Attos' Magazine

Volume #85, December/2009

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Immanuel Velikovsky

Worlds In Collision

By Immanuel Velikovsky

The Tide

The ocean tides are produced by the action of the sun and to a larger extent by that of the moon. A body larger than the moon or one nearer to the earth would act with greater effect. A comet with a head as large as the earth, passing sufficiently close, would raise the waters of the oceans miles high. The slowing down or stasis of the earth in its rotation would cause a tidal recession of water toward the poles, but the celestial body near by would disturb this poleward recession, drawing the water toward itself.

The traditions of many peoples persist that seas were torn apart and their water heaped high and thrown upon the continents. In order to establish that these traditions refer to one and the same event, or at least to an event of the same order, we must keep to this guiding sequence: the great tide followed a disturbance in the motion of the earth.

The Chinese annals, which I have mentioned and which I intend to quote more extensively in a subsequent section, say that in the time of Emperor Yahou the sun did not go down for ten days. The world was in flames, and “in their vast extent” the waters “overtopped the great heights, threatening the heavens with their floods.” The water of the ocean was heaped up and cast upon the continent of Asia; a great tidal wave swept over the mountains and broke in the middle of the Chinese Empire. The water was caught in the valleys between the mountains, and the land was flooded for decades.

The traditions of the people of Peru tell that for a period of time equal to five days and five nights the sun was not in the sky, and then the ocean left the shore and with a terrible din broke over the continent; the entire surface of the earth was changed in this catastrophe.

The Choctaw Indians of Oklahoma relate: “The earth was plunged in darkness for a long time.” Finally a bright light appeared in the north, “but it was mountain-high waves, rapidly coming nearer”

In these traditions there are two concurrent elements: a complete darkness that endured a number of days (in Asia, prolonged day) and, when the light broke through, a mountain-high wave that brought destruction.

The Hebrew story of the passage of the sea contains the same elements. There was a prolonged and complete darkness (Exodus 10:21). The last day of the darkness was at the Red Sea. When the world plunged out of darkness, the bottom of the sea was uncovered, the waters were driven apart and heaped up like walls in a double tide. The Septuagint translation of the Bible says that the water stood “as a wall,” and the Koran, referring to this event, says “like mountains.” In the old rabbinical literature it is said that the water was suspended as if it were “glass, solid and massive.”

The commentator Rashi, guided by the grammatical structure of the sentence in the Book of Exodus, explained in accordance with Mechilta: “The water of all oceans and seas was divided.”

The Midrashim contain the following description “The waters were piled up to the height of sixteen hundred miles, and they could be seen by all the nations of the earth.” The figure in this sentence intends to say that the heap of water was tremendous. According to the Scriptures, the waters climbed the mountains and stood above them, and they mounted to the heavens.

A sea rent apart was a marvelous spectacle and could not have been forgotten. It is mentioned in numerous passages in the Scriptures. “The pillars of heaven tremble. . . . He divideth the sea with his power.” “Marvelous things did he in the sight of their fathers. . . .He divided the sea, and caused them to pass through; and he made the waters to stand as a heap,” 12 “He gathereth the waters of the sea together as a heap . . . let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him.”

Then the Great Sea (the Mediterranean) broke into the Red Sea in an enormous tidal wave.

It was an unusual event, and because it was unusual, it became the most impressive recollection in the very long history of this people. All peoples and nations were blasted by the same fire and shattered in the same fury. The tribes of Israel on the shore of a sea found in this annihilation their salvation from bondage. They escaped destruction but their oppressors perished before their eyes. They extolled the Creator, took upon themselves the burden of moral rules, and considered themselves chosen for a great destiny.

When the Spaniards conquered Yucatan, Indians versed in their ancient literature related to the conquerors the tradition handed down to them by their ancestors: their forefathers were delivered from pursuit by some other people when the Lord opened for them a way in the midst of the sea.

This tradition is so similar to the Jewish tradition of the Passage that some of the friars who came to America believed that the Indians of America were of Jewish origin. Friar Diego de Landa wrote: “Some old men of Yucatan say that they have heard from their ancestors that this country was peopled by a certain race who came from the east, whom God delivered by opening for them twelve roads through the sea. If this is true, all the inhabitants of the Indies must be of Jewish descent.”

It may have been an echo of what happened at the Sea of Passage, or a description of a similar occurrence at the same time but in another place.

