Velikovsky now brought the ancient past up to scrutiny. The cataclysmic break between the Middle and New Kingdoms of Egypt, so well described by Ipuwer, perfectly matches the Exodus story recorded by Moses, and so he began his reconstruction there:

        Shifting Dynasties

        Velikovsky’s solution to the chaos was to shift Egyptian dynasties forward about five to six centuries, beginning with the Exodus of the Israelites from Egypt in the mid-fifteenth century B.C. (Biblical date), and to eliminate later Egyptian dynasties that were duplicates of earlier ones. Pharaohs through the nineteenth Dynasty bear Egyptian names, while those from the twentieth Dynasty on mostly bore Greek names; Velikovsky saw the Greek-named pharaohs as repeats of the earlier Egyptian-named pharaohs, and so eliminated the later dynasties.
        When he was criticized for using literary sources like the Bible and other ancient writings to date ancient events, he correctly pointed out that ancient dates had all been derived from literary sources to begin with (holes in the ground have no calendars). And Velikovsky solved one mystery after another.
        "The problem of the time of the Exodus in Egyptian history had never been solved," he wrote. "In the Papyrus Ipuwer and the Naos of El Arish I found descriptions of a natural upheaval very similar, sometimes identical, with the description in the Book of Exodus... These parallels compelled me to fix an unorthodox date for the Exodus. Collating the historical texts of following generations for twelve hundred years, I could establish numerous correlations between the histories of Egypt and of Israel which could not be accidental; my reconstruction demonstrated that Egyptian history and the histories of the nations which are written in harmony with it are out of line with the historical past by about six to seven hundred years."
        Velikovsky established the mid-fifteenth century ~ circa 1450 B.C., the Biblical date for the Exodus ~ as the proper date of the Exodus. The Hyksos invasion of Egypt ~ conventionally dated to the seventh century B.C. ~ was thus connected to the Exodus, since Ipuwer’s papyrus actually describes the Hyksos invasion but also contains many parallels to the plagues. In this scenerio, the plagues destroyed Egypt, the Israelites left under the leadership of Moses, the entire military might of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom perished in the Red Sea, and the Hyksos invaded and conquered a now defenseless Egypt.
        Velikovsky identified the Hyksos as the Amalekites encountered by the Israelites on their way out of Egypt, an unheard-of but sound identification. There is no mention of Egypt in the Old Testament for half a millennium after the Exodus. The lack of Egyptian interference during the Conquest of Canaan and the era of the Judges can best be ascribed to the Hyksos domination of Egypt which conventional history relegates to less than a century but which ancient historians said lasted 500 years. There was no contact between Israel and Egypt, in fact, until Solomon married the pharaoh's daughter, but greater contact was soon to come.
        Before long Solomon, renown throughout the Middle East for his wisdom, received the most mysterious, the most glamorous, and the most misidentified visitor of them all ~ the Queen of Sheba.
        Velikovsky identified the Queen of Sheba as Hatshepsut, the Eighteenth Dynasty Queen of Egypt whose voyage to the land of Punt ("Punt" was an early Egyptian name for Palestine) exactly matches the Queen's voyage to Jerusalem, including her pursuit of the riches and prosperity of Solomon's kingdom and the gifts she and Solomon exchanged. The temple she built upon her return ~ the Most Splendid of Splendors at Deir el Bahari, which she referred to as "another Punt" ~ was modeled after the Temple in Jerusalem and was totally unlike any other structure ever seen in Egypt.
        When Hatshepsut disappeared, her nephew Thutmose III ascended the throne. The Napoleon of Egypt, Egypt’s greatest pharaoh and greatest conqueror, had no love for either his aunt or her relations. And, with the death of King Solomon and the division of the kingdom of Israel, Israel no longer posed a threat. Thutmose III invaded Palestine, and it is he whom Velikovsky identified as the pharaoh who sacked the Temple in Jerusalem after Solomon's death. Nearly item by item, the Temple treasures described in Kings and Chronicles can be seen pictured on Thutmose III's Karnak temple walls.
        By its importance in the time of the Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty, Velikovsky placed the el-Amarna correspondence in the era of the mid-ninth century and discovered a wealth of correlations to the Old Testament history of the divided kingdom of Israel, including identifying several personages in the text.
        In his most provocative work, Oedipus and Ahknaton, he identified Ahknaton (son of the solar disk, father of Tutankhamen) as the historical original of the mythical King Oedipus, who murdered his father and married his mother. Drawings from the time show Akhnaton and his mother together in scenes hardly typical of mother and son, but vaguely typical of lovers. And the surrounding historical details of the Akhnaton saga match nearly perfectly the mythological details of the Oedipus myth, including the fact (not revealed until 1957) that Tutenkhamen and Smenkhare were brothers.
        Among the mysteries conventional scholars could never solve was the mortuary temple of Ramses III (right) at Tell-el-Yahudieh in the Delta. Ramses III is conventionally assigned to the twelfth century B.C., and his mortuary temple stands today as it was built at the time of his death. Velikovsky identified Ramses III as Nectanabo I of the fourth century B.C. and, in his Thesis on the Reconstruction of Ancient History, published in 1945, he wrote, "The Greek letters of classical form incised on the tiles of Ramses III during the process of manufacture (found at Tell-el-Yahudieh in the Delta) present no problem. They are Greek letters of the fourth century.
        "The inlay work and glazing of the tiles of Ramses III are innovations introduced from Persia. And the hunting motifs in the art of Ramses III were inspired by Assyrian and Persian bas-reliefs; some motifs of the Greek art also made their influence felt in the murals of Ramses III."
        This, in a temple supposedly built 700 years before these art forms and classic era letters even appeared. Velikovsky did not make this up. This information is taken from the archaeological report of the excavation of the mortuary temple, and the confusion has not only perplexed scholars in succeeding decades, it perplexed the two men who excavated the site and could not agree on its proper date. One claimed a fourth century date because of the evidence, and the other claimed a twelfth century date because that was when Ramses III was declared to have lived.
        This led Velikovsky to conclude the obvious: that Ramses III did not live in the twelfth century, but in the fourth century.

