“Dr. Velikovsky”
The same Russian psychiatrist who asserted (in his “Worlds in Collision”) that around 3,500 years ago the planet Venus was somehow ejected from the planet Jupiter as a comet. That Comet Venus then started wandering through the solar system, its gravitational field pushing other planets out of their orbits, changing their rotation, causing the Earth to rock on its axis, stopping and starting its rotation. Then in the eighth century B.C., the Venus comet pushed Mars out of its proper orbit and into a close encounter with Earth, which caused earthquakes to shake the world, and shortened the year so that ancient astrologers were forced to develop a new calendar.
That Velikovsky?
Obviously. He got interested in that due to running into catastrophes as he researched the ancient chronologies. While there is evidence for catastrophes, lots of things can cause them, including impacts from space (which are observed, observable, and well documented ) and I'm much more interested in his reconstruction of ancient chronology, which is also directly based on ancient sources and archaeology. The Old Testament is a major chronological document bridging Egypt and the Middle East events; the need to undermine the Divine Right of Kings led to a bunch of lawyers founding a society of geology, part of a long and still ongoing campaign to debunk everything in the Bible.
Ages in ChaosAddudani (also spelled Addadani) of the el-Amarna letters is called in the Scriptures Adna. But the inscriptions of Shamshi-Ramman, who became the Assyrian king after Shalmaneser in -825, contains a reference to a gift he received from Ada-danu, prince of Gaza (Azati). The 'son of Zuchru' of the el-Amarna letters is called the 'son of Zichri' in the Bible. Iahazibada of the el-Amarna letters is Iehozabad (Jehozabad) in the Scriptures... In the scriptural list of the five chiefs of Jehoshaphat, only one is called by the name of his father: Amaziah, son of Zichri... Zichri of the (Massorete) Bible is Zuchru of the el-Amarna letters, Amaziah, the son of Zichri, is the 'son of Zuchru,' the captain who wrote to the pharaoh on matters relating to the security of his district.
by Immanuel Velikovsky
1952