Many classical authors referred to the occurrence. I give here Seneca's description. In his drama, Thyestes, the chorus asks the sun:
"Whither, O father of the lands and skies, before whose rising thick night with all her glories flees, whither dost turn thy course and why dost blot out the day in mid-Olympus [midday]? Not yet does Vesper, twilight's messenger, summon the fires of night; not yet does thy wheel, turning its western goal, bid free thy steeds from their completed task; not yet as day fades into night has the third trump sounded; the ploughman with oxen yet unwearied stands amazed at his supper hour's quick coming. What has driven thee from thy heavenly course? . . . Has Typhoeus
[Typhon] thrown off the mountainous mass and set his body free?" 2
This picture reminds us of the description of the day of Ahaz' burial.
Seneca relates the fear of world destruction experienced by those who lived at the time of Atreus and Thyestes, the tyrants of the Argive plain. The hearts of men were oppressed with terror at the sight of the untimely sunset. "The shadows arise, though the night is not yet ready. No stars come out; the heavens gleam not with any fires: no moon dispels the darkness' heavy pall. . . .
Trembling, trembling are our hearts, sore smit with fear, lest all things fall shattered in fatal ruin and once more gods and men be overwhelmed by formless chaos; lest the lands, the encircling sea, and the stars that wander in the spangled sky, nature blot out once more."
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Will the seasons be ended and the moon carried away? "No more" shall the stars "mark off the summer and the winter times; no more shall Luna, reflecting Phoebus' rays, dispel night's terrors."
After the catastrophe of the days of Atreus and Thyestes, the luminaries crossed their former paths obliquely; the poles were shifted; the year lengthened—the orbit of the earth became wider. "The Zodiac, which, making passage through the sacred stars, crosses 1 Archilochus, Fragment 74. 2 Translated by F. J. Miller (1917).
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the zones obliquely, guide and sign-bearer for the slow moving years, falling itself, shall see the fallen constellations."
Seneca describes the change in position of each constellation—the Ram, the Bull, the Twins, the Lion, the Virgin, the Scales, the Scorpion, the Goat, and the Wain (the Great Bear). "And the Wain, which was never bathed in the sea, shall be plunged beneath the all-engulfing waves." A commentator who wondered about this description of the position of the Great Bear wrote:
"There was no mythological reason why the Wain—otherwise known as the Great Bear—should not be bathed in the Ocean." 3 But Seneca said precisely this strange thing: the Great Bear—or one of its stars—never set beneath the horizon, and thus the polar star was among its stars during the age that came to its end in the time of the Argive tyrants.
Seneca also says explicitly that the poles were torn up in this cataclysm. The polar axis now is turned toward one of the stars, the North Star, of the Little Bear.
In the face of the cataclysm, when humanity was overwhelmed with awe, the heartbroken Thyestes, longing for death, called upon the universe to go down in utter confusion. The picture was not invented by Seneca: it was familiar because of what had happened in earlier ages.
"O thou, exalted ruler of the sky, who sittest in majesty upon the throne of heaven, enwrap the whole universe in awful clouds, set the winds warring on every hand, and from every quarter of the sky let the loud thunder roll; not with what hand thou seekest houses and undeserving homes, using thy lesser bolts, but with that hand by which the threefold mass of mountains fell . . . these arms let loose and hurl thy fires."
Again Isaiah
Time passed after the death of Ahaz, and the fourteenth year of King Hezekiah approached.
Again the frightened world anxiously anticipated a catastrophe. On its two previous approaches, the celestial missile had come very close, indeed. This time the end of the 3 A note by F. J. Miller to his translation of Thyestes.
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world was feared. After the cataclysms of the days of Uzziah and of the funeral day of Ahaz, one did not have to be a prophet to foretell a new cosmic catastrophe. The earth will move out of its place, a scorching flame will devour the air, hot stones will fall from the sky, and the waters of the sea will mount and descend upon the continents.
"Behold, the Lord hath a mighty and strong one, which as a tempest [cataract] of hail and a destroying storm, as a flood of mighty waters overflowing, shall cast down to the earth with the hand" (Isaiah 28 : 2).
"The mighty and strong one" was a heavenly body, a missile of the Lord. Once more it was destined to scourge the earth. "The overflowing scourge shall pass through" (28 : 18), was Isaiah's new prognostication. Although the people of Jerusalem hoped that "when the overflowing scourge shall pass through, it shall not come unto us" (28 : 15), Jerusalem had no covenant with death.1
There will be no safe place of refuge. "The waters shall overflow the hiding place" (28 : 17). "A consumption even determined upon the whole earth" (28 : 22).
"For the Lord . . , shall be wroth as in the valley of Gibeon, that he may do his work, his strange work; and bring to pass his act, his strange act" (28 : 21).
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What was the "strange act" in the valley of Gibeon? In that valley the host of Joshua witnessed a rain of bolides and saw the sun and the moon disturbed in their movement across the firmament.
"At an instant suddenly" the land will be invaded with "small dust" and with "the multitude of terrible ones," and it will be visited "with thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire" (29 : 5-6).
"A devouring fire" and "an overflowing stream" shall "sift the nations" with "tempest and hailstones" (30 : 27-30).
The prophet, reading the signs of the sky, took upon himself the role of sentinel of the universe, and from his watchtower in Jerusalem he spread the alarm:
1 Cf. Psalms 46 : 5: "God is in the midst of her [Jerusalem]; she shall not be moved: God shall help her."
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"Let the earth hear. . . . For the indignation of the Lord is upon all nations . . . He hath delivered them to the slaughter" (34 : 1 ff.).
Then follows the desolate picture of the destroyed earth and dissolved sky (34: 4 ft): And all the host of heaven shall be dissolved,
and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scrolclass="underline"
and all their host shall fall down. . . .
For my sword shall be bathed in heaven. . . .
And the streams . . . shall be turned into pitch,
and the dust into brimstone,
and the land shall become burning pitch.
It shall not be quenched night nor day;
the smoke shall go up for ever.
Isaiah referred his readers to the "Book of the Lord": "Seek ye out of the book of the Lord, and read: no one of these shall fail" (34 : 16). This book probably belonged to the same series as the Book of Jasher, in which the records of the days of Joshua at Gibeon were preserved; old traditions and astronomical observations must have been written down in the Book of the Lord, no longer extant.
Maimonides and Spinoza, the Exegetes
Ego sum Dominus, faciens om-nia, extendens caelos solus, sta-biliens terrain, et nullus mecum.
Irrita faciens signa divinorum, et ariolos in furorem vertens. Convertens sapientes retrorsum: et scientiam eorum stultam faciens.
—Prophetiae Isaiae 44 : 24-25 (Vulgate)
Here, before I go on to the description of the day on which the prophecies of Isaiah, pronounced after the death of Ahaz, were fulfilled, I should like to present the common view of generations of commentators. The books of the Mayas have come into the hands of only a few scholars; likewise the papyri of Egypt and the clay
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