        The Battle of Kadesh

        But, far and away, Velikovsky's most provocative discovery concerned the greatest battle of antiquity, the Battle of Kadesh.
        There have been, in world history, certain battles that had a major, even world-wide impact, long felt through the ages.
        The Battle of Hastings in 1066 AD allowed William of Normandy to lay claim to the English throne, launched three centuries of Norman occupation of England, Scotland, Wales, and later Ireland, propelled Great Britain toward her place as a major world power, and marked the last time this nation would be invaded by a foreign foe.
        One of European history’s most decisive and far-reaching conflicts, the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, ended forever the reign of terror imposed on Europe by Napoleon Bonaparte, and marked the eclipse of French power and signaled the ascendancy of the German Empire. Napoleon’s defeat was so complete that the name Waterloo came to be a synonym for crushing defeat.
        The Battle of San Jacinto in 1836 resulted in the defeat of Mexico’s El Presidente, Santa Anna, and paved the way for the fledgling United States to reach to the Rio Grande River in the south and the Pacific Ocean in the west, thus becoming a continental power and eventually the most powerful nation in the world.
        The Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 turned back the last major Confederate invasion of the Union and left Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia too weak to wage another major campaign, thus ensuring the eventual reunification of the northern and southern states into one Union and America’s place on the world stage of the fast-approaching Industrial Age and Twentieth Century.
        And, the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942-43, the bloodiest battle in recorded history, was the major turning point in the war in Europe until D-Day, resulted in the liberation of the Soviet Union from the Nazi invasion, and propelled the Soviets to eventual victory in 1945, which in turn led to the division of Europe by the Iron Curtain for more than 45 years.
        The Battle of Kadesh (right), variously dated about 1275 or 1285 B.C., was fought between the two greatest powers in the world and was called by Rob Wanner "truly the mother of all battles, in every sense. Fought on the banks of the Orontes River in Syria, this is the earliest battle of which true military tactics are known...
        "Few single battles in the history have determined the most powerful empire in the world; the Battle of Kadesh was one. Control over the Mediterranean, trade routes, large stretches of land, and massive populations that could be mobilized for war all hung in the balance. In the period from 2000 B.C. to 1200 B.C., the indisputable most powerful civilizations in the world were the Egyptians, the Hittites, and the Assyrians. Secondary players in the same region were Amurru, a kingdom of united lands in coastal and central Syria; Canaan, the coastal land south of the Orontes River; the Hurrians of Mitanni in the east; and Babylonia. Whoever could maintain favorable relations with them or could directly control them would have a major advantage over the others. As rapid expansion of all three civilizations came to a head, there emerged border disputes. All eyes eventually turned to the narrow strip of land that connected Asia, Europe, and Africa, where civilizations incorporated the rich networks of trade from east and west.
        "With around 5,000 chariots involved, it may have been the largest chariot conflict of all time. However, it also marked the high water mark for both empires. The Hittite empire soon began its decline, and was destroyed; and Egyptian influence in the eastern Mediterranean also declined."
        It was a battle that changed the course of history. Yet, because of the historical chaos, we have been deprived of the true drama of the showdown between two of the very greatest monarchs in all antiquity because, according to conventional history, ancient armies fought the same battle twice.
        Check this out: By Ramses II's own account, he began to build a canal connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. He suddenly halted construction and invaded Palestine. His records tell us that he was forced to fight a Palestinian prince who was mortally wounded by an Egyptian dart-thrower (archer), and whose army was subsequently routed. Ramses carried off the princes of Retenu (a New Kingdom designation for Palestine) as "living prisoners" to Egypt. Ramses then plundered the chiefs of the Asiatics in their own lands, returning every year to his headquarters at Riblah to exact tribute.
