The Icelandic Voluspa says: "Dark grows the sun. . . . Brothers shall fight and fell each other. . . .
Axe-time, sword-time, shields are sundered, wind-time, wolf-time, ere the world falls; nor ever shall men each other spare." *
The wars of Shalmaneser IV, Sargon II, and Sennacherib were carried on in the intervals between the catastrophes and at the very time of their occurrence. The campaigns were repeatedly interrupted by the forces of nature. Of his second campaign Sennacherib wrote: "The month of rain set in with extreme cold and the heavy storms sent down rain upon rain and snow.
I was afraid of the swollen mountain streams; the front of my yoke I turned and took the road to Nineveh."5 Before Sennacherib set out on his last campaign to Palestine, his astrologers told him that he had to hurry if he would
1 Breasted, Records of Egypt, IV, Sec. 764. 2 Isaiah 19 : 2.
3 Gardiner, "New Literary Works from Ancient Egypt," Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, I (1914).
4 The Poetic Edda: Voluspa (transl. Bellows). 6 Luckenbill, Records of Assyria, II, Sec. 250.
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escape calamity; 6 as we know, he did not escape it. At the same time Isaiah, who encouraged Hezekiah to resist Sennacherib, reckoned with the possibility of a disaster in the year of the opposition of Mars, and thus built his hope on the intervention of the forces of nature.
The Babylonians called the year of the close opposition of Mars "the year of the fire-god," and the month "the month of descent of the fire-god," as, for instance, in an inscription of Sargon.7
robin-bobin
In The Birth of the War-God, the Hindu poet Kalidasa gives a vivid picture of the wars above and on the earth, weaving them into one great battle.
"Foul birds came, a horrid flock to see . . . and dimmed the sun. . . . And monstrous snakes, as black as powdered soot, spitting hot poison high into the air, brought terror to the army underfoot. . . . The sun a sickly halo round him had; coiling within it frightened eyes could see great, writhing serpents . . . and in the very circle of the sun were phantom jackals."
There fell, with darting flame and blinding flash Lighting the farthest heavens, from on high A thunderbolt whose agonising crash Brought fear and shuddering from a cloudless sky.
There came a pelting rain of blazing coals With blood and bones of dead men mingled in; Smoke and weird flashes horrified their souls; The sky was dusty grey like asses' skin.
The elephants stumbled and the horses fell, The footmen jostled, leaving each his post, The ground beneath them trembled at the swell Of ocean, when an earthquake shook the host.8
Lightning is usually discharged between two clouds or a cloud and the ground. But if for some reason the charge of the ionosphere, the electrified layer of the upper atmosphere, should be sufficiently increased, a discharge would occur between the upper atmosphere 6 Ginzberg, Legends, IV, 267, n. 53.
7 LuckenbilL Records of Assyria, II, Sec. 121.
8 Translated by A. W. Ryder (1912).
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and the ground, and a thunderbolt would crash from a cloudless sky.
The planet-god Shiva, Kalidasa says, "deposited his seed in fire" and gave birth to Kumara who battled the great demon named Taraka that "troubled the world."
The Babylonian astrologers ascribed to their planet-gods the ability to emit the sounds of different animals—lion, pig, jackal, horse, ass—and of two species of birds.9 The ancient Chinese likewise asserted that planets emit animal sounds when they approach the earth with a rain of stones.10 It is fairly probable that on some occasion the crash of the discharge "from the cloudless sky" sounded like Ta-ra-ka, the name of the demon who battled the planets.
The Ethiopian king who went up against Sennacherib called himself Taharka or Tirhakah.11 In many places in the Near and Middle East this or similar names suddenly became very popular at the close of the eighth century before the present era; before that time it was unknown.
Taraka troubled the world so that
The seasons have forgotten how to follow one another now; they simultaneously bring flowers of autumn, summer, spring.
The night when Sennacherib's army was destroyed, he survived, but according to rabbinical sources, was badly burned. Some time after his inglorious return from Palestine without his army, he was killed by two of his sons as he knelt in a temple; Esarhaddon pursued his brother-patricides, killed them, and became king. On one of his campaigns against Egypt, his armies became so panicky at some natural phenomenon that they scattered and fled from Palestine where Sennacherib had lost his army to the storm-god Nergal. The laconic cuneiform chronicles, composed in the days of Nabonidus, the last Babylonian king, who lived in the sixth century, record the main events of Esarhaddon's war: "In the sixth year the troops of 9 Kugler, Babylonische Zeitordnung, p. 91.
10 F. Arago, Astronomie populaire, IV, 204. ll Isaiah 37 : 9.
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Assyria went to Egypt. They fled before a great storm." 1S An army as disciplined as the Assyrian army under one of its famous kings would not have run away from a cloudburst. The event mentioned in this inscription suggested to its modern publisher that the scriptural story of a blast that destroyed the Assyrian host refers, not to Sennacherib's army, but to that of his successor-son; otherwise one must think that on two similar occasions a natural cause subdued the Assyrian army. However, it is probable that after the army of Sennacherib was annihilated, violent atmospheric discharges and some portents in the sky, so numerous in those years, threw the Assyrian troops into a panic so that they fled.
robin-bobin
The trembling earth, the displacement of the poles, the change in the climate, the frightening prodigies in the sky, caused great movements of peoples. The Aztecs changed their homeland.
"These Mexicans carried with them an idol which they called Huitzilo-pochtli. . . . They asserted that this idol commanded them to leave their country, promising to make them lords and masters of all the lands . . . which abounded with gold, silver, feathers . . . and all the things necessary for life. The Mexicans departed like the children of Israel in their search of a promised land." 13 In India the patron of the invading Aryan race was Indra, the god of war, the Hindu Mars.
The Ionians and Dorians spread to the islands, the Latins were pressed by newcomers to the Apennine Peninsula, the Cimmerians wandered from Europe across the Bosporus into Asia Minor, the Scythians crossed the Caucasus into Asia.
Synodos
We remember that Josephus Flavius, after giving Herodotus' account of the destruction of Sennacherib's army, intended to quote a divergent account of Berosus, and introduced it with the words, "Here is what wrote Berosus," but the account is not preserved.
12 Sidney Smith, Babylonian Historical Texts (1924), p. 5.
13 Manuscrit Ramirez (of the 16th century) translated by D. Charnay, Histoire de Vorigine des Indiens qui habitent la Nouvelle Espagne selon leurs traditions (1903), p. 9.
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Now, if we know what happened on the night of March 23, —687, are we not able to find out what the missing account of Berosus was?
We can assume that Berosus knew that the catastrophe was caused by a planet in contact with the earth. Seneca, in his work, Naturales quaestiones, described the cataclysms of water and fire that visited this world and brought it to the brink of destruction. He also presented the opinion of Berosus, which is remarkable in that it reflects ancient knowledge similar to that at which we arrived after a long series of deductions and conclusions. Seneca wrote: "Berosus, the translator of Bel, attributed to the planets the cause of these perturbations." And he added: "His certainty in this matter was so great as to fix the dates of the universal conflagration and deluge. Everything terrestrial, he says, will be burned, when the stars which now follow different orbits will reunite in the sign of Cancer, and will place themselves in one line, so that a straight line would pass through the centers of all these globes. The deluge will come when the same planets will have conjunction in Capricorn." 1