Table of Contents
Clouds and fire keep coming back in the texts I study. A god leads a people in a cloud by day and in fire by night. A mountain smokes like a furnace. A prophet is taken up in a chariot of fire. These are my pages on that theme.
Cloud by day, fire by night
The best-known form of the image is in Exodus:
And the LORD went before them by day in a pillar of a cloud, to lead them the way; and by night in a pillar of fire, to give them light; to go by day and night:
Exodus 13:21 (KJV)
- Cloud by day, luminous sign by night: The motif in Sumerian, Akkadian and Ugaritic texts long before Israel, in Numbers 14:14 and Psalm 105:39, and a Hopi parallel of a cloud by day and a star by night.
- Isra’el, the powerful Yisra: YHWH leads the Israelites through the wilderness with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, Exodus 13:21-22.
- The Book of the Wars of the Lord: At the Red Sea the LORD looks at the Egyptian army “through the pillar of fire and of the cloud” (Exodus 14:24).
- The Israelites: The people who followed the cloud through the wilderness, carried the Ark and kept turning to other gods.
- Tabernacle: The tent of the Ark, and the Oahspe line that the light reached Moses and his people in a pillar of cloud by day and of light by night.
Older than Israel
The cloud and the fire did not start with the Exodus. They are in the royal texts of Mesopotamia and in the tablets of Ugarit.
- Sargon of Akkad: Akkadian royal inscriptions of Sargon of Agade, around 2300 BCE, say the gods led his army with a radiant cloud by day and a star-like fire by night.
- Baal: The Canaanite storm god. In the Ugaritic tablets, as I note on Cloud by day, luminous sign by night, he marches to battle guided by a day-cloud and a night-fire.
- Canaanites: In Numbers 14:14 the people of Canaan already know of the pillar of cloud.
- The Hopi: Four worlds destroyed by fire, ice and flood. The Hopi parallel of a cloud by day and a star by night, before the destruction by fire, is on the cloud-by-day page.
Fire from the sky
- Gods Who Travel in Fire: Mari’s storm of fire in the Basque sky next to Ezekiel’s whirlwind, the burning mountain of Sinai and Elijah’s chariot.
- Mount Sinai: The mountain where the LORD came down in fire and the smoke went up as the smoke of a furnace.
- Kavod, Ruach and Merkaba: The three Hebrew words behind most of the flying scenes in the Bible, and how Mauro Biglino and Paul Wallis read them.
- Ezekiel the Prophet: The priest by the river Chebar who saw a whirlwind, a great cloud and a fire infolding itself.
- Elijah: The prophet parted from Elisha by a chariot of fire and horses of fire, and taken up by a whirlwind.
- Miracles of Elijah, Moses and Jesus: Fire called down from heaven, the pillar of fire and other signs set side by side.
The pillar in the Oahspe
The Oahspe tells the exodus in its own way, and the pillar is there too.
From Sukkoth to Shakelmarath
The pillar leads the Israelites from Sukkoth across the sea, and everyone sees the cloud and the light.
- Now from the place Sukkoth unto the other side of the sea, a pillar of cloud preceded the Israelites by day, and a pillar of fire stood over them by night, and the people looked thereon and saw, every one, the cloud and the light. And the name of the place they reached when they crossed over was Shakelmarath; and they camped there many days.
Oahspe, Book of the Arc of Bon, chapter XVIII
- Book of the Arc of Bon: The Oahspe’s account of Moses and the flight out of Egupt.
- The Book of Judgment: Pillars of fire by night and of cloud by day, listed among the wonders made by miracle-workers and their angels.
- Moses: Moses in the Bible and in the Oahspe, with the ark of Bon and the pillar of cloud.
What I take from it
The same picture turns up in Akkad, in Ugarit, in the Exodus and with the Hopi: a guide in the sky that looks like a cloud in daylight and burns at night. I read it as one of the oldest descriptions of something people saw above them and followed.
