"Through the wrath of the Lord of hosts is the land darkened, and the people shall be as the fuel of the fire" (9 : 19). His rod will lift the sea up "after the manner of Egypt," as on the day of the crossing of the Red Sea (10 : 26). "And the Lord shall utterly destroy the tongue of the Egyptian sea; and with his mighty wind shall he shake his hand [sign] over the river, and shall smite it in the seven streams" (11 : 15). Nor will Palestine be spared. "He shall shake his hand [sign] against
. . . the hill of Jerusalem" (10 : 32).
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Thus, a war of the heavenly host, commanded by the Lord, was proclaimed against the nations of the earth. And the nations of the earth were aroused by the expectation of Doomsday. "The noise of a multitude in the mountains, like as of a great people; a tumultuous noise of the kingdoms of nations gathered together: the Lord of hosts mustereth the host of the battle" (13 : 4). This multitude comes
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"from the end of heaven, even the Lord, and the weapons of his indignation, to destroy the whole land" (13 : 5).
The world will be darkened. "The stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their light: the sun shall be darkened in his going forth [in the forenoon], and the moon shall not cause her light to shine" (13 : 10).
The world will be thrown off its axis: the heavenly host "will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place, in the wrath of the Lord of hosts, and in the day of his fierce anger" (13 : 13).
The nations "shall flee far off, and shall be chased as the chaff of the mountains before the wind, and like a rolling thing before the whirlwind" (17 : 13).
Isaiah, on his vigils, watched the firmament, and in "appointed times" expected "from the north a smoke" (14 : 31).
"All ye inhabitants of the world . . . see ye, when he lifteth up an ensign on the mountains; and when he bloweth a trumpet, hear ye" (18 : 3). The eyes of all "dwellers of the earth" were directed toward the sky, and they listened to the bowels of the earth.
Inquiries were sent to Jerusalem from Seir in Arabia: "Watchman, what of the night?" From his watchtower ("Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower") Isaiah gave his forecasts to inquirers (21:5; 21:11).
Nervous tension grew with the approach of the "appointed time," and a rumor sufficed to drive the population of the cities to the housetops. "What aileth thee now, that thou art wholly gone up to the housetops?" (22 : 1).
Much of the city of David was damaged and many structures had fissures from almost continuous earth tremors (22 : 9). The seer frightened the population with his constant warnings of "a day of trouble . . . and of perplexity by the Lord God of hosts," with "breaking down the walls, and of crying to the mountains" (22 : 5). But many among the population took the attitude of those who before Doomsday say: "Let us eat and drink; for to-morrow we shall die" (22: 13).
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Joel, who prophesied at the same time, also spoke of "wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and the terrible day of the Lord come" (Joel 2 : 30-31).
Micah, another seer "in the days of Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah," warned that the day was close when "the mountains shall be molten . . . and the valleys shall be cleft, as wax before the fire" (Micah 1:4). "Marvelous things" will be shown, as in the days when Israel left Egypt: "The nations shall see and be confounded at all their might . . . their ears shall be deaf . . .
they shall move out of their holes like worms of the earth" (7 : 15-17).
Joel, Micah, and Amos warned in similar terms of "a day of thick darkness" and "the day dark with night." Astronomers, who thought that all this refers to a common eclipse of the sun, wondered: "From —763 down to the destruction of the First Temple in —586 no total eclipse of the sun was visible in Palestine." * They took it for granted that the earth revolves along exactly the same orbit and on a slowly rotating axis, and so they questioned: Why did the prophets speak of eclipses when there were none? However, other descriptions of the world catastrophe in these prophets do not accord with the effects of an ordinary eclipse, either.
The word shaog, used by Amos and Joel, is explained by the Talmud5 as an earthshock, the field of action of which is the entire world, whereas a regular earthquake is of local character. Such a shaking of the earth, disturbed in its rotation, is visualized also as a "shaking of the sky," an expression found in the Prophets, in Babylonian texts, and in other literary sources.
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Then the prophecy was fulfilled. Amid the catastrophe Isaiah raised his voice: "Fear, and the pit, and the snare [pitch 6] are upon thee, O inhabitant of the earth . . . for the windows from on high 4 Schiaparelli, Astronomy in the Old Testament, p. 43. Oppolzer and Ginzel arranged canons of the solar eclipses in antiquity on the premise that there was no change in the movement of the earth or the moon.
5 The Jerusalem Talmud, Tractate Berakhot 13b.
6 Pah in Hebrew originally meant "bitumen" or "pitch," as can be inferred from Psalms 11: 6.
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are open, and the foundations of the earth do shake. The earth is utterly broken down, the earth is clean dissolved, the earth is moved exceedingly" (24 : 17-19).
The catastrophe came on the day on which King Ahaz was buried. There was a "commotion": the terrestrial axis shifted or was tilted, and the sunset was hastened by several hours. This cosmic disturbance is described in the Talmud, in the Midrashim, and referred to by the Fathers of the Church.' It is related also in the records and told in the traditions of many peoples. It appears that a heavenly body passed very close to the earth, moving, as it seems, in the same direction as the earth on its nocturnal side.
"Behold, the Lord maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down. . . .
The inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left" (Isaiah 24 : 1, 6).
The Argive Tyrants
In Ages in Chaos I shall present proof that the large, raw stone structures of Mycenae and Tiryns on the Argive plain in Greece are the ruins of the palaces of the Argive tyrants, well remembered by the Greeks of subsequent centuries, and date from the eighth century before the present era. If the material remains of the palaces of Mycenae and Tiryns are ascribed to the second millennium, then nothing has been found on the Argive plain that can be ascribed to the Argive tyrants, although they are known to have built spacious palaces.
Thyestes and his brother Atreus were of these Argive tyrants. Living in the eighth century, they must have witnessed the cosmic catastrophes of the days of Isaiah. Greek tradition persists that a cosmic catastrophe occurred in the time of these tyrants: the sun changed its course and the night arrived before its proper time.
Men should be prepared for everything and not wonder at anything, wrote Archilochus, since the day that Zeus "turned midday into
'Tractate Sanhedrin 96a; Pirkei Rabbi Elieser 52; Hippolytus on Isaiah. Cf. Ginzberg, Legends, VI, 367, n. 81.
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night, hiding the light of the dazzling sun; and sore fear came upon men. 1