Amos was persecuted and killed. The catastrophe did not fail to come at the appointed time. In anticipation and in fear of it, King Uzziah went to the Temple to burn incense.7 The priests opposed his appropriating their functions. "Suddenly the earth started to quake so violently that a great breach was torn in the Temple. On the west side of Jerusalem, half of a mountain was split off and hurled to the east."8 Flaming seraphim leaped in the air.9
Earthquakes act suddenly, and the population has no means of knowing about them in advance in order to flee. But before the raash
5 Breasted, Records of Egypt, IV, Sec. 743. Cf. J. Vandier, La Famine dans I'Egypte ancienne (1936), p. 123. "The water reduced the land to the same state as when it was still covered with the primeval water of creation."
6 Breasted, Records of Egypt, IV, Sees. 742-743. * II Chronicles 26 : 16 ff. 8 Ginzberg, Legends, IV, 262. »Ibid., VI, 358.
robin-bobin
210 WORLDS IN COLLISION
of Uzziah the population escaped from the cities and fled into caves and clefts between the rocks.
Many generations later, in the post-Exilic period, it was remembered how the population "fled from before the raash in the days of Uzziah king of Judah." 10
The Year -747
If the commotion of the days of Uzziah was of global character and was brought about by an extraterrestrial agent, it must have caused some disturbance in the motion of the earth on its axis and along its orbit. Such a disturbance would have made the old calendar obsolete and would have required the introduction of a new calendar.
In —747 a new calendar was introduced in the Middle East, and that year is known as "the beginning of the era of Nabonassar." It is asserted that some astronomical event gave birth to this new calendar, but the nature of the event is not known. The beginning of the era of Nabonassar, otherwise an obscure Babylonian king, was an astronomical date used as late as the second Christian century by the great mathematician and astronomer of the Alexandrian school, Ptolemy, and also by other scholars. It was employed as a point of departure of ancient astronomical tables.
"This was not a political or religious era. . . . Farther back there was no certainty in regard to the calculation of time. It is from that moment that the records of eclipses begin which Ptolemy used."J What was the astronomical event that closed the previous era and gave birth to a new era?
According to retrospective calculations, there was no eclipse of the sun in the region of Assyro-Babylonia between the years —762 and — 701,2 if the earth has revolved and rotated uniformly since then, which is taken for granted.
!» Zechariah 14 : 5.
1 F. Cumont, Astrology and Religion among the Greeks and Romans (1912),
pp. 8-9. To be correct, the earliest eclipse Ptolemy calculated is dated March 21, -721.
2T. von Oppolzer, Canon der Finsternisse (1887).
WORLDS IN COLLISION 211
Uzziah reigned from about -789 to about -740.3 The last few years of his reign, beginning with the day of the "commotion," he spent in seclusion, having been pronounced a leper. It was apparently the upheaval in the days of Uzziah that separated the two ages. Time was counted
"from the commotion in the days of Uzziah." *
If this conclusion is correct, the upheaval took place in —747. The computation, according to which the era started on the twenty-sixth day of February, must be re-examined in the light of the fact that further cosmic disturbances occurred during the decades that followed —747. It is worth noting, however, that the ancient inhabitants of Mexico celebrated their New Year on the day which corresponds, in the Julian calendar, to the same date: "The first day of their yeere was the sixe and twentie day of February." 5
The chronographer and Byzantine monk, Georgius Syncellus, one of the chief sources of ancient chronology, synchronized the forty-eighth year of Uzziah and the first year of the first Olympiad.6 But according to modern calculations, the first year of the first Olympiad was —
776.7 The Olympiads most probably were inaugurated by some cosmic event. The text of the ancient Chinese book of Shiking refers to some celestial phenomenon in the days of the king Yen-Yang, in —776: the sun was obscured.8 If the occurrence of —776 was of the same nature as that of —747, then Amos' prophecy was a prognostication based on an earlier experience.
3 K. Marti, "Chronology," Encyclopaedia Biblica, ed. by Cheyne and Black.
4 Cf. Amos 1:1; Zechariah 14 : 5.
5 J. de Acosta, The Natural and Moral History of the Indies (transl. E. Grimston, 1604; re-edited, 1880).
6 Georgius Syncellus (ed. G. Dindorf, 1829), II, 203.
robin-bobin
7 S. Newcomb, The American Nautical Almanac, 1891 (1890).
8 A. Gaubil, Traits de I'astronomie chinoise, Vol. Ill of Observations mathSma-tiques, astronomiques, geographiques, chronologiques, et physiques . . . aux Indes et a la Chine, ed. E.
Souciet (1729-1732); J. B. du Halde, A Description of the Empire of China (1741), II, 128-129.
212 WORLDS IN COLLISION
Isaiah
According to Hebrew sources,1 Isaiah began to prophesy immediately after the "commotion" of the days of Uzziah, even on the same day. The destruction in the land was very great. "Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire. . . . Except the Lord of hosts had left unto us a very small remnant, we should have been as Sodom, and we should have been like unto Gomorrah" (1 : 7 ff.). The very horizon of Jerusalem was disfigured by the splitting of the mountain on the west; and the cities were filled with debris and mutilated bodies. "The hills did tremble, and . . . carcasses were torn in the midst of the streets" (5 : 25).
This was the event that kindled in Isaiah the prophetic spirit. During his long life—he prophesied in "the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah"—he did not cease to foretell the return of the catastrophes. Isaiah was skilled in the observation of the stars, and he apparently knew that at periodic intervals—every fifteen years—a catastrophe occurred, caused, he believed, by the messenger of God. "His anger is not turned away, but his hand [sign 2] is stretched out still. And he will lift up an ensign to the nations from afar" (5:25-26).
Isaiah drew an apocalyptic picture of swiftly moving hostile troops. Was he prophesying a cruel and mighty people of warriors, or a host of missiles hurled from afar when he spoke of the army that would come swiftly from the end of the world, called by the Lord? Their horses' hoofs would be like flint, and their wheels like a whirlwind. "If one look unto the land, behold darkness and sorrow; and the light is darkened in the heavens thereof" (5 : 30).
It is not the Assyrians on horses and in chariots that are compared to the flint and the whirlwind, but the flint and the whirlwind that are likened to warriors.3 The darkness at the end of the picture discloses that which is the object of comparison and that to which it is compared.
1 Seder Olam 20. 2 Yad is "hand" as well as "sign." 3 See infra the Section, "The Terrible Ones."
WORLDS IN COLLISION 213
The catastrophe of the days of Uzziah was only a prelude: the day of wrath will return and will destroy the population "until the cities be wasted without inhabitant" (6 : 11). "Enter into the rock, and hide thee in the dust" (2 : 10)—all over the world caves in the rocks were regarded as the best places of refuge. "And they shall go into the holes of the rocks, and into the caves of the earth, for fear of the Lord, and for the glory of his majesty, when he ariseth to shake terribly the earth" (2 : 19).
Isaiah appeared before King Ahaz and offered him a sign, on the earth or "in the height above."
Ahaz refused: "I will not ask, neither will I tempt the Lord" (7 : 12).
Then Isaiah faced the people. "And they shall look unto the earth; and behold trouble and darkness, dimness of anguish" (8 : 22). Nevertheless, he said, the dimness will not be as great as on two former occasions when "at the first he lightly afflicted the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, and afterward did more grievously afflict her by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, in Galilee of the nations" (9:1). He calculated that the next catastrophe would cause less harm than had been caused on previous occasions. But soon thereafter he changed his prognostication and became utterly pessimistic.