| Eclipses, Leprosy, and a Durable Bug | ||||||
| by Tom Slattery | ||||||
There is a curious astronomical reference in Joshua 10:12, "Sun stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon." And in Joshua 10:13, "And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed . . . So the Sun stood still in the midst of heaven and hast not to go down about a whole day." Believe what you may, but this would defy all known physical laws if true. One can, however, guess that these passages may have originally been references to a solar eclipse. At Gibeon, the visual appearance of the sun may have appeared different from the typical crescent-moon shape seen in an eclipse at Ajalon. Due to the eclipse, darkness could have come, and then the sun rose in the middle of the sky at noon. The event would have been preserved by oral ballads until it was written down in the new Hebrew script centuries later. By then the story had changed, as stories do with repeated tellings. We may have a garbled version of an actual solar eclipse? There was a solar eclipse in the region on September 30, 1131 B.C. Few have used this to pin down a date for the Exodus and subsequent events, but in the context of a smallpox pandemic it turns out to be compelling. The flight into the Sinai would have taken place somewhere between a decade and several decades earlier, 1141, 1151, 1161, or maybe more. If Rameses V died of smallpox in 1154 B.C., the epidemic would probably have been raging for some time before the protected pharaoh came down with the disease. Maybe it struck Egypt as early as c. 1161. This close correspondence in reasonable dates is bolstered by more. A smallpox epidemic would explain the ease with which a band fresh from surviving in the desert could take over fortified Canaan, a country under at least some additional protection by the powerful Imperial Egyptian Army. Canaan would seem to have been devastated by something like a smallpox pandemic. Moreover, there are some passages that seem to refer to smallpox. The disease called tsara'at in Hebrew has been translated as "leprosy." No one now knows exactly what tsara'at was. The meaning of the word has been lost. But it is clearly a disease that, unlike leprosy, takes very little time to produce death. Tsara'at is described as a disease of "swelling" (se'et) as used for local inflamations, boils, or mole-like appearances, and "breaking out" (saphahat) as used for rashes. Spies are sent from the Sinai into Canaan. They bring back the dread disease and it would appear to quickly spread through the Sinai encampment. Numbers 14 would seem to graphically allude to "carcasses" wasting in the desert as if from an epidemic. Miriam gets this strange disease. When the tabernacle (probably something like a Bedouin tent) blows open, she is seen as "leprous, white as snow," as if in a stage of smallpox when fluid from the blisters has been absorbed and dead white flesh remains. There are also suggestions of quarantine measures and other strategies against an unknown infectious disease. One can at least entertain the idea that a smallpox epidemic was raging at this time. And it begins to fit with a larger picture. Not far from Canaan was Troy. Perhaps a lost metaphor for the famous siege of Troy -- maybe known to Homer, but lost on us -- was that the armed confrontation represented the folly of the last battle before civilization completely collapsed, that only heroic deeds mattered as nature was spreading death and doom to everything that everyone had lived for. The siege may even have been taking place as a smallpox pandemic was spreading into the Aegean. What, for instance, was the vague "plague" that struck the besiegers? Could a possible lone occupant of the Trojan Horse have been an infected person who would spread havoc throughout citadel Troy? Or maybe no one was in it. Maybe it was just an infected statue? Smallpox stays infectious on something for up to 60 days. In the context of a smallpox pandemic, one can wonder. At any rate, a smallpox pandemic would appear to have been raging across the Old World within the time frame of the Fall of Troy and the Exodus. Not only did the Achaean Greek civilization collapse after the battle of Troy, the highly sophisticated New Kingdom Egyptian civilization collapsed not long after the death of Rameses V, the Hittites vanished forever, and way over in China, the Shang Dynasty collapsed. In Mesopotamia the picture is a little less clear. But something happened. Within not too many years of this time the old civilizations there collapsed and were replaced by new versions. And a dark age does appear to have followed this time. Sophisticated civilization gave way to survival society for a long time. Old written languages disappeared. New ones were invented centuries later. And in two of these, Greek and Hebrew, we get an idea of what the people emerging out of a dark age may have retained from the civilizations that had been virtually eradicated centuries earlier. The Bronze Age did not immediately come to an end. A great many people appear to have died, and there was plenty of metal for the survivors for centuries until population returned to pre-catastrophe levels. During those centuries, experiments with iron-making seem to have been going forward. When demand created an incentive, breakthroughs seem to have occurred and the technical knowledge spread. The Bronze Age was over. I titled my book The Tragic End of the Bronze Age: A Virus Makes History. Previous page > Something Awful Happened > Page 1, 2 This resource page is copyright © 2001-2002 Tom Slattery.
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