Worlds In
Collision
Chapter One
THE MOST
INCREDIBLE STORY
The most incredible story of miracles is told about Joshua ben Nun
who, when pursuing the Canaanite kings at Beth-horon, implored the
sun and the moon to stand still.
"And he said to the sight of
Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the
valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed,
until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not
this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the
midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day"
(Joshua 10:12-13).
This story is beyond the belief of even the most imaginative or the
most pious person. Waves of stormy sea may have drowned one host and
been merciful to another. The earth could crack asunder and swallow
up human beings. The Jordan could be blocked by a slice of its bank
falling into the bed of the river. Jericho's walls -- not by the
blast of trumpets, but by an incidental earthquake -- could have
been breached.
But that the sun and the moon should halt in their movement across
the firmament -- this could be only the product of fancy, a poetic
image, a metaphor; a hideous implausibility when imposed as a
subject for belief; a matter for scorn -- it manifests even a want
of reverence for the Supreme Being.
According to the knowledge of our age -- not of the age when the
Book of Joshua or of Jasher was written -- this could have happened
if the earth had ceased for a time to roll along its prescribed
path. Is such a disturbance conceivable? No record of the slightest
confusion is registered in the present annals of the earth. Each
year consists of 365 days, 5 hours, and 49 minutes.
A departure of the earth from its regular rotation is thinkable, but
only in a very improbable event that our planet should meet another
heavenly body of sufficient mass to disrupt the eternal path of our
world.
It is true that aerolites or meteorites reach our earth continually,
sometimes by the thousands and tens of thousands. But no dislocation
of our precise turning round and round has ever been perceived.
This does not mean that a larger body, or a larger number of bodies,
could not strike the terrestrial sphere. The large number of
asteroids between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter
suggests that at some unknown time another planet revolved there;
now only these meteorites follow approximately the path along which
the destroyed planet circled the sun. Possibly a comet ran into it
and shattered it.
That a comet may strike our planet is not very probable, but the
idea is not absurd. The heavenly mechanism works with almost
absolute precision; but unstable, their way lost, comets by the
thousands, by the millions, revolve in the sky, and their
interference may disturb the harmony. Some of these comets belong to
our system. Periodically they return, but not at very exact
intervals, owing to the perturbations caused by gravitation toward
the larger planets when they fly too close to them. But innumerable
other comets, often seen only through the telescope, come flying in
from immeasurable spaces of the universe at very great speed, and
disappear -- possibly forever. Some comets are visible only for
hours, some for days or weeks or even months.
Might it happen that our earth, the earth under our feet, would roll
toward perilous collision with a huge mass of meteorites, a trail of
stones flying at enormous speed around and across our solar system?
This probability was analyzed with fervor during the last century.
From the time of Aristotle, who asserted that a meteorite, which
fell at Aegospotami when a comet was glowing in the sky, had been
lifted from the ground by the wind and carried in the air and
dropped over that place, until the year 1803 when, on April 26, a
shower of meteorites fell at l'Aigle in France and was investigated
by Biot and the French Academy of Sciences, the scholarly world --
and in the meantime there lived Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Kepler,
Newton, and Huygens -- did not believe that such a thing as a stone
falling from the sky was possible at all. And this despite many
occasions when stones fell before the eyes of a crowd, as did the aerolite in the presence of
Emperor Maximilian and his court in Ensisheim, Alsace, on November 7, 1492.
Only shortly before 1803, the Academy of Sciences of Paris refused
to believe that, on another occasion, stones had fallen from the
sky. The fall of meteorites on July 24, 1790, in southwest France
was pronounced "un phénomène physiquement impossible". Since the
year 1803, however, scholars have believed that stones fall from the
sky. If a stone can collide with the earth, and occasionally a
shower of stones, too, cannot a full-sized comet fly into the face
of the earth? It was calculated that such a possibility exists but
that it is very unlikely to occur.
[D.F. Arago computed on some
occasion that there is one chance in 280 million that a comet
will hit the earth. Nevertheless, a hole one mile in diameter in
Arizona is a sign of an actual headlong collision of the earth
with a small comet or asteroid. On June 30, 1908, a calculated
forty-thousand-ton mass of iron fell in Siberia at 60°56' north
latitude and 101°57' east longitude. In 1946 the small
Giacobini-Zinner comet passed within 131,000 miles of the point
where the earth was eight days later.
