Geological Disinformation

by Revilo P. Oliver

A FRIEND has sent me a page from the March 1986 issue of a periodical called Retirement Life. I hope — I most earnestly hope that what is said in the article is not true, but I am so pessimistic about the present state of our demoralized and decaying civilization that I have misgivings.

According to the article, “Dr. Daniel J. Stanley and Harrison Sheng of the National Museum in a report to the Geological Society of America” said that “there is scientific evidence that what is related in Exodus [i.e., the tale in the Jew Book] did indeed happen.” The article does not tell us what was done by the members of the Geological Society when they heard the report, so I cannot tell you whether they laughed uproariously or staggered out to the bar for a double Scotch to make sure they were sober.

The “scientific evidence,” according to the journalist, is an event that occurred around 1475 BC and has interested archaeologists, especially since 1967, when S. Marinatos began publishing reports of his excavations on the island that was known as Thera in Classical times and is now called Santorin. (The reports, written in respectable Modern Greek, appeared in an annual publication of which I translate the title as Proceedings of the Athenian Archaeological Society.) Marinatos dug his way through fifty feet of solidified lava and uncovered the remarkable, archaeologically sensational, remains of a once prosperous city, which had elegant private homes of three storeys, their walls adorned with frescoes of considerable artistic merit, and large and well-built public buildings — a city that was overwhelmed by a volcanic eruption c. 1475 BC. I shall not digress to a discussion of that city’s place in the history of the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures, particularly since the last work by Marinatos that I have read is the second edition of his Kreta, Thera und das mykenische Hellas (Munchen, Hirmer, 1973) and I have not found time to read the numerous later studies.

The buildings of the city were largely preserved by the volcanic ash and lava that covered and protected them before the island was blown apart by one of the most violent seismic explosions in historical times. More than half of the island was pulverized by the final, explosive eruption, which Rhys Carpenter, in his Discontinuity in Greek Civilisation (Cambridge Press, 1966) estimates as at least twice as great as the famous explosion of Krakatoa in 1883. The explosion undoubtedly shook the island of Crete, some seventy miles away, ruining at least some buildings, and darkening the skies with volcanic dust, which, if the wind was northerly, may have fallen so thickly as to destroy harvests and produce a general dislocation of society. So violent an explosion was probably felt in Egypt, and, if the prevailing winds were right, may have obscured the sun and the heavens for days. And, as Carpenter proved, the great eruption and the destruction of the city on Thera was the primary source of the legend of Atlantis.

All this is a matter of common knowledge. What Retirement Life imputes to Dr. Stanley and his colleague — I hope libellously — is a claim that “the volcanic eruption… on Santorin… set a tidal wave in motion that could have caused a parting of the waters so that the Hebrew people could continue unharmed… toward the Promised Land”! Now anyone who has ever seen a map of the world knows that no tidal wave in the Mediterranean could have reached the gulf between Egypt and Arabia without rolling right over Egypt and totally obliterating its inhabitants. And no volcanic shock at Thera could have so greatly disturbed the waters of the Sinus Arabicus as to produce tidal waves of the size supposed in the nonsense I have just quoted. Let us be charitable and assume that what Dr. Stanley told the journalist was that the shock of the volcanic explosion on Thera could have set off in or near the Arabian Gulf a sub-pelagian earthquake or other seismic movement sufficient to produce tidal waves of the kind now called a tsunami. That is a bare possibility and would save Dr. Stanley from being thought to have spouted incoherent drivel. But even that concession will not save the proposition from absurdity.

As everyone knows, the tale in the part of the Jew Book called Exodus (which, in all probability, was composed in its present form around 440 BC or later) says that when a horde of Kikes fled from Egypt with their load of stolen goods, their accomplice up in the clouds facilitated their escape from the Egyptian owners of the property by parting the waters between Egypt and Arabia to permit his bandits to walk over the bottom of the sea, and then released the waters from his magic spell to drown the pursuing Egyptians and teach the world what happens to people who don’t like to be plundered by the parasites with which it pleased old Yahweh to afflict civilized mankind. (The body of water in question must, of course, be what was known in Antiquity as the Sinus Arabicus, now the Arabian Gulf, but the Christians who concocted the tall tales in the “New Testament” were so ignorant that they called it (in Greek) “The Red Sea,” and in Mediaeval times and later, when Europeans still imagined that the story-book was historical, that term was used in geography with the meaning the Christian scribblers had given it. In Antiquity, Mare Erythraeum (“Red Sea”) was the designation of the upper part of what is now the Indian Ocean, and while it is true that the Arabian Gulf is an arm of that ocean, just as the Gulf of California is an arm of the Pacific Ocean, no one would say, except as a joke, that by going from Sonora to Baja California he had crossed the Pacific.)

A tsunami in the comparatively shallow waters of a narrow gulf is extremely unlikely and I cannot recall having ever heard of one, but assuming that one did occur and that it exposed the floor of the sea, that would not have helped the Sheenies in the story, who were trying to escape from Egypt with their loot. In the first place, their feet and the feet of their pack animals would have been bogged down in the mire of the freshly exposed sea bottom. And in the second place, if the waters did recede and expose the bottom, a tidal wave of equal force would have returned long before the marauders could have traveled the distance from one side of the gulf to the other, even on dry land. The returning wave would have overwhelmed the fleeing Yids and would have delivered the world from a terrible affliction.

In short, the phenomenon postulated by the attempt to make the foolish tale in Exodus seem plausible is a geological impossibility, as everyone who has even a smattering of geology well knows. The “scientific evidence” mentioned by the journalist is just a crude hoax. Its purpose is obvious: to help the holy men in their confidence game by pretending that “the scientific world is divided” over something about which there can be no rational doubt.

We are told, furthermore, that some dervishes reject the so-called “scientists'” explanation of the “miracle” and insist old Yahweh did it all by himself, just as he gave his pet bandits time to kill more Semites by ordering the sun to stop his chariot over a town in Palestine. Other shamans favor a compromise between their religion and “science”: They say that the vicious old Jew up in the clouds made the volcano on Thera erupt and destroy thousands of civilized men just to help his pack of thieves escape from Egypt. What has happened is that archaeological evidence has been unscrupulously used to concoct a hoax that will help the salvation-peddlers by distracting their victims’ attention from the one obvious and indubitable fact: The tale in the Jew Book is sheer poppycock and nothing of that sort ever happened or could have happened. Jews may find in the tale some symbolical value that pleases their racial psyche, but to a rational Aryan it is just a repellently immoral and ugly myth.

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Source: Liberty Bell magazine, August 1986