Immanuel Velikovsky

While attending Wycliffe Theological College in Toronto, Ontario my pastor mentioned the name Velikovsky in passing. I hadn’t heard of him before so began a bit of an investigation into what he’s about. In the end I purchased a number of his works (Ages in Chaos, Worlds in Collision, Earth in Upheaval) and read them front to back. If the work had not been of interest I wouldn’t have got past the first few pages. I won’t usually read anything that is clearly flawed unless it was necessary to a part of my formal education.

What Velikovsky proposed didn’t seem to be that big of a deal to me. Of course I had grown up with little vested interest in history per se or much concern for the movement of the planets (outside their normal orbits) as I held most of this to be speculation. The work of Clark Pinnock in Set Forth Your Case gave me a swift kick to the side of the head as well as the heart which caused history to begin to matter. I was still in the early stages of integrating this reality (although I’m pretty quick about these things) when Velikovsky’s reordered chronologies entered my thinking.

Basically Velikovsky believed that there were catastrophic events on earth from near misses by Venus and Mars which would not have the orbits they currently enjoy. Venus was a recent planet that was an offshoot from Jupiter. It’s near passing of earth was related to the events accounted for in the plagues prior to the exodus. He had gathered a number of records from ancient cultures around the globe that describe in a somewhat similar fashion what they saw and experience from the heavens. Based on this he realigned history to have this major catastrophic event be the lynch pin linking the historic timeline together.

In most cases does this really matter or better put, who cares? Well one of the key realignments was between Israel and Egypt. There were stories in Egyptian history that referenced similar events as described by the Old Testament during the plagues. When these are aligned the matching time period in Egyptian history is not the universally accepted 1250 BC but rather 1650 BC. On a bit of a lark I pulled out my course text book on Egypt called The Culture of Ancient Egypt by John A. Wilson. I flipped though until I found the time period under discussion. In the opening paragraph it was discussing the fall of the middle kingdom and the fact that it was virtually unknown how this occurred. Now this was the greatest era in one of the greatest civilizations in the history of man (gave us the pyramids), yet there was no evidence to determine how it came to an abrupt end????

Perhaps I read more into this than I should but I was blown away. This made way more sense than trying to jam it into 1250 BC where the Pharaohs don’t really line up or fit Israel’s timeline. Also, I had read this before while I was taking the class and this never stood out. Now it looked like the proverbial sore thumb. For the first time I was actually interested in history. I mean if these chronologies were lined up properly then there should be a serious windfall of matching corroborative evidence for both cultures including the Old Testament. Well that’s what Velikovsky did. He basically took some of the key events in the Old Testament and matched them to the same occurrences in Ancient Egypt. This read like a real history book. Not what I was used to which was basically a story with no evidence to support it. There were constant references back to this or that document. I especially remember the information on who was the Queen of Sheba. A comparison followed between the offering she brought to Solomon and a very similar listing from Egyptian documents of what was loaded onto a barge for the same purposes.

I also had to do a paper called “Who destroyed Shilo?” This was for a different course in a different college. Well I just added the 400 years and went back to Wilson’s Culture and low and behold found there were campaigns of plundering by the Egyptians into Mesopotamia at the time and Shilo was one of the cities that were listed by name. This was a bit freaky since these books had nothing to do with one another.

So I was pretty excited thinking this would open the door to endless corroboration of the Old Testament. It seemed to me there were relatively scant evidence and a whole lot of criticism. In my zeal I went to my Old Testament Professor to see if he’d heard of Velikovsky and the potential goldmine he’d unearthed. My meeting with R.K. Harrison was brief. He had taught at Richmond College when I was there and I had him again at Wycliffe. He was renowned for his tomb Introduction to the Old Testament which was a standard for anyone going through these doors. Sure enough Mr. Harrison had heard of Immanuel Velikovsky but gave zero credence to his postulations. The conversation did not last long and I left a little disheartened. I didn’t know why he was so convinced that Velikovsky was wrong but I sure knew that’s what he thought.

Only later did I discover that this was merely the tip of the tip of the iceberg. The entire scientific community was up in arms at Velikovsky’s suggested theories, to the point of extreme absurdity. Of course the bulk of Mr. Harrison’s work would require complete revision if he were to be correct.

I continue to ponder the Exodus. It made so much sense, if the Old Testament were accurate. At one point Pharaoh was concerned with how many Jews there were because they outnumbered their own people. They were slaves so clearly an enormous workforce. And you’d need a very large army to keep them in check. Also, they’d been at it for 400 years. It makes sense why Pharaoh would not want to let them go because the entire infrastructure of Egypt lay in the balance. Even after he agrees to release them he comes to his senses and goes after them. In the end Pharaoh and all his army are destroyed in the collapse of the Red Sea (Harrison called this the “Reed” sea) and over half the population of Egypt (the work force) is gone. This makes perfect sense as to why Middle Kingdom fell. Also, it is logical to assume the Jews actually built the pyramids which remain a wonder of the world.

Velikovsky’s work created an enormous divide in the scientific community. The majority opposed but some were open to new ideas and scientific query into the truth of the matter. I noted the unbridled vitriolic displayed by many (Shapely, Sagan) which are the sure signs of children with their toys removed from their possession. These men were supposed to be scientists not Hollywood rags working by slander and innuendo. The fact that such a nerve was touch pointed more to the potential validity of the theory rather than against it.

As one pro-Velikovskian person put it so many years later:

I mean that should one reasonably and incredulously ask: ‘Is there nowhere an anti-Velikovsky treatise of serious consequence?’ the answer, regrettably, is still ‘no.’ Not in general nor even in a special discipline such as astrophysics or archaeology. Thousands of scientists and scholars have impugned his work. A few have stepped up to bat against him or one of his team: they put on airs; they dance about; they come up unprepared; they take blundering swipes at the ball; they strike out. When all is done, they say that it was not a real professional ballgame.- Alfred de Grazia The Velikovsky Affair