4 Strabo, The Geography (transl. H. L. Jones, 1924), vii, 3, 8. 5 Ibid.
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furrows into the earth and form the beds of the rivers, but descending underground, he made fountains break forth.
Similar descriptions come from various places of the ancient world, in which the nations relate the experience of their ancestors who witnessed the great catastrophe of the middle of the second millennium.
-At that time the Israelites had not yet arrived at a clear monotheistic concept and, like other peoples, they saw in the great struggle a conflict between good and evil. The author of the Book of Exodus, suppressing this conception of the ancient Israelites, presented the portent of fire and smoke moving in a column as an angel or messenger of the Lord. However, many passages in other books of the Scriptures preserved the picture as it impressed itself upon eyewitnesses.
Rahab is the Hebrew name for the contester with the Most High. "O Lord God of hosts, who is a strong Lord like unto thee? . . . Thou hast broken Rahab in pieces. . . . The heavens are thine, the earth also is thine: as for the world and the fulness thereof, thou hast founded them. The north and the south thou hast created them."6 Deutero-Isaiah prayed: "Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the Lord; awake as in the ancient days, in the generations of old. Art thou not it that hath cut Rahab, and wounded the dragon? Art thou not it which hath dried the sea, the waters of the great deep; that hath made the depths of the sea a way for the ransomed to pass over?" 7
From these passages it is clear that the battle of the Lord with Rahab was not a primeval battle before Creation, as some .scholars think.8
Isaiah prophesied for the future: "In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea." 9
The "crooked serpent" is shown in many ancient pictures from
6 Psalms 89 : 10-12. * Isaiah 51 : 9-10.
* See S. Reinach, Cults, Myths and Religion (1912), pp. 42 ff; H. Gunkel,
robin-bobin
Schbpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (1895); J. Pedersen, Israel, Its Life and Culture (1926), pp. 472 ff.
» Isaiah 27 : 1.
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bound Israelites saw the upheaval of nature: darkness, hurricane, mountains of water, fire and smoke, recorded in the Greek legend as the circumstances in which the battle of Zeus with the dragon Typhon was fought. In the same pit of the sea lie the pharaoh and his hosts.3 s Up to now I have identified Rahab-Typhon as a comet. But if Typhon lies on the bottom of the sea, is he not the pharaoh? This would mean that in the legend of Typhon two elements were welded together: the pharaoh, who perished in the catastrophe, and the outrageous rebel against Zeus, the lord of the sky.4 \ In Pliny's Natural History, the ninety-first section of the second book reads: 5 "A terrible comet was seen by the people of Ethiopia and Egypt, to which Typhon, the king of that period, gave his name; it had a fiery appearance and was twisted like a coil, and it was very grim to behold: it was not really a star so much as what might be called a ball of fire."
The visit of a disastrous comet, so many times referred to in this book, is told in plain words, not in disguise. However, I must find support for my assumption that the comet of the days of King Typhon was the comet of the days of the Exodus.
I investigated the writings of the old chronographers, and in Cometographia of Hevelius (1688) I found references to the works of Calvisius, Helvicus, Herlicius, and Rockenbach, all of whom used manuscripts for the most part and not printed sources, as they lived only a little over one century after the invention of movable characters and the printing press. ^ Hevelius wrote (in Latin): "In the year of the world 2453 (1495 b.c), according to certain authorities, a comet was seen in Syria,
3 In Ages in Chaos, evidence will be presented to identify the pharaoh of the Exodus as Taui Thom, the last king of the Middle Kingdom. He is Tau Timaeus (Tutimaeus) of Manetiio, in whose days "a blast of God's displeasure" fell upon Egypt and terminated the period at present known as the Middle Kingdom. The name of his queen is given in the naos of el-Arish as Tephnut.
Ra-uah-ab is a name met among the Egyptian kings of that period (W.M.F. Petrie, A History of Egypt, I, 227); it could have served as origin for the Hebrew word for dragon, Rahab. See note 4.
4 Actually, "dragon" became the appellation of Egyptian pharaohs in the prophetic literature. Cf.
Ezekiel 32 : 2.
5 Pliny, Natural History, ii, 91 (transl. Rackham, 1938).
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China to India, to Persia, to Assyria, to Egypt, to Mexico. With the rise of the monotheistic concept, the Israelites regarded this crooked serpent, the contester with the Most High, as the Lord's own creation.
"He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing. . . . The pillars of heaven tremble. . . . He divideth the sea with his power ... his hand hath formed the crooked serpent." 10 The Psalmist also says: " "God is my King of old. . . . Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength. . . . Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces. . . . Thou didst cleave the fountain and the flood: Thou driedst up mighty rivers."
The sea was cleft, the earth was cut with furrows, great rivers disappeared, others appeared. The earth rumbled for many years, and the peoples thought that the fiery dragon that had been struck down had descended underground and was groaning there.
The Comet of Typhon
Of all the mysterious phenomena which accompanied the Exodus, this mysterious Pillar seems the first to demand explanation.
—W. Phythian-Adams The Call of Israel
One of the places of the heavenly combat between elementary forces of nature—as narrated by Apollodorus and Strabo—was on the way from Egypt to Syria.1 According to Herodotus, the final act of the fight between Zeus and Typhon took place at Lake Serbon on the coastal route robin-bobin
from Egypt to Palestine.2 On the way from Egypt to Palestine the Israelites, after a night of terror and strong east wind, witnessed the upheaval of the day of the Passage. These parallel circumstances lead to a conclusion that will sound somewhat strange. Typhon (Typheus) lies on the bottom of the sea where the spell-w> Job 26 : 7-13. « Psalms 74 : 12-15.
1 Mount Casius, mentioned by Apollodorus, is the name of Mount Lebanon as well as of Mount Sinai. Cf. Pomponius Mela De situ orbis.
2 Herodotus iii, 5. Also Apollonius Rhodius in the Argonautica, Bk. ii, says that Typhon
"smitten by the bolt of Zeus . . . lies whelmed beneath the waters of the Serbonian lake."
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Babylonia, India, in the sign Jo, in the form of a disc, at the very time when the Israelites were on their march from Egypt to the Promised Land. So Rockenbach. The Exodus of the Israelites is placed by Calvisius in the year of the world 2453, or 1495 b.c." 6
I was fortunate enough to locate one copy of Rockenbach's De cometis tractatus novus methodicus in the United States.7 This book was published in Wittenberg in 1602. Its author was professor of Greek, mathematics, and law, and dean of philosophy at Frankfort. He wrote his book using old sources which he did not name: "ex pro-batissimis ir antiquissimis veterum scriptoribus" (from the most trustworthy and the most ancient of the early writers). As a result of his diligent gathering of ancient material, he made the following entry:
"In the year of the world two thousand four hundred and fifty-three—as many trustworthy authors, on the basis of many conjectures, have determined—a comet appeared which Pliny also mentioned in his second book. It was fiery, of irregular circular form, with a wrapped head; it was in the shape of a globe and was of terrible aspect. It is said that King Typhon ruled at that time in Egypt. . . . Certain [authorities] assert that the comet was seen in Syria, Babylonia, India, in the sign of Capricorn, in the form of a disc, at the time when the children of Israel advanced from Egypt toward the Promised Land, led on their way by the pillar of cloud during the day and by the pillar of fire at night." 8