FOOTNOTES:

[41:1] Astronomy in the Old Testament, p. 33 note.

[43:1] Astronomy in the Old Testament, p. 32.

[46:1] Ruskin, Modern Painters, part vii. chap. i.



CHAPTER V

THE ORDINANCES OF THE HEAVENS

As has been already pointed out, the astronomical references in Scripture are not numerous, and probably give but an inadequate idea of the actual degree of progress attained by the Hebrews in astronomical science. Yet it is clear, even from the record which we have, that there was one great astronomical fact which they had observed, and that it had made a deep impression upon them.

That fact was the sublime Order of the heavenly movements. First amongst these was the order of the daily progress of the sun; rising in the east and moving slowly, majestically, and resistlessly upward to the meridian,—the "midst" or "bisection" of heaven, of Josh. x. 13,—and then passing downwards as smoothly and unfalteringly to his setting in the west.

This motion of the sun inspires the simile employed by the Psalmist in the astronomical psalm, the nineteenth. He sings—

"The heavens declare the glory of God.

* * * * *

In them hath He set a tabernacle for the sun, Which is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, And rejoiceth as a strong man to run his course. His going forth is from the end of the heaven, And his circuit unto the ends of it: And there is nothing hid from the heat thereof."

The night revealed another Order, in its way more majestic still. As the twilight faded away the bright and silent watchers of the heavens mustered each in his place. And each, like the sun during the day, was moving, slowly, majestically, resistlessly, "without haste, without rest." Each had its appointed place, its appointed path. Some moved in small circles in the north; some rose in the east, and swept in long curves over towards their setting in the west, some scarcely lifted themselves above the southern horizon. But each one kept its own place. None jostled another, or hurried in advance, or lagged behind. It is no wonder that as the multitude of the stars was observed, and the unbroken order of their going, that the simile suggested itself of an army on the march—"the host of heaven." And the sight of the unbroken order of these bright celestial orbs suggested a comparison with the unseen army of exalted beings, the angels; the army or host of heaven in another sense, marshalled, like the stars, in perfect obedience to the Divine will. So in the vision of Micaiah, the son of Imlah, the "host of heaven" are the thousands of attendant spirits waiting around the throne of God to fulfil His bidding.

"I saw the Lord sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven standing by him on His right hand and on His left."

But more frequently it is the starry, not the angelic, army to which reference is made.

So Jeremiah prophesies—

"As the host of heaven cannot be numbered, Neither the sand of the sea measured: So will I multiply the seed of David My servant, And the Levites that minister unto Me."

The prophets of Israel recognized clearly, that the starry host of heaven and the angelic host were distinct; that the first, in their brightness, order, and obedience formed fitting comparison for the second; but that both were created beings; neither were divinities.

The heathen nations around recognized also the hosts both of the stars and of spiritual beings, but the first they took as the manifestations of the second, whom they counted as divinities. There was often a great confusion between the two, and the observance or worship of the first could not be kept distinguished from the recognition or worship of the other; the very ideogram for a god was an 8-rayed star.

The Hebrews were warned again and again lest, confusing in their minds these two great hosts of stars and angels, they should deem the one the divine manifestation of the other, the divinity, not accounting them both fellow-servants, the handiwork of God.

Thus, in the wilderness, the Lord commands them through Moses—

"Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves, . . . lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the Lord thy God hath divided [distributed] unto all nations under the whole heaven."

But the one celestial army continually suggests the other, and the two are placed in the closest parallelism when reference is made to the time when the foundations of the earth were fastened, and the corner stone thereof was laid,

"When the morning stars sang together, And all the sons of God shouted for joy."

So when Deborah sings of the deliverance which the Lord gave to Israel at the battle of the Kishon, she puts the stars for the angelic legions that she feels assured were engaged in warring in their support.

"They fought from heaven; The stars in their courses fought against Sisera."

The "courses" of the stars are the paths which they appear to follow as they move round the pole of the heavens as the night proceeds, whilst the stars themselves stand for the heavenly helpers who, unseen, had mingled in the battle and discomforted the squadrons of Sisera's war-chariots. It almost reads as if to Deborah had been vouchsafed such a vision as Elisha prayed might be given to his servant:—

"Therefore sent the King of Syria thither horses, and chariots, and a great host: and they came by night, and compassed the city about.