        Four years later, Ramses moved on Kadesh, north of Bab, along a river designated variously in hieroglyphics as r-n-t, n-r-t, and p-n-r-t. He set up camp by the fortress at Kadesh, which had a double wall and moats, was surrounded on all four sides by water, and projected into a large stream near a sacred lake. Ramses' army consisted of the divisions of Amon, Ra, Ptah and Seth; Lydian mercenaries (hired men) were employed, and chariotry took part in the battle. As the Egyptian army camped, Hittite King Hattusilis, aided by his Syrian allies, came around from the south and attacked. The Egyptian army panicked and fled to the north ~ away from Egypt. (Ancient armies always retreated in the direction of their homelands, so as not to sever their supply lines.) Ramses rallied his forces and counterattacked, and a cease-fire the following day ended hostilities, whereupon Ramses returned to Egypt with precious few spoils to show for his efforts. He then spent the next few years subduing revolts in neighboring provinces. All of this occurred, we are to believe, in the thirteenth century B.C. (conventional date).
        Six centuries later, in the seventh century B.C., the Greek historian Herodotus tells us that Pharaoh Necho II began to build a canal to connect the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. Convinced he was building it for the heathen, Necho halted construction and invaded Palestine. According to II Kings and II Chronicles, Necho was challenged in the Megiddo Pass by Josiah, King of Jerusalem. Necho requested that Josiah let him pass by, but Josiah refused and in the ensuing battle was mortally wounded by an Egyptian archer. His army was subsequently routed. Jehoahaz was made king of Jerusalem, but Necho soon put him in chains, carried him off to Egypt, and replaced him with Jehoiakim, who paid an annual tribute of 100 talents of silver and one talent of gold.
        Four years later, according to the Hebrew prophet Jeremiah, Necho moved on Carchemish, north of Baw, on the Euphrates River. He set up camp by the fortress at Carchemish, which ~ according to excavation reports ~ had a double wall and moats, was surrounded on all four sides by water, and projected into a large stream near a sacred lake. Necho's army consisted of the divisions of Amon, Ra, Ptah and Sutekh; mercenaries from the Sardana, from Sardis in Lydia, were employed, and chariotry took part in the battle. As the Egyptians set up camp, Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar, aided by his Syrian allies, came around from the south and attacked. The Egyptian army panicked and fled to the north ~ away from Egypt. Necho rallied his forces and counterattacked, and a cease-fire the following day ended hostilities, whereupon Necho returned in disgrace to Egypt with Nebuchadnezzar hot on his tail. He then spent the next few years subduing revolts in neighboring provinces.
        Each campaign exactly matches the other, but wait! It gets better!
        Some years later the antagonists signed a treaty ~ the first recorded act of diplomacy in history ~ and they became the best of friends. Both copies of this treaty survive, one in Egyptian hieroglyphics in Ramses’ temple, and the other in Babylonian cuneiform on a tablet from a seventh century layer dig at Boghazkoi. Both versions bear Ramses' name, for which reason the cuneiform copy, and the dig at Boghazkoi, were dated to the thirteenth century in spite of all evidence to the contrary, and the entire scenario was duplicated.
        There is no record anywhere in Egypt of a pharaoh named Necho, even though he was a great monarch who sent a sailing expedition around the African continent and kept the Middle East in a state of turmoil for more than twenty years; and no document outside of Egypt, except for the cuneiform treaty from a late-century dig, mentions Ramses II, the second-greatest pharaoh in the history of Egypt.
        The site of Kadesh has never been found, though Ramses' description of it is identical to the excavated site at Carchemish. The canal both men built is still there, but with Ramses alone identified as its builder. And Hattusilis is a biographical and psychological twin of Nebuchadnezzar.
        Velikovsky's conclusion was that the most famous battle in all antiquity pitted Ramses II, Pharaoh of Egypt, against Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Babylon, and Nebuchadnezzar won.

