Volcano and Mt. Sinai

Volcanoes are well-liked in my family. My mother has ascended on a bunch of volcanoes of Kuril islands (Iturup, Kunashir, etc.). And a book about volcanoes was actually the first book I have ever read on my own.

Anyway, many people arguing against revelation at Sinai say that perhaps it was a volcano. Seeing the footage above, it is easy to see why these people are confused, mistakenly thinking that the ancient Jews could be confused. In other words (source):

Here is the proposed "explanation" of the belief in revelation at Sinai in terms of myth formation. Maybe the Jewish people were in the desert and there was a volcanic eruption or an earthquake. These are very startling events. These are very shocking events. They might even have been regarded as supernatural. Then maybe later people told them that they heard voices, saw visions and so on, and all of that elevated into the story of Revelation. This is the sort of "explanation" which myth formation offers. Here too the "explanation" suffers from both implausibility and lack of parallels.

1. In order to see how implausible the "explanation" is, let's take it in two stages. For the first stage, imagine that the story says of itself that it has been passed down continuously from the time of the event. In other words, the story says: "So-and-so many years ago the entire ancestry of your nation stood at a mountain and heard G-d speaking to them. They were commanded to tell the story of this event to their children, and they to their children, and the nation in fact did this." (There actually is something like this in the Torah itself - cf. Deut. 4:9-10, 31: 9-13, 19-21. But I will not use this below because it is not clear and prominent enough.)

Now we have to imagine a gradual process of taking a natural event and promoting it into a national revelation, ending with the story that this national revelation was always known by the nation. But before you arrive at the story of a national revelation no one knows about it! How are we supposed to imagine that the universal knowledge of the story is promoted gradually?

Now for the second stage, suppose that the story does not say that is was passed down continuously, but that the reader or listener will automatically assume that it will be passed down continuously. Then we have precisely the same problem as the last paragraph: how can a story which the listener assumes must have been continuously known be promoted gradually? This is the Kuzari's point: a story of a national revelation will not be forgotten, and the listener to whom the story is being sold knows this and will use it in evaluating the story and deciding whether to believe it. The problem of filling in the details of the gradual promotion of such a story is a great obstacle to the hypothesis of myth formation.

2. Now for the second problem, the lack of historical parallels. If the belief in the revelation at Sinai is the result of myth formation applied to a natural event, and if that is a normal sort of thing to happen, then it ought to happen more than once. We are not the only people in history that have witnessed earthquakes or who saw volcanic eruptions, or to whom typhoons took place, or tidal waves or other events that could be regarded as supernatural. If a belief in a public revelation could be produced by a natural event, it should have been produced more than once. It is very suspicious to say that here is a effect of a natural cause, a normal cause, fitting in well with human psychology and the normal human environment, but it only happened once in the history of the world!

This is especially true with respect to a belief like this, because a belief in a public revelation is the strongest possible foundation for a religion. If somebody goes up on a mountain and says that he heard G-d speak, either you believe him or you don’t believe him. It is then open for everyone else to doubt it and to say that he either made it up or had delusions. It is much more powerful logically to start out with a belief that an entire nation heard G-d speak.

Now if that kind of belief could have been made up then it should have been made up more than once. After all, it is logically the most sound foundation for a religion. In addition, ancient religions borrowed from one another, they were in contact with one another, they had a similar structure; they have the same sort of Pantheon, the same sorts of beliefs. Why wasn’t this element ever borrowed? Our belief goes back at least three thousand years. There was a lot of travel through our area of the world. How is it that no one picked it up?

Thirdly, Christianity and Islam desperately need this belief. Christianity and Islam in their early stages made strenuous efforts to convert Jews. Now, if you are a Christian or a Moslem missionary and you come to a Jew and you tell him that your leader is G-d, or that your leader is a Prophet and so forth, the Jew responds: “I don’t know about your leader, all I know is that my ancestors stood at Sinai, and you agree. You Christian, you Moslem agree that my ancestors stood at Sinai. How can I now abandon that? How can I contradict that?” What shall the Christian or Moslem answer? That is one of the reasons that they did so poorly in converting Jews. Because the Revelation at Sinai is a foundation that is very difficult to contradict.

Now, according to myth formation there would have been a perfect answer that the Christian or Moslem could have given. He could have said: “You are right, your ancestors stood at Sinai, but it happened again. Another public revelation. All of your ancestors, five hundred years ago, stood again at another mountain and heard the second edition, and we have the second edition.” Why did they not make up that kind of belief? If this is the kind of belief that you can make up, why didn’t they make it up?

So, if you are working on a scenario about how the original belief of the Revelation took place, you have an enormous obstacle to overcome. The more plausible your scenario is, the more difficult it is to explain why it didn’t happen to anybody else. You are sort of caught between two improbable alternatives. Either you create a very implausible scenario so as to protect yourself from the fact that no one else did it, but then it is implausible as an explanation as to how it happened to us. Or you create a very plausible scenario, in which case the question why no one else ever did it is simply impossible to answer.