"And when the servant of the man of God was risen early, and gone forth, behold, an host compassed the city both with horses and chariots. And his servant said unto him, Alas, my master! how shall we do?

"And he answered, Fear not: for they that be with us are more than they that be with them.

"And Elisha prayed, and said, Lord, I pray Thee, open his eyes that he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha."

The solemn procession of the starry host through the long night—the rising in the east, the southing, and the setting in the west—is not the only ordered movement of the stars of heaven that may be recognized. As night by night brightens to its dawn, if we watch the eastern horizon and note what stars are the last to rise above it before the growing daylight overpowers the feeble stellar rays, then we see that some bright star, invisible on the preceding mornings, shines out for a few moments low down in the glimmer of the dawn. As morning succeeds morning it rises earlier, until at last it mounts when it is yet dark, and some other star takes its place as the herald of the rising sun. We recognize to-day this "heliacal rising" of the stars. Though we do not make use of it in our system of time-measuring, it played an important part in the calendar-making of the ancients. Such heralds of the rising sun were called "morning stars" by the Hebrews, and they used them "for seasons" and "for years." One star or constellation of stars would herald by its "heliacal rising" the beginning of spring, another the coming of winter; the time to plough, the time to sow, the time of the rains, would all be indicated by the successive "morning stars" as they appeared. And after an interval of three hundred and sixty-five or three hundred and sixty-six days the same star would again show itself as a morning star for a second time, marking out the year, whilst the other morning stars would follow, each in its due season. So we read in Job, that God led "forth the Mazzaroth in their season."

This wonderful procession of the midnight sky is not known and admired by those who live in walled cities and ceiled houses, as it is by those who live in the open, in the wilderness. It is not therefore to be wondered at, that we find praise of these "works of the Lord . . . sought out of all them that have pleasure therein," mostly amongst the shepherds, the herdsmen, the wanderers in the open—in the words and prophecies of Job, of Jacob, Moses, David and Amos.

The thought that each new day, beginning with a new outburst of light, was, in its degree, a kind of new creation, an emblem of the original act by which the world was brought into being, renders appropriate and beautiful the ascription of the term "morning stars" to those "sons of God," the angels. As the stars in the eastern sky are poetically thought of as "singing together" to herald the creation of each new day, so in the verses already quoted from the Book of Job, the angels of God are represented as shouting for joy when the foundations of the earth were laid.

The "morning star" again stands as the type and earnest of that new creation which God has promised to His servants. The epistle to Thyatira concludes with the promise—"He that overcometh, and keepeth my works unto the end, . . . I will give him the morning star."

The brightest of these heralds of the sun is the planet Venus, and such a "morning star" for power, glory, and magnificence, the king of Babylon had once been; like one of the angels of God. But as addressed in Isaiah's prophecy, he has been brought down to Sheol:—

"How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!. . . For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God . . . I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High."

But the "morning star" is taken as a higher type, even of our Lord Himself, and of His future coming in glory. St. Peter bids the disciples, to whom he writes, take heed unto the word of prophecy as unto a lamp shining in a dark place "until the day dawn, and the Day star arise in your hearts." In almost the last words of the Bible, the Lord uses the same image Himself:—

"I, Jesus, have sent Mine angel to testify unto you these things in the Churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, the bright and morning star."

In the sublime and ordered movements of the various heavenly bodies, the Hebrews recognized the ordinances of God. The point of view always taken in Scripture is the theo-centric one; the relation sought to be brought out is not the relation of thing to thing—which is the objective of physical science—but the relation of creature to Creator. We have no means of knowing whether they made attempt to find any mechanical explanation of the movements; such inquiry would lie entirely outside the scope of the books of Holy Scripture, and other ancient Hebrew literature has not been transmitted to us.

The lesson which the Psalmists and the Prophets desired to teach was not the daily rotation of the earth upon its axis, nor its yearly revolution round the sun, but that—

"If those ordinances depart from before Me, saith the Lord, then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation before Me for ever."

In the Bible all intermediate steps are omitted, and the result is linked immediately to the first Cause. God Himself is the theme, and trust in Him the lesson.

"Lift up your eyes on high, and see Who hath created these, That bringeth out their host by number: He calleth them all by name; by the greatness of His might, and for that He is strong in power, not one is lacking.