        * * * * * * * *

        While astronomers foamed at the mouth at the mere mention of Velikovsky’s name, historians were more sympathetic, particularly the leading American historian, Dr. Robert H. Pfeiffer of Harvard University. Upon the publication of Worlds in Collision in 1950, Pfeiffer wrote to Velikovsky, "Allow me first of all to congratulate you, not of course for the fact that your book has become ‘a run-away best seller,’ but for the magnificent qualities of contents and form of your book. I read it with utter fascination and absorption, being carried away by the cosmic drama which you unfolded before me. I was amazed at the depth and vastness of your erudition, which I have not seen equaled except possibly in O. Spengler’s Decline of the West. Aside from expressing my admiration, I am unable to make any valuable comments: my ignorance of astronomy, physics, chemistry, far-eastern, and Aztec literatures, etc. is abysmal, complete. I shall have to sit on the sidelines as you and the scientists discuss your theory about the comet which eventually became the planet Venus."
        Upon publication of Ages in Chaos in 1952, Pfeiffer wrote, "Dr. Velikovsky discloses immense erudition and extraordinary ingenuity. He writes well and documents all his statements with the original ancient sources. His conclusions are amazing, unheard of, revolutionary, sensational. If his findings are accepted by historians, all present histories for the period before Alexander the Great (who died in 323 B.C.) must be discarded, and completely re-written. If Dr. Velikovsky is right, this volume is the greatest contribution to the investigation of ancient times ever written."
        And Professor Etienne Drioton of the Service des Antiquités, and General Director of the Cairo Museum, wrote to Velikovsky, "You certainly overturn ~ and with what zest! ~ many of our historical assumptions, which we have considered established. But you do it with a total absence of prejudice and with impartial and complete documentation, all of which is most gratifying. One might dispute your conclusions point by point: whether one admits them or does not admit them, they will have posed the problems afresh and obliged us to discuss them in depth in the light of your new hypotheses. Your fine book will have been in every way very useful to scholarship."
        When his revised chronology was, on occasion, put to the test, the results were startling. Generally, Carbon-14 test results that did not conform to conventional dating were discarded because, obviously, they had to be wrong; but, on occasion, some were released. Among them, Carbon-14 dating proved that Old and Middle Kingdom artifacts were several hundred years younger than had been believed; and in 1958 National Geographic reported that North and Central American civilizations were thousands of years older than previously thought, both finds vindicating Velikovsky. Wood from the foundation cribbing of a Hittite fortress at Alisar III was carbon-dated with a divergence of 800 years from the conventional chronology.
        Tutankhamen is linked to Mycenae by his grandparents, Amenhotep III and Queen Tiy, whose scarabs were found at Mycenae and who received Mycenaean products in Thebes. All are conventionally dated to the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries, but uncontaminated material from Tutankhamen's tomb was carbon-dated by Willard Libby, who invented the process. The date? The eighth/ninth centuries B.C.
        Velikovsky had long stated that Tutankhamen and Smenkhkare (who had briefly ruled along with him) were brothers, which fit neatly into his Oedipus theory. This was not generally accepted until Cyril Aldred announced in 1957 that blood tests had shown that Tutankhamen and Smenkhkare were, in fact, brothers.
        But, no other single event was as important to Velikovsky’s historical reconstruction, or to classical studies in general, as the deciphering of the Linear B script from Crete.
