Yahweh: The Volcano God?

by cameo-d 20 Replies latest watchtower bible

  • cameo-d
    cameo-d

    There are various suggestions as to were Mt. Sinai is. De Vaux believes that the theophany of Sinai was a description of a volcanic eruption in northern Arabia (1978, 432-8).

    Exodus 19:18 describes the mountain like a furnace of smoke. From a distance it would look like a pillar of cloud in the day, and a pillar of fire at night. Following this cloud of smoke would lead them right to the volcano.

    There are no volcanoes in Sinai, but there are several in northern Arabia (Lee 1996, 20).

    The only known large eruption around this time is Santorini on the Greek island of Thera (Simkin et al. 1981, 111).

    Professor Goedicke thinks a giant tidal-like wave called a tsunami caused by the eruption of Santorini, destroyed the Egyptian army, and the eruption formed the pillar of cloud and fire in Exodus (Shanks 1981, 42-50; Oren 1981, 46-53).

    Note that at the time of Ogyges there occurred the first great deluge in Greece. Ogyges "lived at the same time of the Exodus from Egypt" (Eusebius 1981, 524).

    Maybe a tsunami caused this deluge in Greece?

    http://www.bibleandscience.com/archaeology/mtsinai.htm

  • ziddina
    ziddina

    "There are no volcanoes in Sinai..."

    But there is the entire area of the Golan Heights in Israel and Jordan, which is comprised of multiple volcanic flows, many of them UNDER 10,000 years old... Here's a brief description from Google Earth: "The basaltic Golan Heights volcanic field in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains of SW Syria near the borders with Lebanon and Israel contains numerous cinder cones of Pliocene-to-Holocene age. The Golan Heights volcanic field covers a broad area NE of the Lake Tiberius (the Sea of Galilee) and SW of the city of Damascus (Dimashq) and includes the prehistoric cone of Majdel Shams in the Golan Heights. The volcanic field lies on a basaltic plateau that dips to the west and SW, with steep slopes facing the Dead Sea rift valley. It lies within the northern part of the massive alkaline Harrat Ash Shaam volcanic field that extends from southern Syria through NW Jordan to Saudi Arabia."

    The geologic periods mentioned - Pliocene [>5 million years] to Holocene [>10,000 years] indicates how active this volcanic field is... Of course, it's located above the northern end of the African Rift zone...

    There's also the Al Harrah volcanic field, which is in Saudi Arabia near Jordan: "Al Harrah, a large basaltic volcanic field in northwestern Saudi Arabia near the Jordanian border, covers an area of 15,200 sq km. The volcanic field forms the southern third of the massive Harrat Ash Shamah volcanic field, which extends from Syria through Jordan into northern Saudi Arabia. The Saudi Arabian portion of the Harrat Ash Shamah volcanic field extends across a 210-km-long, roughly 75-km-wide NW-SE-trending area on the NE flanks of the Wadi Sirhan and reaches its 1100 m high point at Jabal al Amud. Activity began during the Miocene; a younger eruptive stage, at the SE end of the volcanic field, occurred during the late-Pleistocene and Holocene (Brown et al., 1984)."

    Mt. Ararat, to direct one's attention in a slightly different direction, is also a volcano - a stratovolcano which has probably erupted within the last 5,000 years...

    Which would put these volcanoes' eruptions WELL WITHIN the time period to have influenced a primitive, superstitious tribal group of sheepherders...

    Zid

  • ziddina
    ziddina

    Also, I don't think they've found the real "Sodom and Gomorrah" yet - that account is a dead-on description of a Vesuvian-style eruption... The most recent candidates for the notorious twin cities of sin, Tall el-Hammam, doesn't have deposits of volcanic ash, as far as I can tell by the archaeological descriptions that I've skimmed; neither do the other candidates: Bab Edh-Dhra (first discovered in 1924), Numeira (found by Rast and Schaub in 1973), Safi, Feifa and Khanazir...

    Another interesting coincidence is the similarity between the 'sign of god' that led the Isra-EL-ites out of Egypt, in Exodus 13: 21-22 and Exodus 14: 19-20: "The Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to lead them on their way during the day and in a pillar of fire to give them light at night, so that they could travel day or night. The pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night never left its place in front of the people..." "The pillar of cloud moved from in front of them and stood behind them. It came between the Egyptian and Isra-EL-ite forces. The cloud was there [in] the darkness, yet it lit up the night..."

    (Which indicates that, as they traveled, the geographical landmark - probably an erupting volcano, as I will show in a moment - came to be situated behind them as they progressed northward...)

