Cambrey, Lapland Legends (1926).
74 WORLDS IN COLLISION
"trembled with terror so that the upper layers of the earth fell away and many of the people were hurled down into those caved-in places to perish." "And Jubmel, the heaven-lord himself, came down. . . . His terrible anger flashed like red, blue, and green fire-serpents, and people hid their faces, and the children screamed with fear. . . . The angry god spoke: 1 shall reverse the world. I shall bid the rivers flow upward; I shall cause the sea to gather together itself up into a huge towering wall which I shall hurl upon your wicked earth-children, and thus destroy them and all life.'"
Jubmel set a storm-wind blowing, and the wild air-spirits raging. . . . Foaming, dashing, rising sky-high came the sea-wall, crushing all things. Jubmel, with one strong upheaval, made the earth-lands all turn over; then, the world again he righted. Now the mountains and the highlands could no more be seen by Beijke [sun]. Filled with groans of dying people, was the fair earth, home of mankind. No more Beijke shone in heaven.
According to the Lapland epic, the world was overwhelmed by the hurricane and the sea, and almost all human beings perished. After the sea-wall fell on the continent, gigantic waves continued to roll and dead bodies were dashed about in dark waters.
The great earthquake and the chasms that opened in the ground, the appearance of a celestial body with serpentlike flashes, rivers flowing upward, a sea-wall that crushed everything, mountains that became leveled or covered with water, the world that was turned over and then righted, the sun that no more shone in the sky—all these are motifs which we found in the description of the calamities of the time of the Exodus.
In many places of the world, and especially in the north, large boulders are found in a position which proves that a great force must have lifted them up and carried them long distances before depositing them where they are found today. Sometimes these large loose
WORLDS IN COLLISION 75
rocks are of entirely different mineral composition than the local rocks, but are akin to formations many miles away. Thus, occasionally an erratic boulder of granite perches on top of a high ridge of dolerite, whereas the nearest outcrops of granite lie far away. These erratic boulders may weigh as much as ten thousand tons, about as much as one hundred thirty thousand people.18
To explain these facts, the scholars of the first half of the nineteenth century assumed that enormous tides had swept over the continents and carried with them masses of stone. The robin-bobin
transfer of the rocks was explained by the tides, but what could have caused those billows to rise high over the continents?
"It was conceived that somehow and somewhere in the far north a series of gigantic waves was mysteriously propagated. These waves were supposed to have precipitated themselves upon the land, and then swept madly on over mountain and valley alike, carrying along with them a mighty burden of rocks and stones and rubbish. Such deluges were styled 'waves of translation'; and the till was believed to represent the materials which they hurried along with them in their wild course across the country." 10 The stones and boulders on the hilltops and the mounds of sand and gravel in the lowlands were explained by this theory. Critics, however, maintained that
"it was unfortunate for this view that it violated at the very outset the first principles of science, by assuming the former existence of a cause which there was little in nature to warrant . . .
spasmodic rushes of the sea across a whole country had fortunately never been experienced within the memory of man." 20 That the correctness of the last sentence is questionable is shown by references to the traditions of a number of peoples.
Wherever possible, the movement of stones was attributed to the progress of the ice sheet in the glacial ages and to glaciers on the mountain slopes.
18 The Madison boulder near Conway, New Hampshire, measures 90 by 40 by 38 feet, and weighs almost 10,000 tons. "It is composed of granite, quite unlike the bedrock beneath it; hence the boulder is typically 'erratic'" Daly, The Changing World of the Ice Age, p. 16.
19 J. Geikie, The Great Ice Age and Its Relation to the Antiquity of Man (1894), pp. 25-26.
20 Ibid.
76 WORLDS IN COLLISION
Agassiz, in 1840, assumed that just as the Alpine moraines were left behind by the retreating glaciers, so the moraines in the flat-lands of northern Europe and America could have been caused by the movement of great continental ice sheets (and thus introduced the theory of ice ages). Although this is correct to some extent, the analogy is not exact, as the glaciers of the Alps push the stones down, not up the slope. Meeting an upward motion of the ice, large boulders would probably sink into the ice.