Attos' Magazine

Volume #82, December/2009

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

Earthquake

The earth, forced out of its regular motion, reacted to the close approach of the body of the comet: a major shock convulsed the lithosphere, and the area of the earthquake was the entire globe.

Ipuwer witnessed and survived this earthquake. “The towns are destroyed. Upper Egypt has become waste. . . . All is ruin.” “The residence is overturned in a minute.” Only an earthquake could have overturned the residence in a minute. The Egyptian word for “to overturn” is used in the sense of “to overthrow a wall,”

This was the tenth plague. “And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he, and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead” (Exodus 12:30). Houses fell, smitten by one violent blow, “[The angel of the Lord] passed over the houses of the children of Israel in Egypt, when he smote the Egyptians, and delivered our houses” (Exodus 12 : 27). Nogaf, meaning “smote,” is the word used for a very violent blow, as, for instance, goring by the horns of an ox. The Passover Haggadah says: “The firstborn of the Egyptians didst Thou crush at midnight.”

The reason why the Israelites were more fortunate in this plague than the Egyptians probably lies in the kind of material of which their dwellings were constructed. Occupying a marshy district and working on clay, the captives must have lived in huts made of clay and reeds, which are more resilient than brick or stone. “The Lord will pass over the door, and will not suffer the destroyer to come and smite your houses” An example of the selective action of a natural agent upon various kinds of construction is narrated also in Mexican annals. During a catastrophe accompanied by hurricane and earthquake, only the people who lived in small log cabins remained uninjured; the larger buildings were swept away. “They found that those who lived in small houses had escaped, as well as the newly married couples, whose custom it was to live for a few years in cabins in front of those of their fathers-in-law.”

In Ages in Chaos (my reconstruction of ancient history), I shall show that “first-born” (bkhor) in the text of the plague is a corruption of “chosen” (bchor) All the flower of Egypt succumbed in the catastrophe.

“Forsooth: The children of princes are dashed against the walls . . . the children of princes are cast out in the streets”; “the prison is ruined,” wrote Ipuwer , and this reminds us of princes in palaces and captives in dungeons who were victims in the disaster (Exodus 12:29).

To confirm my interpretation of the tenth plague as an earthquake, which should be obvious from the expression, “to smite the houses,” I find a corroborating passage of Artapanus in which he describes the last night before the Exodus, and which is quoted by Eusebius: There was “hail and earthquake by night, so that those who fled from the earthquake were killed by the hail, and those who sought shelter from the hail were destroyed by the earthquake. And at that time all the houses fell in, and most of the temples.”

Also, Hieronymus (St. Jerome) wrote in an epistle that “in the night in which Exodus took place, all the temples of Egypt were destroyed either by an earthshock or by the thunderbolt.” Similarly in the Midrashim: “The seventh plague, the plague of barad [meteorites]: earthquake, fire, meteorites.” It is also said that the structures which were erected by the Israelite slaves in Pithom and Ramses collapsed or were swallowed by the earth. An inscription which dates from the beginning of the New Kingdom refers to a temple of the Middle Kingdom that was “swallowed by the ground” at the close of the Middle Kingdom.

The head of the celestial body approached very close, breaking through the darkness of the gaseous envelope, and according to the Midrashim, the last night in Egypt was as bright as the noon on the day of the summer solstice.

The population fled. “Men flee . . . Tents are what they make like the dwellers of hills,” wrote Ipuwer. The population of a city destroyed by an earthquake usually spends the nights in the fields. The Book of Exodus describes a hurried flight from Egypt on the night of the tenth plague; a “mixed multitude” of non-Israelites left Egypt together with the Israelites, who spent their first night in Sukkoth (huts).

“The lightnings lightened the world: the earth trembled and shook . . . Thou leddest thy people like a flock by the band of Moses and Aaron.” They were brought out of Egypt by a portent which looked like a stretched arm –“by a stretched out arm and by great terrors,” or “with a mighty hand, and with an outstretched arm, and with great terribleness, and with signs, and with wonders.”

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