-The celestial body that the great Architect of nature sent close to the earth, made contact with it in electrical discharges, retreated, and approached again. If we are to believe the Scriptural data, there elapsed seven weeks, or by another computation, about two months 8 from the day of the Exodus to the day of the revelation at Mount Sinai.
**There were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud; so that all the people that was in the camp trembled. . . . And mount Sinai was altogether on a smoke . . . and the smoke thereof ascended as the smoke of a furnace, and the whole mount quaked greatly. And when the voice of the trumpet sounded long, and waxed louder and louder, Moses spake, and God answered him by a voice." 9
3 Cf. Palmer, Sinai: From the Fourth Egyptian Dynasty to the Present Day.
4 Song of Deborah, Judges 5 : 5.
6 W. M. Flinders Petrie, "The Metals in Egypt," Ancient Egypt (1915), refers to "the enormous eruption of ferruginous basalt . . . which probably burnt up forests in its outflow.'
8 N. Glueck, The Other Side of the Jordan (1940), p. 34.
i C. P. Grant, The Syrian Desert (1937), p. 9. 8 Exodus 19 : 1.
» Exodus 19 : 16-19.
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The Talmud and Midrashim describe the Mountain of the Law-giving as quaking so greatly that it appeared as if it were lifted up and shaken above the heads of the people; and the people felt as it they were no longer standing securely on the ground, but were held up by some invisible force.10 The presence of a heavenly body overhead caused this phenomenon and this feeling.
"Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations also of the hills moved and were shaken, because he was wroth. . . . He bowed the heavens also, and came down: and darkness was under his feet. ... At the brightness that was before him his thick clouds passed, hail stones and coals of fire. The Lord also thundered in the heavens . . . hail stones and coals of fire. . . . He shot out lightnings. . . . Then the channels of waters were seen, and the foundations of the world were discovered." n
Earth and heaven participated in the cosmic convulsion. In the Fourth Book of Ezra the occurrences witnessed at Mount Sinai are described in these words: "Thou didst bow down the robin-bobin
heavens, didst make the earth quake, and convulsed the world. Thou didst cause the deeps to tremble and didst alarm the spheres." 12
The approach of a star toward the earth in the days of the revelation at Sinai is implied by the text of the Tractate Shabbat: Although the ancestors of the later proselytes were not present at the Mountain of the Lawgiving, their star was there close by.13
An author of the first century of the present era, whose work on biblical antiquities has been ascribed to Philo, the Alexandrian philosopher, thus describes the commotion on the earth below and in the sky above: "The mountain [Sinai] burned with fire and the earth shook and the hills were removed and the mountains overthrown; the depths boiled, and all the inhabitable places were shaken . . . and flames of fire shone forth and thunderings and lightnings were 10 CL Ginzberg, Legends, II, 92, 95.
n Psalms 18 : 7-15. An identical text is found in 2 Samuel 22.
12 IV Ezra (transl. Box), in The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, ed. R. H.
Charles.
13 The Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Shabbat 146a. According to Midrash Shir (15a-15b) the pharaoh warned the Israelites not to leave Egypt, because they would meet the bloody star Ra (in Hebrew "Evil").
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multiplied, and winds and tempests made a roaring: the stars were gathered together
[collided]."14 Referring to the verse, "He bowed the heavens also, and came down" (Psalms 18), Pseudo-Philo describes the events of Mount Sinai and says that the Lord "impeded the course of the stars."15 "The earth was stirred from her foundation, and the mountains and the rocks trembled in their fastenings, and the clouds lifted up their waves against the flame of the fire that it should not consume the world . . . and all the waves of the sea came together."16
The Hindus depict the cosmic catastrophe at the end of a world age: "The whole world breaks into flames. So also a hundred thousand times ten million worlds. All the peaks of Mount Sineru, even those which are hundreds of leagues in height, crumble and disappear in the sky. The flames of fire rise up and envelop the heaven." 17 The sixth sun or sun age ended. Similarly, in the Jewish tradition, with the revelation at Sinai the sixth world age was terminated and the seventh began.18
Theophany
Earthquakes are often accompanied by a roaring noise that comes from the bowels of the earth.
This phenomenon was known to early geographers. Pliny * wrote that earthquakes are "preceded or accompanied by a terrible sound." Vaults supporting the ground give way and it seems as though the earth heaves deep sighs. The sound was attributed to the gods and called theophany.
The eruptions of volcanoes are also accompanied by loud noises. The sound produced by Krakatoa in the East Indies, during the eruption of 1883, was so loud that it was heard as far as Japan, 3,000 miles away, the farthest distance traveled by sound recorded in modern annals.2
•^Jn the days of the Exodus, when the world was shaken and rocked,
14 The Biblical Antiquities of Philo (transl. M. R. James, 1917), Chap. XI. is Ibid., Chap. XXIII.
" Ibid., Chap. XXXII. W Warren, Buddhism, p. 323. 18 Midrash Rabba, Bereshit. 1 Pliny.
Natural History, ii, 82.
2G. J. Symons (ed.), The Eruption of Krakatoa: Report of the Krakatoa Committee of the Royal Society (of London) (1888).
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and all volcanoes vomited lava and all continents quaked, the earth groaned almost unceasingly.
At an initial stage of the catastrophe, according to Hebrew tradition, Moses heard in the silence of the desert the sound which he interpreted to mean, "I am that I am." 3 "I am Yahweh," heard the people in the frightful night at the Mountain of the Lawgiving.4 "The whole mount quaked greatly" and "the voice of the trumpet sounded long." 5 "And all the people saw the roars, and robin-bobin
the torches, and the noise of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking: and when the people saw it, they trembled, and stood afar off."6
It was a perfect setting for hearing words in the voice of nature in an uproar. An inspired leader interpreted the voice he heard, ten long, trumpetlike blasts. The earth groaned: for weeks now all its strata had been disarranged, its orbit distorted, its world quarters displaced, its oceans thrown upon its continents, its seas turned into deserts, its mountains upheaved, its islands submerged, its rivers running upstream—a world flowing with lava, shattered by meteorites, with yawning chasms, burning naphtha, vomiting volcanoes, shaking ground, a world enshrouded in an atmosphere filled with smoke and vapor.
Twisting of strata and building of mountains, earthquakes and rumbling of volcanoes joined in an infernal din. It was a voice not only in the desert of Sinai; the entire world must have heard it.
"The sky and the earth resounded . . . mountains and hills were moved," says the Midrash. "Loud did the firmament roar, and earth with echo resounded," says the epic of Gilgamesh.7 In Hesiod
"the huge earth groaned" when Zeus lashed Typhon with his bolts—"the earth resounded terribly, and the wide heaven above." 8
The approach of two charged globes toward each other could also produce trumpetlike sounds, varying as the distance between them increased or lessened.9 It appears that this phenomenon is described
3 Exodus 3 : 14. * Exodus 20 : 1. 5 Exodus 19 : 18-19.