The Astronomy of the Bible Part 8

The similitude or token of Ashtoreth, the paramount G.o.ddess of the Zidonians, was the _ashera_, the "grove" of the Authorized Version, probably in most cases merely a wooden pillar. This G.o.ddess, "the abomination of the Zidonians," was a moon-G.o.ddess, concerning whom Eusebius preserves a statement by the Phnician historian, Sanchoniathon, that her images had the head of an ox. In the wars in the days of Abraham we find Chedorlaomer, and the kings that were with him, smiting the Rephaim in Ashteroth Karnaim, that is, in the Ashtoreths "of the horns." It is impossible to decide at this date whether the horns which gave the distinctive t.i.tle to this shrine of Ashtoreth owed their origin to the horns of the animal merged in the G.o.ddess, or to the horns of the crescent moon, with which she was to some extent identified. Possibly there was always a confusion between the two in the minds of her wors.h.i.+ppers. The cult of Ashtoreth was spread not only among the Hebrews, but throughout the whole plain of Mesopotamia. In the times of the Judges, and in the days of Samuel, we find continually the statement that the people "served Baalim and Ashtaroth"--the plurals of Baal and Ashtoreth--these representing the sun and moon, and reigning as king and queen in heaven. When the Philistines fought with Saul at Mount Gilboa, and he was slain, they stripped off his armour and put it "in the house of Ashtaroth." Yet later we find that Solomon loved strange women of the Zidonians, who turned his heart after Ashtoreth, the G.o.ddess of the Zidonians, and he built a high place for her on the right hand of the Mount of Olives, which remained for some three and a half centuries, until Josiah, the king, defiled it. Nevertheless, the wors.h.i.+p of Ashtoreth continued, and the prophet Jeremiah describes her cult:--

"The children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead their dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven."

This was done in the cities of Judah and streets of Jerusalem, but the Jews carried the cult with them even when they fled into Egypt, and whilst there they answered Jeremiah--

"We will certainly do whatsoever thing goeth forth out of our own mouth, to burn incense unto the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, as we have done, we, and our fathers, our kings, and our princes, in the cities of Judah, and in the streets of Jerusalem: for then had we plenty of victuals, and were well, and saw no evil. But since we left off to burn incense to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto her, we have wanted all things, and have been consumed by the sword and by the famine."

_Ashtoreth_, according to Pinches[90:1] is evidently a lengthening of the name of the a.s.syrio-Babylonian G.o.ddess Itar, and the Babylonian legend of the Descent of Itar may well have been a myth founded on the varying phases of the moon. But it must be remembered that, though Ashtoreth or Itar might be the queen of heaven, the moon was not necessarily the only aspect in which her wors.h.i.+ppers recognized her. In others, the planet Venus may have been chosen as her representative; in others the constellation Taurus, at one time the leader of the Zodiac; in others, yet again, the actual form of a material bull or cow.

The Hebrews recognized the great superiority in brightness of the sun over the moon, as testified in their names of the "greater" and "lesser"

lights, and in such pa.s.sages as that already quoted from Isaiah (x.x.x.

26). The word here used for moon is the poetic one, _lebanah_. Of course no argument can be founded on the parallelism employed so as to lead to the conclusion that the Hebrews considered that the solar light exceeded the lunar by only seven times, instead of the 600,000 times indicated by modern photometric measurement.

In only one instance in Scripture--that already quoted of the moon withdrawing itself--is there even an allusion to the changing phases of the moon, other than that implied in the frequent references to the new moons. The appointment of certain feasts to be held on the fifteenth day of the month is a confirmation of the supposition that their months were truly lunar, for then the moon is fully lighted, and rides the sky the whole night long from sunset to sunrise. It is clear, therefore, that the Hebrews, not only noticed the phases of the moon, but made regular use of them. Yet, if we adopted the argument from silence, we should suppose that they had never observed its changes of shape, for there is no direct allusion to them in Scripture. We cannot, therefore, argue from silence as to whether or no they had divined the cause of those changes, namely that the moon s.h.i.+nes by reflecting the light of the sun.

