It is apparent from this passage that the population of Jerusalem that sought refuge in Egypt thought the national catastrophe fell upon their people, not because they had left the Lord God, but because in the days of Josiah and his sons they had ceased to worship the planetary gods of Manasseh and especially the Queen of Heaven, the planet Venus.
Of this remnant of the people that went to Egypt in the beginning of the sixth century a military colony was established in Ebb (Elephantine) in southern Egypt. Documents (papyri) of this colony were unearthed in the beginning of this century. The Jewish colony
WORLDS IN COLLISION 297
in Elephantine faithfully worshipped Yahu (Yahwe), the Lord of the sky, as the theophoric names of many members of the colony testify. Scholars were puzzled, however, to find on one of the papyri the name Anat-Yahu; they were uncertain whether it belonged to a goddess or a place or a person. "Anat is the familiar name of the Canaanite goddess identified with Athene in a Cyprian inscription." * The historical facts revealed in the present research make the understanding of such cult easier. The dark tradition that it was the planet Venus that played such an important role in the days when the forebears of these refugees in Egypt left that land and passed through cataclysms of fire and water, sea and desert, was responsible for this syncretism of names.
The Jewish people did not obtain all of its "supremacy" 2 in that one day at the Mountain of Lawgiving; this people did not receive the message of monotheism as a gift. It struggled for it; and step by step, from the smoke rising from the overturned valley of Sodom and Gomorrah, from the furnace of affliction of Egypt, from the deliverance at the Red Sea amid the sky-high tides, from the wandering in the cloud-enshrouded desert burning with naphtha, from the internal struggle, from the search for God and for justice between man and man, from the desperate and heroic struggle for national existence on its narrow strip of land against the overwhelming empires of Assyria and Egypt, it became a nation chosen to bring a message of the brotherhood of man to all the peoples of the world.
1 E. Sachau, Aramaische Papyrus and Ostraka aus einer jiidischen Militarkolonie zu Elephantine (1911), p. xxv.
2 S. A. B. Mercer, The Supremacy of Israel (1945).
CHAPTER 6
A Collective Amnesia
At any rate they seem to have been strangely forgetful of the catastrophe. —Plato, Laws iii (transl. R. Bury)
IT IS an established fact in the learning about the human mind that the most terrifying events of childhood (in some cases even of manhood) are often forgotten, their memory blotted out from consciousness and displaced into the unconscious strata of the mind, where they continue to live and to express themselves in bizarre forms of fear. Occasionally they may be converted into symptoms of compulsion neuroses and even contribute to the splitting of the personality.
One of the most terrifying events in the past of mankind was the conflagration of the world, accompanied by awful apparitions in the sky, quaking of the earth, vomiting of lava by thousands of volcanoes, melting of the ground, boiling of the sea, submersion of continents, a primeval chaos bombarded by flying hot stones, the roaring of the cleft earth, and the loud hissing of tornadoes of cinders.
There occurred more than one world conflagration; the most horrible one was in the days of the Exodus. In hundreds of passages in their Bible, the Hebrews described what happened.
Returning from the Babylonian exile in the sixth and fifth centuries before this era, the Hebrews did not cease to learn and repeat the traditions, but they lost sight of the fearful reality of what they learned. Apparently,
298
WORLDS IN COLLISION 299
robin-bobin
the post-Exile generations looked upon all these descriptions as the poetical utterances of religious literature.
The talmudists in the beginning of this era disputed whether a deluge of fire, prophesied in old traditions, would take place or not; those who denied that it might come, based their argument on the divine promise found in the Book of Genesis, that the Deluge would not be repeated; those who argued to the contrary, reasoning that though the deluge of water would not recur, there might come a deluge of fire, were attacked for construing too narrowly the promise of the Lord.1
Both sides overlooked the most prominent part of their traditions: the history of the Exodus and all the passages about the cosmic catastrophe, endlessly repeated in Exodus, Numbers, and the Prophets, and in the rest of the Scriptures.
The Egyptians in the sixth pre-Christian century knew about the catastrophes that overwhelmed other countries. Plato narrates the story which Solon heard in Egypt about the world destroyed in deluges and conflagrations: "You remember but one deluge, though many catastrophes had occurred previously." The Egyptian priests who said this and who maintained that their land was spared on these occasions, forgot what happened to Egypt. When, in the Ptolemaic age, the priest Manetho starts his story of the invasion of the Hyksos by acknowledging his ignorance of the cause and nature of the blast of heavenly displeasure that befell his land, it becomes apparent that the knowledge which was possibly alive in Egypt in the days when Solon and Pythagoras visited there, had already sunk into oblivion in the Ptolemaic age. Only some hazy tradition about a conflagration of the world was repeated, without knowing when or how it occurred.
The Egyptian priest, described by Plato as conversing with Solon, supposed that the memory of the catastrophes of fire and flood had been lost because literate men perished in them, together with all the achievements of their culture, and these upheavals "escaped your notice because for many generations the survivors died with no power to express themselves in writing." 2 A similar argument is found in
> Cf. Ginzberg, "Mabul shel esh" in Ha-goren, VIII, 35-51. 2 Plato, Timaeus 23 C.
300 WORLDS IN COLLISION
Philo the Alexandrian, who wrote in the first century of this era: "By reason of the constant and repeated destructions of water and fire, the later generations did not receive from the former the memory of the order and sequence of events." 3
Although Philo knew about the repeated destructions of the world by water and fire, it did not occur to him that a catastrophe of conflagration was described in the Book of Exodus. Nor did he think that anything of this sort took place in the days of Joshua or even of Isaiah. He thought that the Book of Genesis comprised the story of "how fire and water wrought great destruction of what is on the earth," and that the destruction by fire, about which he knew from the teachings of the Greek philosophers, was identical with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The memory of the cataclysms was erased, not because of lack of written traditions, but because of some characteristic process that later caused entire nations, together with their literate men, to read into these traditions allegories or metaphors where actually cosmic disturbances were clearly described.
It is a psychological phenomenon in the life of individuals as well as whole nations that the most terrifying events of the past may be forgotten or displaced into the subconscious mind. As if obliterated are impressions that should be unforgettable. To uncover their vestiges and their distorted equivalents in the physical life of peoples is a task not unlike that of overcoming amnesia in a single person.
Folklore
Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge. There is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard.
—Psalms 19:2-3
The scholars who dedicate their efforts to gathering and investigating the folklore of peoples are constantly aware that folk tales require interpretation, for, in their opinion, these tales are not inno-robin-bobin