    Here's a description [from the Time/Life book "Volcano", part of their "Planet Earth" series printed in 1982, pages 33 - 37...], the aftermath of the eruptions of Mount Pelee' on the island of Martinique, beginning with the eruption on May 8th, 1902 that produced a pyroclastic flow that killed 30,000+ people in the capital city of St. Pierre: [the team of volcanologists present after the first eruption were fortunate to observe another one on July 9th, 1902...] "Anderson and Flett were offshore, cruising past St. Pierre in a sailboat (geologist Jaggar was...in Fort-de-france, 12 miles away) when in the gathering darkness they saw a dull red glow suffuse the summit of Pelee. The glow became brighter and brighter until the whole scene was brightly illuminated, and the sailors cried in terror: "The mountain bursts!" The men watched in awe as an immense red-hot 'avalanche', as they termed it, swept down the flanks of Pelee and across the ruins of St. Pierre to the sea...Hardly had the crimson glow of the 'avalanche' faded than a cloud shaped itself against the starlit sky...It rushed foward over the water...boiling and changing its form every instant...When the cloud was about a mile from the scientists, they could see...the cloud rose from the sea and passed directly over the heads of the men. Stones, some as large as chestnuts, rained down on the boat, then came a shower of smaller, pea-shaped pellets, and finally a downpour of dry, gray ashes. The air smelled faintly of sulphuric acid..." (Which is also strongly reminiscent of the "Sodom and Gomorrah" story, again...)

    But back to the description of the "pillar of cloud by day, pillar of fire by night"... "Hovey and several others had observed...what they believed to be a growing cone of volcanic debris inside the crater...by May 31...[estimated height of] 1,440 feet..."

    "By June 27, the cone had risen above the rim of the crater. On July 6, Jaggar reported seeing the cone, whose summit sported a large monolith shaped like a shark's dorsal fin...The dome's famous dorsal fin...was destroyed in the July 9 blast observed by Anderson and Flett. But in mid-October...another gigantic shaft of solidified lava rising from the dome in the crater of L'Etang Sec...The spine...was 350 to 500 feet thick at its base...At night, the spine glowed with a tracery of red incandescent lines, and frequently a luminous spot could be seen at its tip...it rose at such an astonishing rate, often as much as 50 feet a day, that it continued to grow taller. By the end of November, the "Tower of Pelee" had reached a height of 800 feet, and after seven months it soared 1,090 feet above the crater's mouth. At its maximum height it was twice as tall as the Washington Monument and of an immensity equal in volume to the Great Pyramid of Egypt....

    ...by September 1903 it had collapsed into a mass of rubble..."

    Can you see what this must have looked like from a distance of 10 - 20 miles? A "pillar" of smoke - "cloud" by day, and by night??? The glowing, 1,000-foot-tall "spine"... "Pillar of fire by night"... DEFINITELY a volcano!! If you paid any attention to the eruption of Mt. Saint Helens, you will recall that its appearance BY DAY was that of a "pillar of smoke/cloud"...

    So much for the 'scientific' understanding of the 'god' of the bible - that's THREE scriptures that strongly indicate, if not CLEARLY describe - in primitive, ignorant tribesmens' terms - volcanic eruptions!

    Zid

  • journey-on
    journey-on

    Doesn't part of Scientology's doctrines involve volcanoes?

  • nancy drew
    nancy drew

    yes because you must sacrifice by tossing virgins into the crater to please him.

  • ziddina
    ziddina

    "yes because you must sacrifice by tossing virgins into the crater to please him..."

    No, no, Nancy Drew, that's the Polynesian worship of Pele' - much, much older than Scientology... Scientology believes that "Zonan" [or whatever his name was...] the alien from - uh, I forget which star/galaxy - maybe Alcyone?? - brought a bunch of his alien society's dissidents to Earth - 12 Trillion years ago [longer than the age of the known universe, I believe...] and buried them - alive - under the volcanoes on Earth, then planted atomic bombs in the volcanoes and blew all the dissidents up...

    Unnecessary to point out all the fallacies here - but I am amused that Scieontology states that Earth had volcanoes about 11.96 Trillion years before Earth actually existed...

    Hope that sets the record straight... Zid

  • nancy drew
    nancy drew

    75 million years ago xenu had an overpopulation problem so he incapacitated his citizens stacked them around a volcano set off some bombs so now the spirits of space alien thetans are clinging to human bodies and sucking the life out I guess but you can pay the scientologists to get them off you. this is just something else to add to the crazy list.

  • journey-on
    journey-on

    And they get tax exemptions for being a religion!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  • ziddina
    ziddina

    "75 million years ago xenu had an overpopulation problem ..."

    Whoops! I quoted Bill Maher's explanation, not that of an actual Scientologist... Do they really believe it was only 75 million years ago?? Or is that Scientology "New Light"??? Zid

  • maninthemiddle
    maninthemiddle

    I wanted to add to this a video I found talking about volcanos in Egypt.

    http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/player/news/culture-places-news/atlantis-volcano-vin.html

    This is more about the santorni volcano Cameo-d referenced.

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