Nor are there any references to the markings on the moon. It is quite obvious to the naked eye that there are grey stains upon her silver surface, that these grey stains are always there, most of them forming a chain which curves through the upper hemisphere. Of the bright parts of the moon, some s.h.i.+ne out with greater l.u.s.tre than others, particularly one spot in the lower left-hand quadrant, not far from the edge of the full disc. The edges of the moon gleam more brightly as a rule than the central parts. All this was apparent to the Hebrews of old, as it is to our una.s.sisted sight to-day.

The moon's influence in raising the tides is naturally not mentioned.

The Hebrews were not a seafaring race, nor are the tides on the coast of Palestine p.r.o.nounced enough to draw much attention. One influence is ascribed to the moon; an influence still obscure, or even disputed. For the promise that--

"The sun shall not smite thee by day, Nor the moon by night,"

quite obvious in its application to the sun, with the moon seems to refer to its supposed influence on certain diseases and in causing "moon-blindness."

The chief function of the moon, as indicated in Scripture, is to regulate the calendar, and mark out the times for the days of solemnity.

In the words of the 104th Psalm:--

"He (G.o.d) appointed the moon for seasons: The sun knoweth his going down.

Thou makest darkness, and it is night; Wherein all the beasts of the forest do creep forth.

The young lions roar after their prey, And seek their meat from G.o.d.

The sun ariseth, they get them away, And lay them down in their dens.

Man goeth forth unto his work And to his labour until the evening.

O Lord, how manifold are Thy works!

In wisdom hast Thou made them all: The earth is full of Thy riches."

FOOTNOTES:

[81:1] How the little children must have revelled in that yearly holiday!

[90:1] T. G. Pinches, _The Old Testament in the Light of the Historical Records of a.s.syria and Babylonia_, p. 278.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A CORNER OF THE MILKY WAY.

The "America Nebula": photographed by Dr. Max Wolf, at Heidelberg.]

CHAPTER VIII

THE STARS

The stars and the heaven, whose host they are, were used by the Hebrew writers to express the superlatives of number, of height, and of expanse. To an observer, watching the heavens at any particular time and place, not more than some two thousand stars are separately visible to the una.s.sisted sight. But it was evident to the Hebrew, as it is to any one to-day, that the stars separately visible do not by any means make up their whole number. On clear nights the whole vault of heaven seems covered with a tapestry or curtain the pattern of which is formed of patches of various intensities of light, and sprinkled upon this patterned curtain are the brighter stars that may be separately seen.

The most striking feature in the pattern is the Milky Way, and it may be easily discerned that its texture is made up of innumerable minute points of light, a granulation, of which some of the grains are set more closely together, forming the more brilliant patches, and some more loosely, giving the darker shades. The mind easily conceives that the minute points of light whose aggregations make up the varying pattern of the Milky Way, though too small to be individually seen, are also stars, differing perhaps from the stars of the Pleiades or the Bears only in their greater distance or smaller size. It was of all these that the Lord said to Abram--

"Look now toward heaven, and tell the stars, if thou be able to number them: and He said unto him, So shall thy seed be."

The first catalogue of the stars of which we have record was that of Hipparchus in 129 B.C. It contained 1,025 stars, and Ptolemy brought this catalogue up to date in the Almagest of 137 A.D. Tycho Brahe in 1602 made a catalogue of 777 stars, and Kepler republished this in 1627, and increased the number to 1,005. These were before the invention of the telescope, and consequently contained only naked-eye stars. Since astronomers have been able to sound the heavens more deeply, catalogues have increased in size and number. Flamsteed, the first Astronomer Royal, made one of 3,310 stars; from the observations of Bradley, the third, a yet more famous catalogue has been compiled. In our own day more than three hundred thousand stars have been catalogued in the Bonn Durchmusterung; and the great International Photographic Chart of the Heavens will probably show not less than fifty millions of stars, and in this it has limited itself to stars exceeding the fourteenth magnitude in brightness, thus leaving out of its pages many millions of stars that are visible through our more powerful telescopes.

