Ragnarok : the Age of Fire and GravelDonnelly, Ignatius
Science
Ragnarok : the Age of Fire and Gravel
Donnelly, Ignatius
Atlantis (Legendary place); Comets; Drift
Has the book of Job anything to do with that great event which we
have been discussing? Did it originate out of it? Let us see.
In the first place it is, I believe, conceded by the foremost
{p. 277}
scholars that the book of Job is not a Hebrew work; it was not
written by Moses; it far antedates even the time of Abraham.
That very high orthodox authority, George Smith, F. S. A., in his
work shows that--
"Everything relating to this patriarch has been violently
controverted. His country; the age in which he lived; the author of
the book that bears his name; have all been fruitful themes of
discord, and, as if to confound confusion, these disputants are
interrupted by others, who would maintain that no such person ever
existed; that the whole tale is a poetic fiction, an allegory!"[1]
Job lived to be two hundred years old, or, according to the
Septuagint, four hundred. This great age relegates him to the era of
the antediluvians, or their immediate descendants, among whom such
extreme ages were said to have been common.
C. S. Bryant says:
"Job is in the purest Hebrew. The author uses only the word _Elohim_
for the name of God. The compiler or reviser of the work, Moses, or
whoever he was, employed at the heads of chapters and in the
introductory and concluding portions the name of _Jehovah_; but all
the verses where _Jehovah_ occurs, in Job, are later interpolations
in a very old poem, written at a time when the Semitic race had no
other name for God but _Elohim_; before Moses obtained the elements
of the new name from Egypt."[2]
Hale says:
"The cardinal constellations of spring and autumn, in Job's time,
were _Chima_ and _Chesil_, or Taurus and Scorpio, of which the
principal stars are Aldebaran, the Bull's Eye, and Antare, the
Scorpion's Heart. Knowing, therefore, the longitudes of these stars
at present, the interval
[1. "The Patriarchal Age," vol. i, p. 351.
2. MS. letter to the author, from C. S. Bryant, St. Paul, Minnesota.]
{p. 278}
of time from thence to the assumed date of Job's trial will give the
difference of these longitudes, and ascertain their positions then
with respect to the vernal and equinoctial points of intersection of
the equinoctial and ecliptic; according to the usual rate of the
precession of the equinoxes, one degree in seventy-one years and a
half."[1]
A careful calculation, based on these principles, has proved that
this period was 2338 B. C. According to the Septuagint, in the
opinion of George Smith, Job lived, or the book of Job was written,
from 2650 B. C. to 2250 B. C. Or the events described may have
occurred 25,740 years before that date.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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