Posted on 07/11/2002 1:56:44 PM PDT by blam
Mike Baillie
Discovering Archeology, July/August 1999
Moses called down a host of calamities upon Egypt until the pharaoh finally freed the Israelites. Perhaps he had the help of a comet impact coupled with a volcano. A volcano destroyed the island of Santorini in the Aegean Sea (between today's Greece and Turkey) around the middle of the second millennium B.C. Researchers Val LaMarche and Kathy Hirschboeck suggest the volcano might be associated with tree-ring evidence for several years of intense cold beginning in 1627 B.C. Could that form the basis for strange meteorological phenomena recorded in the biblical book of Exodus?
In the book of Exodus, which describes events a few hundred kilometers from Santorini, we read of a pillar of cloud and fire, a lingering darkness, and the parting of the Red Sea. An enormous column of ash must have hung in the sky over the eruption (the Israelites’ “pillar of cloud by day and fire by night?”), and the volcano doubtless caused a tsunami, or tidal wave (which could have drowned a pharaoh's army). The Exodus story is traditionally dated to either the thirteenth or fifteenth century B.C. Those dates, however, depend ultimately on identifying the “Pharaoh of the Oppression,” and historians have never proven to which ruler that infamous title referred. Many biblical scholars will disagree, but I suggest that a seventeenth-century B.C. date is not impossible.
The argument can be bolstered. Equally catastrophic meteorological conditions are recorded in the Bible for the time of King David. Psalm 18, in reference to David, speaks of terrifying events: “Earth shook and trembled. The foundations of the hills moved and were shaken. ... Smoke ... fire ... darkness ... dark waters ... thick clouds of the skies ... hailstones and coals of fire.” On some chronologies, David is placed 470 years after the Exodus. The spacing between the two disastrous events recorded in Irish tree rings at 1628 and 1159 B.C. is 469 years. The Exodus story includes dust, several days of darkness, hail, dead fish, undrinkable water, cattle killed by hail, water breaking out of rocks, the earth opening, the sea parting as in a tsunami, and so on. Someone looking at the Exodus story and knowing descriptions of other distant volcanic effects might offer the possibility that the Israelites escaped from Egypt under the cover of a major natural catastrophe. There may be veiled references to comets in the biblical narrative, leading to the possibility that the Santorini eruption itself may have been triggered by a bolide (comet or asteroid) impact.
David Levy, co-discoverer of the comet that bears his and Jean Shoemaker's names, has argued that the description of the “angel of the Lord in the sky over Jerusalem with a drawn sword” (1 Chronicles 21) could be a reference to a comet. The Angel of the Lord was, of course, also present at the Exodus, as it was “traveling in front of Israel's army.” Further, there are indications that as the Israelites left Egypt, the night was as bright as midday. The nights over Europe were reported to have been daytime-bright after the only known modern bolide impact, the Tunguska explosion over Siberia in 1908.
These stories raise the question of whether comets recorded by the Chinese at the start and end of the Shang Dynasty, at very near the same dates, were the same as the comets that may be recorded in the Old Testament. I believe that we know the answer: In the last five millennia, several dynastic changes and dark ages have been the direct result of impacts and/or volcanoes. The consequences of such events must have been devastating, leading to apocalyptic imagery in religious writing and predictions of the end of the world. Zachariah of Mitylene lived through the environmental disaster that began about 540 A.D. In the mid-550s, he wrote in his twelve-volume records of the trials the world had survived: “In addition to all the fearful things described above, the earthquakes and famines and wars, ... there has also been fulfilled against us the curse of Moses in Deuteronomy."“ The curse included pestilence, consumption, fever, fiery blasts from the skies, mildew, a rain of powder and dust, and darkness. The curse of Moses must have seemed an appropriate description of life after the impact of a piece of a comet.
Hey, it works for me at the conceptual level. It's the dates I have a problem with. But dates are not always correct either...
Scholars, builders, designers of fine art and civic leaders all dead. Bye-Bye Civilization. Hello, “bang your neighbor over the head for his stew pot” time.
a.cricket
It would be interesting to see somebody do similar analysis using the Greenland ice layers, since they go back 100,000 years as opposed to the 7,000 represented by tree-ring analysis.
Exactly. I was discussing the 540 AD (Probable impact) event with a FReeper the other day and the fact that the Dark Ages (Beginning in 540 AD), were called the Dark Ages because it was dark. He said no-one had written about that during that time. I said, the writers were all dead. LOL. (actually it was written about)
Now there's the NEW thought for the day. ---ggg--. If you come across that article again Blam I'd like to read it.
The data is available from the following cores: Camp Century, Milcent, Dye 2, Dye 3 and Summit. Your chance to write a book? (They're not as accurate as tree rings though)
I do believe I can find it. I have to go outside and fuss at the dogs first, we have a visiting stray that has them all worked up.
Not far from the truth. Knowledge was kept in the hands of a few. If something happened to the few then the whole collapsed. Archeologists always are going on about the mysterious disappearance of some civilization or another. It is no mystery. Natural disaster or war, generally some mixture of the two can end everything very quickly. They really don’t get how fragile things were back then.
I once read a book that mentioned that all the written documents we have from the year 1000 would all fit nicely into a cardboard file box with room to spare. War or fire destroyed a lot of stuff. It is really amazing that anything survived at all.
a.cricket
The Dark Ages: Were They Darker Than We Imagined?
I thought you saw this the other day when I linked it to another thread on which we were both commenting.
NO!
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