So when Abraham, Moses, Job or Jeremiah speaks of the host of heaven that cannot be numbered, it does not mean simply that these men had but small powers of numeration. To us,--who can count beyond that which we can conceive,--as to the Psalmist, it is a sign of infinite power, wisdom and knowledge that "He telleth the number of the stars; He calleth them all by their names."

Isaiah describes the Lord as "He that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, . . . that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in." And many others of the prophets use the same simile of a curtain which we have seen to be so appropriate to the appearance of the starry sky. Nowhere, however, have we any indication whether or not they considered the stars were all set _on_ this curtain, that is to say were all at the same distance from us. We now know that they are not equidistant from us, but this we largely base on the fact that the stars are of very different orders of brightness, and we judge that, on an average, the fainter a star appears, the further is it distant from us. To the Hebrews, as to us, it was evident that the stars differ in magnitude, and the writer of the Epistle to the Corinthians expressed this when he wrote--

"There is one glory of the sun, and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars: for one star differeth from another star in glory."

The ancient Greek astronomers divided the stars according to their brightness into six cla.s.ses, or six "magnitudes," to use the modern technical term. The average star of any particular magnitude gives about two and a half times as much light as the average star of the next magnitude. More exactly, the average first magnitude star gives one hundred times the light of the average star of the sixth magnitude.

In a few instances we have been able to measure, in the very roughest degree, the distances of stars; not a hundred stars have their parallaxes known, and these have all been measured in the course of the last century. And so far away are these stars, even the nearest of them, that we do not express their distance from us in millions of miles; we express it in the time that their light takes in travelling from them to us. Now it takes light only one second to traverse 186,300 miles, and yet it requires four and a third years for the light from the nearest star to reach us. This is a star of the first magnitude, Alpha in the constellation of the Centaur. The next nearest star is a faint one of between the seventh and eighth magnitudes, and its light takes seven years to come. From a sixth magnitude star in the constellation of the Swan, the light requires eight years; and from Sirius, the brightest star in the heavens, light requires eight and a half years. These four stars are the nearest to us; from no other star, that we know of, does light take less than ten years to travel; from the majority of those whose distance we have succeeded in measuring, the light takes at least twenty years.

To get some conception of what a "light-year" means, let us remember that light could travel right round the earth at its equator seven times in the s.p.a.ce of a single second, and that there are 31,556,925 seconds in a year. Light then could girdle the earth a thousand million times whilst it comes from Alpha Centauri. Or we may put it another way. The distance from Alpha Centauri exceeds the equator of the earth by as much as this exceeds an inch and a half; or by as much as the distance from London to Manchester exceeds the hundredth of an inch.

Of all the rest of the innumerable stars, as far as actual measurement is concerned, for us, as for the Hebrews, they might all actually lie on the texture of a curtain, at practically the same distance from us.

We have measured the distances of but a very few stars; the rest--as every one of them was for the Hebrew--are at a greater distance than any effort of ours can reach, be our telescopes ever so great and powerful, our measuring instruments ever so precise and delicate. For them, as for us, the heaven of stars is "for height," for a height which is beyond measure and therefore the only fitting image for the immensity of G.o.d.

So Zophar the Naamathite said--

"Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection?

It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do?"

and Eliphaz the Temanite reiterated still more strongly--

"Is not G.o.d in the height of heaven?

And behold the height of the stars, how high they are."

G.o.d Himself is represented as using the expanse of heaven as a measure of the greatness of his fidelity and mercy. The prophet Jeremiah writes--

"Thus saith the Lord; if Heaven above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth searched out beneath, I will also cast off all the seed of Israel for all that they have done, saith the Lord."

As if he were using the figure of a great cross, whose height was that of the heavens, whose arms stretched from east to west, David testifies of the same mercy and forgiveness:--

"For as the heaven is high above the earth, So great is His mercy toward them that fear Him.

As far as the east is from the west, So far hath He removed our transgressions from us."

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GREAT COMET OF 1843.