        When scarabs from the Eighteenth Egyptian Dynasty were discovered at Mycenae, its date was fixed to the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries B.C. [All ancient sites in the Middle East are dated by Egyptian artifacts found there.] Evans' discovery of the Linear B tablets at Knossos and Pylos established a firm connection between Mycenae and Late Minoan Crete: fifteenth and fourteenth century. No Mycenaean script survived past the destruction of Mycenae (conventional date about 1200 B.C.), and the Greek alphabet did not appear until the seventh century.
        Because Mycenae is dated in the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries B.C., and because Greece did not arise until the seventh century, between Mycenae and Greece there is postulated a gap of six centuries, the "Dark Age of Greece," about which virtually nothing is known. According to conventional history, the entire Mycenaean civilization suddenly and completely disappeared, and then ~ 600 years later ~ the Greek civilization just as suddenly appeared, fully formed in all its glory, out of no where. However, Homer, in the early seventh century or later, accurately described Mycenaean practices and artifacts, and facts about the fall of Troy, which he could not have known in such detail if the Dark Age had intervened. Oral tradition could not have preserved them so accurately; and, within the bounds of poetic license, Homer ~ like the Hebrew Scriptures ~ has never been proven by any archaeological discovery to be historically wrong.
        Among the most asinine statements historians made concerned fifteenth-century Mycenaean artifacts found in seventh-century Greek homes. Perhaps, the archaeologists concluded, farmers during the Dark Age had kept the Mycenaean artifacts in their homes for 600 years. Archaeological reports from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are filled with this kind of idiocy, forced upon intelligent and educated scholars by misaligned historical chronologies and the blindness of those scholars in adhering to the accepted paradigm in the face of factual and conflicting evidence.
        Discovered at various sites beginning in 1900, numbering about 3,000 clay tablets consisting mostly of minutely detailed bureaucratic records of petty commercial transactions, and dating (conventionally) from 1400 to 1240 B.C., the Linear B script had confounded scholars for half a century. By 1950, no ground had been gained.
        Because the Dark Age supposedly separated the two cultures, Evans insisted that Linear B could not be Greek, and Homeric Greek authority Helen L. Lorimer wrote in 1950, The result is wholly unfavorable to any hope entertained that the language of the inscriptions might be Greek.
        Velikovsky, however, synchronized Mycenae and Late Minoan Crete with the 8th-9th century divided kingdom of Israel, immediately preceding the appearance of Greece. He thus deduced that Linear B was Greek, and said so before the Princeton University Graduate College Forum on October 14, 1953.
        Just six months later, on April 9, 1954, the New York Times announced that Michael Ventris and John Chadwick had deciphered Linear B. It was Greek. Not only that, it had much in common with Classic Era Greek dialects. Historians were aghast.
        How, they asked, could a highly literate, cultured, and productive society become wholly illiterate, uncultured, and unproductive so quickly and remain so for half a millennium, and then suddenly reappear ~ brilliant, fully literate, and fully productive ~ as exemplified by Homer?
        And How, when civilization was rampant throughout the Mediterranean, could 600 years of history simply disappear so completely that not one shred of evidence confirms its existence?
        Civilizations do not completely lose their literacy and then regain it centuries later, yet no scholar except Velikovsky has ever supplied a satisfactory explanation. Velikovsky's answer was that the 600-year Dark Age never existed, that Mycenae immediately preceded Greece, and that Homer in the seventh century wrote of Mycenean things he saw and knew about first-hand.