[While investigating whether an encounter between the earth and
a comet had been the subject of a previous discussion, I found
that W. Whiston, Newton's successor at Cambridge and a
contemporary of Halley, in his NEW THEORY OF THE EARTH (the
first edition of which appeared in 1696) tried to prove that the
comet of 1680, to which he (erroneously) ascribed a period of
575.5 years, caused the biblical Deluge on an early encounter.
[G. Cuvier, who was unable to offer his own explanation of the
causes of great cataclysms, refers to the theory of Whiston in
the following terms:
"Whiston fancied that the earth was created
from the atmosphere of one comet, and that it was deluged by the
tail of another. The heat which remained from its first origin,
in his opinion, excited the whole antediluvian population, men
and animals, to sin, for which they were all drowned in the
deluge, excepting the fish, whose passions were apparently less
violent."
[I. Donnelly, author, reformer, and member of the United States
House of Representatives, tried in his book RAGNAROK (1883) to
explain the presence of till and gravel on the rock substratum
in America and Europe by hypothesizing an encounter with a
comet, which rained till on the terrestrial hemisphere facing it
at that moment. He placed the event in an indefinite period, but
at a time when man already populated the earth. Donnelly did not
show any awareness that Whiston was his predecessor. His
assumption that there is till only in one half of the earth is
arbitrary and wrong.]
If the head of a comet should pass very
close to our path, so as to effect a distortion in the career of the
earth, another phenomenon besides the disturbed movement of the
planet would probably occur: a rain of meteorites would strike the
earth and would increase to a torrent. Stones scorched by flying
through the atmosphere would be hurled on home and head.
In the Book of Joshua, two verses before the passage about the sun
that was suspended on high for a number of hours without moving to
the occident, we find this passage:
"As they [the Canaanite kings] fled
from before Israel, and were in the going down to Beth-horon ...
the Lord cast down GREAT STONES from heaven upon them unto
Azekah, and they died: they were more which died with hail
stones [stones of BARAD] than they whom the children of Israel
slew with the sword.
[Joshua 10:11]
The author of the Book of Joshua was
surely ignorant of any connection between the two phenomena. He
could not be expected to have had any knowledge about the nature of
aerolites, about the forces of attraction between celestial bodies,
and the like. As these phenomena were recorded to have occurred
together, it is improbable that the records were invented.
The meteorites fell on the earth in a torrent. They must have fallen
in very great numbers for they struck down more warriors than the
swords of the adversaries. To have killed persons by the hundreds or
thousands in the field, a cataract of stones must have fallen. Such
a torrent of great stones would mean that a train of meteorites or a
comet had struck our planet.
The quotation in the Bible from the
Book of Jasher is laconic and
may give the impression that the phenomenon of the motionless sun
and moon was local, seen only in Palestine between the valley of
Ajalon and Gibeon. But the cosmic character of the prodigy is
pictured in a thanksgiving prayer ascribed to Joshua:
"Sun and moon stood still in
heaven
And thou didst stand in Thy wrath against our
oppressors. ...
"All the princes of the earth stood up,
The kings of the nations had gathered themselves
together. ...
"Thou didst destroy them in Thy fury,
And Thou didst ruin them in Thy rage.
"Nations raged from fear of Thee,
Kingdoms tottered because of Thy wrath. ...
"Thou didst pour out Thy fury upon them. ...
Thou didst terrify them in Thy wrath. ...
"The earth quaked and trembled from the noise of Thy
thunders.
"Thou didst pursue them in Thy storm,
Thou didst consume them in the whirlwind. ...
"Their carcasses were like rubbish."
[Ginzberg, LEGENDS, IV, 11-12.]
The wide radius over which the heavenly
wrath swept is emphasized in the prayer: "All the kingdoms tottered.
... "
A torrent of large stones coming from the sky, an earthquake, a
whirlwind, a disturbance in the movement of the earth -- these four
phenomena belong together. It appears that a large comet must have
passed very near to our planet and disrupted its movement; a part of
the stones dispersed in the neck and tail of the comet smote the
surface of our earth a shattering blow.
Are we entitled, on the basis of the Book of Joshua, to assume that
at some date in the middle of the second millennium before the
present era the earth was interrupted in its regular rotation by a
comet? Such a statement has no many implications that it should not
be made thoughtlessly. To this I say that though the implications
are great and many, the present research in its entirety is an
interlinked sequence of documents and other evidence, all of which
in common carry the weight of this and other statements in this
book.
