The prolonged darkness (and prolonged day in the Far East) and the earthshock (i.e., the ninth and the tenth plagues) and the world conflagration were the result of one of these disturbances in the motion of the earth. A few days later, if we follow the biblical narration, immediately before the hurricane changed its direction, "the pillar of cloud went from before their faces and stood behind them"; this means that the column of fire and smoke turned about and appeared from the opposite direction. Mountainous tides uncovered the bottom of the sea; a spark sprang between two celestial bodies;
1 See, e.g., the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Taanit 20; Tractate Avoda Zara 25a.
2 Pirkei Rabbi Elieser 41; Ginzberg, Legends, VI, 45-46.
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and "at the turning of the morning," 3 the tides fell in a cataclysmic avalanche.
The Midrashim speak of a disturbance in the solar movement on the day of the Passage: the sun did not proceed on its course.4 On that day, according to the Psalms (76 : 8), "the earth feared and was still." It is possible that Amos (8 : 8-9) is reviving the memory of this event when he mentions the "flood of Egypt," at the time "the earth was cast out of the sea, and dry land was swallowed by the sea," and "the sun was brought down at noon," although, as I show later on, Amos might have referred to a cosmic catastrophe of a more recent date.
Also, the day of the Lawgiving, when the worlds collided again, was, according to numerous rabbinical sources, a day of unusual length: the motion of the sun was disturbed.5 ^^On this occasion, and generally in the days and months following the Passage, the gloom, the heavy and charged clouds, the lightning, and the hurricanes, aside from the devastation by earthquake and flood, made observation very difficult, if not impossible. "They walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course" (Psalms 82:5) is a metaphor used by the Psalmist.
e Papyrus Ipuwer, which says that "the earth turned over like a potter's wheel" and "the earth is upside down," was written by an eyewitness of the plagues and the Exodus.6 The change is described also in the words of another papyrus (Harris) which I have quoted once before: "The south becomes north, and the earth turns over." v,Whether there was a complete reversal of the cardinal points as a result of the cosmic catastrophe of the days of the Exodus, or only a substantial shift, is a problem not solved here. The answer was not apparent even to contemporaries, at least for a number of decades. In the gloom that endured for a generation, observations were im-3 Rashi, the commentator, is surprised by the combination of the words, "at the turning of the morning" (lifnot haboker). The word lifnot (from pana), when used with reference to time, means robin-bobin
"to turn away" or "to go down." The word is applied here, not to "day," which goes down, but to the morning, which rises, changes to day, but does not go down.
* Midrash Psikta Raboti; Likutim Mimidrash Ele Hadvarim (ed. Buber, 1885). B Ginzberg, Legends, III, 109. 6 See the Section, "The Red World," note is
\Th
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possible, and very difficult when the light began to break through.
The Kalevala relates that "dreaded shades" enveloped the earth, and "the sun occasionally steps from his accustomed path." T Then Ukko-Jupiter struck fire from the sun to light a new sun and a new moon, and a new world age began.
In Voluspa (Poetic Edda) of the Icelanders we read:
No knowledge she [the sun] had where her home should be,
The moon knew not what was his,
The stars knew not where their stations were.
Then the gods set order among the heavenly bodies.
The Aztecs related: "There had been no sun in existence for many years. . . . [The chiefs] began to peer through the gloom in all directions for the expected light, and to make bets as to what part of heaven he [the sun] should first appear in. Some said 'Here,' and some said 'There'; but when the sun rose, they were all proved wrong, for not one of them had fixed upon the east." 8
Similarly, the Mayan legend tells that "it was not known from where the new sun would appear."
"They looked in all directions, but they were unable to say where the sun would rise. Some thought it would take place in the north and their glances were turned in that direction. Others thought it would be in the south. Actually, their guesses included all directions because the dawn shone all around. Some, however, fixed their attention on the orient, and maintained that the sun would come from there. It was their opinion that proved to be correct." 9
According to the Compendium of Wong-shi-Shing (1526-1590), it was in the "age after the chaos, when heaven and earth had just separated, that is, when the great mass of cloud just lifted from the earth," that the heaven showed its face.10
7 J. M. Crawford in the Preface to his translation of Kalevala.
8 Quoted by I. Donnelly, Ragnarok, p. 215, from Andres de Olmos. Donnelly thought that this tradition signified that "in the long-continued darkness they had lost all knowledge of the cardinal points"; he did not consider that it might refer to the displacement of the cardinal points.
9 Sahagun, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva Espana, Bk. VII, Chap. 2.
10 Quoted by Donnelly, Ragnarok, p. 210.
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In the Midrashim it is said that during the wandering in the desert the Israelites did not see the face of the sun because of the clouds. They were also unable to orient themselves on their march.11
The expression repeatedly used in the Books of Numbers and Joshua, "the east, to the sunrising,"
12 is not tautology, but a definition, which, by the way, testifies to the ancient origin of the literary materials that served as sources for these books; it is an expression that has its counterpart in the Egyptian "the west which is at the sun-setting."
The cosmological allegory of the Greeks has Zeus, rushing on his way to engage Typhon in combat, steal Europa (Erev, the evening land) and carry her to the west. Arabia (also Erev) kept its name, "the evening land,"13 though it lies to the east of the centers of civilization—Egypt, Palestine, Greece. Eusebius, one of the Fathers of the Church, assigned the Zeus-Europa episode to the time of Moses and the Deucalion Flood, and Augustine wrote that Europa was carried by the king of Crete to his island in the west, "betwixt the departure of Israel out of Egypt and the death of Joshua."14
The Greeks, like other peoples, spoke of the reversal of the quarters of the earth and not merely in allegories but in literal terms.
robin-bobin
The reversal of the earth's rotation, referred to in the written and oral sources of many peoples, suggests the relation of one of these events to the cataclysm of the day of the Exodus. Like the quoted passage from Visuddhi-Magga, the Buddhist text, and the cited tradition of the Cashinaua tribe in western Brazil, the versions of the tribes and peoples of all five continents include the same elements, familiar to us from the Book of Exodus: lightning and "the bursting of heaven,"
which caused the earth to be turned "upside down," or "heaven and earth to change places." On the Andaman Islands the natives are afraid that a natural catastrophe will cause the world 11 Exodus 14 : 3; Numbers 10 : 31.
i2 Numbers 2 : 3; 34 : 15; Joshua 19 : 12.
13 Cf. Isaiah 21 : 13. In Jeremiah 25 : 20 the name "Arab" is used to denote "a mingled people."
** Eusebius, Werke, Vol. V, Die Chronik (transl. J. Karst, 1911), "Chronikon Kanon"; St. Augustine, The City of God, Bk. XVIII, Chap. 12.
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to turn over.15 In Greenland also the Eskimos fear that the earth will turn over.16