Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [53]
There is a contention (page 63) that instead of the tenth plague of Exodus killing the “first born” of Egypt, what is intended is the killing of the “chosen.” This is a rather serious matter and at least raises the suspicion that where the Bible is inconsistent with Velikovsky’s hypothesis, Velikovsky retranslates the Bible. The foregoing queries may all have simple answers, but the answers are not to be found easily in Worlds in Collision.
I do not mean to suggest that all of Velikovsky’s legendary concordances and ancient scholarship are similarly flawed, but many of them seem to be, and the remainder may well have alternative, for example diffusionist, origins.
With the situation in legend and myth as fuzzy as this, any corroboratory evidence from other sources would be welcomed by those who support Velikovsky’s argument. I am struck by the absence of any confirming evidence in art. There is a wide range of paintings, bas-reliefs, cylinder seals and other objets d’art produced by humanity and going back to at least 10,000 B.C. They represent all of the subjects, especially mythological subjects, important to the cultures that created them. Astronomical events are not uncommon in such works of art. Recently (Brandt, et al., 1974), impressive evidence has been uncovered in cave paintings in the American Southwest of contemporary observations of the Crab Supernova event of the year 1054, which was also recorded in Chinese, Japanese and Arab annals. Appeals have been made to archaeologists for information on cave painting representations of the earlier Gum Supernova (Brandt, et al., 1971). But supernova events are not nearly so impressive as the close approach of another planet with attendant interplanetary tendrils and lightning discharges connecting it to Earth. There are many unflooded caves at high altitudes, distant from the sea. If the Velikovskian catastrophes occurred, why are there no contemporary graphic records of them?
I therefore cannot find the legendary base of Velikovsky’s hypothesis at all compelling. If, nevertheless, his notion of recent planetary collisions and global catastrophism were strongly supported by physical evidence, we might be tempted to give it some credence. If the physical evidence is not, however, very strong, the mythological evidence will surely not stand by itself.
LET ME GIVE a short summary of my understanding of the basic features of Velikovsky’s principal hypothesis. I will relate it to the events described in the Book of Exodus, although the stories of many other cultures are said to be consistent with the events described in Exodus:
The planet Jupiter disgorged a large comet, which made a grazing collision with Earth around 1500 B.C. The various plagues and Pharaonic tribulations of the Book of Exodus all derive directly or indirectly from this cometary encounter. Material which made the river Nile turn to blood drops from the comet. The vermin described in Exodus are produced by the comet—flies and perhaps scarabs drop out of the comet, while indigenous terrestrial frogs are induced by the heat of the comet to multiply. Earthquakes produced by the comet level Egyptian but not Hebrew dwellings. (The only thing that does not seem to drop from the comet is cholesterol to harden Pharaoh’s heart.)
All this evidently falls from the coma of the comet, because at the moment that Moses lifts his rod and stretches out his hand, the “Red Sea” parts—due either to the gravitational tidal field of the comet or to some unspecified electrical or magnetic interaction between the comet and the “Red Sea.” Then, when the Hebrews have successfully crossed, the comet has evidently passed sufficiently farther on for the parted waters to flow back and drown the host of Pharaoh. The Children of Israel during their subsequent