is ibid. " Ibid., ii. 53.
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The Stormer of the Walls
Following the upheavals in which, in the words of the Babylonians, Mars-Nergal "moved the earth off its hinges," and, in the words of Isaiah, "the earth moved exceedingly" and was
"removed out of her place," mighty and repeated earthquakes devastated whole countries, destroyed cities, and shattered the walls of strongholds. "Bloodstained stormer of walls" is the ever repeated epithet of Ares in Homer. Hesiod, too, calls Ares "sacker of towns."* "Behold,"
said Amos, "the Lord commandeth, and he will smite the great house with breaches [into pieces]." Then came the "commotion" of the days of Uzziah, and of the days of Ahaz, and of the days of Hezekiah, when "the bricks are fallen down" (Isaiah 9 :10) and only "a very small remnant" of the people remained (Isaiah 1:9). Those were days of "trouble, and of treading down, and of perplexity by the Lord God of Hosts" and "breaking down the walls" (Isaiah 22 : 5).
Recurrent displacement of the terrestrial globe, torsion of the litho-sphere, and migration of the inner parts of the globe must have caused a succession of earthquakes over a prolonged period.
But in comparison with the great catastrophes, when "heaven reeled," the local earthquakes received only slight attention.
In the reports of the astrologers of Nineveh and Babylon, earthquakes are often mentioned in just a single line, as in the following message: "Last night there was an earthquake." The frequent trembling of the earth became a source of omens for the magicians, which were reduced to formulas: "When the earth quakes in the month of Shevat," or "When the earth quakes in the month of Nisan," then one or another event will take place. As in the following sentence, the robin-bobin
observation could be basically correct: "When the earth quakes through the whole day, there will be a destruction of the land. When it quakes continually, there will be an invasion of the enemy."
2
Reports concerning earthquakes in Mesopotamia in the eighth and
1 Hesiod, Theogony, 11. 935 S. Purandara or "town destroying" is the usual appellative of Indra.
2 R. C. Thompson (ed.), The Reports of the Magicians and Astrologers of Nineveh and Babylon in the British Museum (1900), Vol. II, Nos. 263, 265.
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seventh centuries are very numerous, and they are dated.3 Nothing comparable is known in modern times. In some of these reports, Nergal (Mars) is mentioned as the cause of the calamity.
"The earth shook; a collapsing catastrophe was all over the country; Nergal strangles the country."4 Temples constructed with great care, so that the foundations might absorb shocks and resist them, were often destroyed by the catastrophes, and the cause was again the planet Nergal.
Thus Nergal is referred to in connection with the collapse of the temple in Nippur that was destroyed in an earthquake.5
The kings of Babylon, the successors to Sennacherib, record im many inscriptions the repairing of breaches in the palaces and temples of the land. Sometimes the same temples or palaces were repaired by two kings in close succession, as in the case of Nergilissar (Neriglissar) and Nebuchadnezzar.8 In the great catastrophes of the eighth to the seventh centuries, practically no structure escaped damage, and new buildings were erected so as to absorb frequent shocks. At the close of the seventh century, Nebuchadnezzar described the precautions taken in placing the foundations of the palaces "on the breast of the netherworld"; these foundations of large stones with joints fitting one into the other have been unearthed in excavations.7 The Babylonians also found that walls of burnt bricks were of greater elasticity than walls of stones; they were built on foundations of great blocks of stone.8
These ever recurrent earthshocks in a country as rich in oil as Mesopotamia also caused eruptions of earth deposits: "The earth threw oil and asphalt," observed the official astrologers, as the effect of an earthquake.9
3 See Kugler, Babylonische Zeitordnung, p. 116. 4 Ibid.
5 Langdon, Sumerian and Babylonian Psalms, p. 99.
• See the Section "Mars Moves the Earth from Its Pivot," note 6.
7 R. Koldeway, The Excavations at Babylon (1914); idem, Das wieder entstan-dene Babylon (4th ed., 1925).
8 Koldeway, Die Konigsburgen von Babylon (1931-1939), Vols. I and II. Cf. Pliny, ii. 84: "The solidly built portion of the city being specially liable to collapses of this nature . . . walls built of clay bricks suffer less damage front being shaken."
9 Kugler, Babylonische Zeitordnung, p. 117.
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The Scriptures and the rabbinical sources record repeatedly the repairing of breaches in the House of the Lord. On the day of the "commotion" of Uzziah the temple suffered a great breach.10 References to breaches in houses, large palaces, and small dwellings are very numerous in the prophets of the eighth century. Isaiah speaks of "breaches of the city of David that they are many." u Repair of breaches in the Temple was the permanent concern of the kings of Jerusalem, also "the wall that was broken" of the city's outer bulwark.12
Since in modern times earthquakes occur only very seldom in Palestine, the frequent reference of the prophets and psalmists to them caused perplexity: "The earthquake held a place in the religious conceptions of the Israelites quite out of proportion to its slight and relatively rare occurrence in Palestine." 13
Troy, the scene of the Homeric epos, was destroyed by an earthquake. The famous "sixth city" at Hissarlik, recognized as the fortress of Priam, king of the Trojans, fell because of earthshocks, a robin-bobin
fact established in the excavation by the archaeological expedition of the University of Cincinnati.14
There are a number of theories concerning the cause of the earthquakes, but none of them is generally accepted. One connects the cause of earthquakes with the process of mountain building. Mountains are supposed to have their origin in the cooling of the earth and contraction of its crust.15 This theory is based on the assumption that originally the earth was liquid. The folding of the crust creates mountains and causes earthquakes.
Another theory sees the cause of earthquakes in the migration of
10 Josephus, Antiquities, IX. x. 4. See Ginzberg, Legends, VI, 358.
« Isaiah 22 : 9.
12 II Kings 12 : 5; 22 : 5; II Chronicles 32 : 5; Amos 6 : 11; 9 : 11.
x3 A. Lods, Israeclass="underline" From Its Beginnings to the Middle of the Eighth Century (transl. S. H. Hooke, 1932), p. 31.
14 C. W. Blegen, "Excavation at Troy," American loumal of Archaeology, XXXIX (1935), 17.
15 See the discussion of the problem of mountain building in the Section "The Planet Earth."
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land masses, even of entire continents. This theory, too, is based on the concept of a thin crust resting on a viscous substratum. Geological and faunal similarities of South America and West Africa suggested their separation in recent geological times, and their migration in opposite directions. According to this theory, thermal convection is the mechanical cause of this migration, with magma supplying the heat.
Still another theory supposes that there are great mountains and deep valleys on the inner surface of the crust, facing the magma. The sliding of huge rocks along these mountainous slopes under the pull of gravity is presumed to be the cause of earthquakes.