Attos' Magazine

Volume #75, December/2009

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

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 in 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 the 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 for 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.

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.”

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 Cibeon. 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.

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 so 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.

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