According to the Lapland cosmogonic story, “when the wickedness increased among the human beings,” the midmost of the earth “trembled with terror so that the upper layers of the earth fell away and many of the people were hurled down into those caved-in places to perish.” “And Jubmel, the heaven-lord himself, came down. . . His terrible anger flashed like red, blue, and green fire-serpents, and people hid their faces, and the children screamed with fear. . . . The angry god spoke: ‘I shall reverse the world. I shall bid the rivers flow upward; I shall cause the sea to gather together itself up into a huge towering wall which I shall hurl upon your wicked earth-children, and thus destroy them and all life.’ ”

Jubmel set a storm-wind blowing,
and the wild air-spirits raging. . .
Foaming, dashing, rising sky-high
came the sea-wall, crushing all things.
Jubmel, with one strong upheaval,
made the earth-lands all turn over;
then, the world again he righted.
Now the mountains and the highlands
could no more be seen by Beijke [sun].
Filled with groans of dying people,
was the fair earth, home of mankind.
No more Beijke shone in heaven.

According to the Lapland epic, the world was overwhelmed by the hurricane and the sea, and almost all human beings perished. After the sea-wall fell on the continent, gigantic waves continued to roll and dead bodies were dashed about in dark waters.

The great earthquake and the chasms that opened in the ground, the appearance of a celestial body with serpentlike flashes, rivers flowing upward, a sea-wall that crushed everything, mountains that became leveled or covered with water, the world that was turned over and then righted, the sun that no more shone in the sky—all these are motifs which we found in the description of the calamities of the time of the Exodus.

In many places of the world, and especially in the north, large boulders are found in a position which proves that a great force must have lifted them up and carried them long distances before depositing them where they are found today. Sometimes these large loose rocks are of entirely different mineral composition than the local rocks, but are akin to formations many miles away. Thus, occasionally an erratic boulder of granite perches on top of a high ridge of dolerite, whereas the nearest outcrops of granite lie far away. These erratic boulders may weigh as much as ten thousand tons, about as much as one hundred thirty thousand people.

To explain these facts, the scholars of the first half of the nineteenth century assumed that enormous tides had swept over the continents and carried with them masses of stone. The transfer of the rocks was explained by the tides, but what could have caused those billows to rise high over the continents?

“It was conceived that somehow and somewhere in the far north a series of gigantic waves was mysteriously propagated. These waves were supposed to have precipitated themselves upon the land, and then swept madly on over mountain and valley alike, carrying along with them a mighty burden of rocks and stones and rubbish. Such deluges were styled ‘waves of translation’; and the till was believed to represent the materials which they hurried along with them in their wild course across the country.” The stones and boulders on the hilltops and the mounds of sand and gravel in the lowlands were explained by this theory. Critics, however, maintained that “it was unfortunate for this view that it violated at the very outset the first principles of science, by assuming the former existence of a cause which there was little in nature to warrant . . . spasmodic rushes of the sea across a whole country had fortunately never been experienced within the memory of man.” That the correctness of the last sentence is questionable is shown by references to the traditions of a number of peoples.

Wherever possible, the movement of stones was attributed to the progress of the ice sheet in the glacial ages and to glaciers on the mountain slopes.

Agassiz, in 1840, assumed that just as the Alpine moraines were left behind by the retreating glaciers, so the moraines in the flatlands of northern Europe and America could have been caused by the movement of great continental ice sheets (and thus introduced the theory of ice ages). Although this is correct to some extent, the analogy is not exact, as the glaciers of the Alps push the stones down, not up the slope. Meeting an upward motion of the ice, large boulders would probably sink into the ice.

The problem of the migration of the stones must be regarded as only partially connected with the progress and retreat of the ice sheet, if at all. Billows miles high traveled over the land, originating in causes described in this book.

It can be established by the extent of denudation of the rocks under the erratic boulders that the latter were deposited at their places during human history. So, for instance, in Wales and Yorkshire, where this effect was evaluated in terms of time, the “amount of denudation of limestone rocks on which boulders lie” is a “proof that a period of no more than six thousand years has elapsed since the boulders were left in their positions.”

The fact that accumulations of stones were transferred from the equator toward the higher latitudes, an enigmatic problem in the ice theory, can be explained by the poleward recession of the equatorial waters at the moment the velocity of rotation of the earth was reduced or its poles were shifted. In the Northern Hemisphere, in India, the moraines were carried from the equator not only toward higher latitudes, but also toward the Himalaya Mountains, and in the Southern Hemisphere from the equatorial regions of Africa toward the higher latitudes, across the prairies and deserts and forests of the black continent.

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