        Take Your Pick

        So which is right: the Old Testament or the conventional history of Egypt? They do not agree. The Hebrews were the first people to compose a narrative history of their nation; but it was the fashion in the nineteenth century to discredit ancient writings and deny the authorship of those credited with writing them (i.e., Moses of the Pentateuch, Homer of the Iliad and the Odyssey), so the Israelites have long been denied the credit due them. Instead, nineteenth and early twentieth century historians rejected the Old Testament outright as a collection of myths and legends written down five centuries before Christ. Still, the long list of kings and dynasties had no dates, and historians needed an anchor point in time on which to pin the king-lists in order to rebuild the history of Egypt.
        The Egyptian chronology is the basis for the chronologies of all Middle Eastern nations, so it had to be a mighty trunk to support such a wide-ranging tree. Yet, rather than consider the Old Testament sequences and dating of events, historians looked elsewhere for an anchor; and, in constructing the history of Egypt, here is the mighty piece of documentation they chose over the Bible on which to hang the history of the ancient Middle East:

        Hang on! The plot now sickens!

        On that basis, and on that alone, Ramses II landed in the thirteenth century B.C. This, and this alone, is what historians chose over the "mythological" Old Testament to be the anchor point for the conventional history of ancient Egypt.
        Using records of moon festivals, and relying on controversial readings of ancient papyrus dates relating to 1460-year cycles between first risings of Sirius before the rising sun on the Egyptian New Year (called the Sothic Period), dates were assigned to other dynasties fore and aft.
        If names which Manetho did not have were found on monuments, they were inserted in likely places.
         The edifice of Egyptian history was complete. The histories of other surrounding nations, including Israel, were rewritten to conform to it. Archaeological digs, no matter where, are still dated by Egyptian artifacts found there.
        So, it is entirely correct to say that on that one inscription in the margin of Theon's manuscript rests the entire history of the ancient Middle East.
        But now for the difficulties:

        The conventional history of Egypt remains engraved in stone, a huge monolith of epic size but little substance. Like the theory of evolution of species, it hangs on by the skin of its teeth; but those who are hard at work dismantling it are achieving a wider and more profound respect among conventional archaeologists and historians who have tried to refute them and failed. And they are no longer published in private papers and Velikovskian journals alone; they are now being published in such conventional voices as The Journal of Near Eastern Studies and Biblical Archaeology Review.

        Why is this important?