The problem before us is one of mechanics. Points on the outer
layers of the rotating globe (especially near the equator) move at a
higher linear velocity than points on the inner layers, but at the
same angular velocity. Consequently, if the earth were suddenly
stopped (or slowed down) in its rotation, the inner layers might
come to rest (or their rotational velocity might be slowed) while
the outer layers would still tend to go on rotating. This would
cause friction between the various liquid or semifluid layers,
creating heat; on the outermost periphery the solid layers would be
torn apart, causing mountains and even continents to fall or rise.
As I shall show later, mountains fell and others rose from level
ground; the earth with its oceans and continents became heated; the
sea boiled in many places, and rock liquefied; volcanoes ignited and
forests burned. Would not a sudden stop by the earth, rotating at a
little over one thousand miles an hour at its equator, mean a
complete destruction of the world? Since the world survived, there
must have been a mechanism to cushion the slowing down of
terrestrial rotation, if it really occurred, or another escape for
the energy of motion besides transformation into heat, or both. Or
if rotation persisted undisturbed, the terrestrial axis may have
tilted in the presence of a strong magnetic field, so that the sun
appeared to lose for hours its diurnal movement. These problems are
kept in sight and are faced in the Epilogue of this volume.
ON THE OTHER
SIDE OF THE WORLD
The Book of Joshua, compiled from the more ancient
Book of Jasher,
related the order of events. "Joshua ... went up from Gilgal all
night." In the early morning he fell upon his enemies unawares at
Gibeon, and "chased them along the way that goes up to Beth-horon".
As they fled, great stones were cast from the sky. That same day
("in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites") the sun stood
still over Gibeon and the moon over the valley of Ajalon. It has
been noted that this description of the position of the luminaries
implies that the sun was in the forenoon position. The Book of
Joshua says that the luminaries stood in the midst of the sky.
Allowing for the difference in longitude, it must have been early
morning or night in the Western Hemisphere.
We go to the shelf where stand books with the historical traditions
of the aborigines of Central America.
The sailors of Columbus and Cortes, arriving in America, found there
literate peoples who had books of their own. Most of these books
were burned in the sixteenth century by the Dominican monks. Very
few of the ancient manuscripts survived, and these are preserved in
the libraries of Paris, the Vatican, the Prado, and Dresden; they
are called codici, and their texts have been studied and partly
read. However, among the Indians of the days of the conquest and
also of the following century there were literary men who had access
to the knowledge written in pictographic script by their
forefathers.
[The Mayan tongue is still spoken by about 300,000 people, but of
the Mayan hieroglyphics only the characters employed in the calendar
are known for certain.]
In the Mexican ANNALS OF CUAUHTITLAN -- the history of the empire of
Culhuacan and Mexico, written in Nahua-Indian in the sixteenth
century -- it is related that during a cosmic catastrophe that
occurred in the remote past, the night did not end for a long time.
The biblical narrative describes the sun as remaining in the sky for
an additional day ("about a whole day"). The Midrashim, the books of
ancient traditions not embodied in the Scriptures, relate that the
sun and the moon stood still for thirty-six ITIM, or eighteen hours,
and thus from sunrise to sunset the day lasted about thirty hours.
In the Mexican annals it is stated that the world was deprived of
light and the sun did not appear for a fourfold night. In a
prolonged day or night, time could not be measured by the usual
means at the disposal of the ancients.
[With the exception of the water clock.]
Sahagun, the Spanish savant who came to America a generation after
Columbus and gathered the traditions of the aborigines, wrote that
at the time of one cosmic catastrophe the sun rose only a little way
over the horizon and remained there without moving; the moon also
stood still.
I am dealing with the Western Hemisphere first, because the biblical
stories were not known to its aborigines when it was discovered.
Also, the tradition preserved by Sahagun bears no trace of having
been introduced by the missionaries: in his version there is nothing
to suggest Joshua ben Nun and his war against the Canaanite kings;
and the position of the sun, only a very little above the eastern
horizon, differs from the biblical text, though it does not
contradict it.
We could follow a path around the earth and inquire into the various
traditions concerning the prolonged night and prolonged day, with
sun and moon absent or tarrying at different points along the
zodiac, while the earth underwent a bombardment of stones in a world
ablaze. But we must postpone this journey. There was more than one
catastrophe when, according to the memory of mankind, the earth
refused to play the chronometer by undisturbed rotation on its axis.
First, we must differentiate the single occurrences of cosmic
catastrophes, some of which took place before the one described
here, some after it; some of which were of greater extent, and some
of lesser.
Back to Contents
|