        Scripture places the Exodus in the fifteenth century B.C., 480 years before Solomon began building the Temple in Jerusalem (I Kings 6:1); but this is the conventional date for the reign of Egypt's greatest pharaoh, Thutmose III. The conventional date for the Exodus is the thirteenth century based solely on the erroneous connection with Ramses II, Egypt's second-greatest pharaoh. Neither of these two great rulers was troubled by such a disaster as the plagues (which totally destroyed Egypt) or the Exodus, and Bible scholars clutch at straws trying to fit the terrible holocaust described by Moses into these two extremely successful reigns. The claim that pharaohs did not record their defeats, so often used as an excuse for lack of documentation during these two pharaohs’ reigns, is wholly erroneous. They recorded their defeats, but extolled their own valor over that of their armies.
        The Exodus was to be God's memorial to us for as long as men inhabit the earth; but, because of the historical confusion generated by misplaced dynasties, many believe that the plagues never happened and the Exodus story is a lie. God's great memorial has become a Sunday School fable, good for moral instruction but of no historical significance, because academics biased against the Lord and against the Scriptures tell us to believe them and not the Word of God, even though it's the history and science books, and not the Bible, that are continually being rewritten!
        Ken Ham, President of Answers in Genesis USA and Joint CEO of Answers in Genesis International, is a well-known Young Earth Creationist who declares that Sunday School teaching has ruined Christians in their attempts to defend Scripture. He declares that Christians are taught neat little Sunday School lessons from Genesis without the scientific and historical evidence to back it up, which has rendered too many Christians impotent in intellectual debate on Creation. Add to that the historicity of the entire Old Testament, and you see Ham’s point: Christians rely on the moral and spiritual lessons from the Old Testament but cannot defend it against secular science and history.
        Velikovsky may have been wrong about the role Venus played in those ancient dramas. We really don't know, and there is strong evidence that Venus, while obviously a former comet and a young planet, was not the culprit Velikovsky thought it was. Many of his readings and interpretations have been legitimately challenged since, as a psychoanalyst, he sometimes wrung more interpretation from a source than it really had to give. He may have missed on some of his cultural connections or even specific historical events. But, then, nobody is always right; and, after all, he didn't write a Bible.
        He also shot himself in the foot by publishing his reconstruction piecemeal rather than all at once, and only three of the five volumes at that. A full 25 years separated Volumes 1 and 2, by which time few people cared.
        But overwhelming space age confirmation of his celestial predictions and subsequent terrestrial discoveries compelled both interest from the open-minded and wrath and condemnation from the bigoted who would rather destroy him than listen to what he had to say, even though what he said in 1950 is standard thinking today. His breadth of view alone was staggering, since in this age of extreme specialization no single expert has the broad interdisciplinary knowledge to dispute him.
        "How could one man be so right about so much?" someone asked. Good question!
        Finally, his historical reconstruction is important because it makes a glaring statement about academic bias and misinterpretation, and about the willingness of Christians and Jews to allow ungodly men to rewrite their Scriptures. His work revealed the earth’s cataclysmic historical past, which the Bible fully describes, and he demonstrated the reality of Biblical events that are also described in the written records of other ancient civilizations. In fact, whenever it has been put to an archaeological test, the Bible ~ both Old and New Testaments ~ has never been proven wrong, and has been consistently upheld against secular history books. All the theories of the composition of the Old Testament were put forth before the rise of archaeology. Unbelievers still spout them, but archaeology is the skeptic’s greatest enemy.
        People turn pale at the thought of cometary impacts 3,000 years ago, or the history of Egypt being wrong. But they aren't scared when they scratch for rare hints of the Exodus in the accepted time slots, and they aren't overly bothered when ungodly scholars tell them not to expect or look for historical confirmation of Biblical events. Christians and Jews have blindly accepted the lie that the Scriptures have to be taken almost totally on faith in the face of overwhelming historical difficulties, if not outright refutation, and that all we can realistically expect from the Bible is sound moral guidance.
        That is the biggest vat of snake oil anybody ever bought. If the Bible is the Word of God, then its history will be accurate and true. And Velikovsky was the first non-Christian scholar to say so. And, even if it isn’t the Word of God, it is still accurate history and describes real historical events.
        As Velikovsky told Carl Sagan, "Whatever happened, happened."
        And he made it clear, even if only by the respect he gave the Scriptures as historical documents, that we who believe the Bible to be the inspired Word of God have no need to bow down to the sacred cows of secular history and science. Considering the perfect archaeological batting record which both the Old and New Testaments have over conventional science and history books, and considering the wholly vacuous base on which the conventional history of ancient Egypt rests, perhaps it's about time we do what Velikovsky did and rewrite the one that needs to be rewritten.

Unpublished work © 2006 Henry Zecher

[Photo of Immanuel Velikovsky courtesy of Ev Cochrane, Editor and Publisher of Aeon, Ames, Iowa]