"Why sayest thou, O Jacob, and speakest, O Israel, My way is hid from the Lord, and my judgment is passed away from my God. Hast thou not known? hast thou not heard? the everlasting God, the Lord, the Creator of the ends of the earth, fainteth not, neither is weary; there is no searching of His understanding. He giveth power to the faint; and to him that hath no might He increaseth strength. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall: but they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint."



CHAPTER VI

THE SUN

"And God said Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons and for days, and years: and let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven, to give light upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights; the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: He made the stars also. And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day."

A double purpose for the two great heavenly bodies is indicated here,—first, the obvious one of giving light; next, that of time measurement. These, from the human and practical point of view, are the two main services which the sun and moon render to us, and naturally sufficed for the object that the writer had before him. There is no evidence that he had any idea that the moon simply shone by reflecting the light of the sun; still less that the sun was a light for worlds other than our own; but if he had known these facts we can hardly suppose that he would have mentioned them; there would have been no purpose to be served by so doing.

But it is remarkable that no reference is made either to the incalculable benefits conferred by the action of the sun in ripening the fruits of the earth, or to the services of the moon as a time-measurer, in dividing off the months. Both these actions are clearly indicated later on in the Scriptures, where Moses, in the blessing which he pronounced upon the tribe of Joseph, prayed that his land might be blessed "for the precious things of the fruits of the sun," so that we may take their omission here, together with the omission of all mention of the planets, and the slight parenthetical reference to the stars, as indicating that this chapter was composed at an exceedingly early date.

The chief purpose of the sun is to give light; it "rules" or regulates the day and "divides the light from the darkness." As such it is the appropriate emblem of God Himself, Who "is Light, and in Him is no darkness at all." These images are frequently repeated in the Scriptures, and it is only possible to give a few instances. David sings, "The Lord is my light and my salvation." "The Lord shall be unto thee an everlasting light," is the promise made to Zion. St. John expressly uses the term of the Son of God, our Lord: "That was the true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." Whilst the more concrete emblem is used as often. In the eighty-fourth psalm, the psalm of pilgrimage, we read, "The Lord God is a sun and shield;" Malachi predicts that "the Sun of Righteousness shall arise with healing in His wings," and St James, with the same thought of the sun in his mind, speaks of God as "the Father of lights."

But in none of these or the other parallel passages is there the remotest approach to any deification of the sun, or even of that most ethereal of influences, light itself. Both are creatures, both are made by God; they are things and things only, and are not even the shrines of a deity. They may be used as emblems of God in some of His attributes; they do not even furnish any indication of His special presence, for He is equally present where sun and light are not. "The darkness hideth not from Thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light are both alike to Thee."

The worship of the sun and of other heavenly bodies is one of the sins most unsparingly denounced in Scripture. It was one of the first warnings of the Book of Deuteronomy that Israel as a people were to take heed "lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them and serve them," and the utter overthrow of the nation was foretold should they break this law. And as for the nation, so for the individual, any "man or woman that hath wrought wickedness in the sight of the Lord thy God, in transgressing His covenant and hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them, either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven" was when convicted of working "such abomination" unsparingly to be put to death.

Yet with all this, sun-worship prevailed in Israel again and again. Two of the reforming kings of Judah, Asa and Josiah, found it necessary to take away "the sun-images;" indeed, the latter king found that the horses and chariots which his predecessors, Manasseh and Amon, had dedicated to sun worship were kept at the very entrance to the temple. In spite of his reformation, however, the evil spread until the final corruption of Jerusalem was shown in vision to Ezekiel, "Seventy men of the ancients"—that is the complete Sanhedrim—offered incense to creeping things and abominable beasts; the women wept for Tammuz, probably the sun-god in his decline to winter death; and deepest apostasy of all, five and twenty men, the high-priest, and the chief priests of the twenty-four courses, "with their backs toward the temple of the Lord, and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun toward the east." The entire nation, as represented in its chief members in State, Society, and Church, was apostate, and its ruin followed. Five years more and the temple was burned and Jerusalem destroyed, and in captivity and exile the nation learned to abhor the idolatry that had brought about its overthrow.

Four words are translated "sun" in our Authorized Version. Of these one, used Job xxxi. 26, should really be "light," as in the margin—"If I beheld the light when it shined,"—though the sun is obviously meant. The second word is one used in poetry chiefly in conjunction with a poetical word for the moon, and refers to the sun's warmth, as the other does to the whiteness of the moon. Thus the Bride in the Song of Solomon is described as "fair as the moon, clear as the sun." The third word has given use to some ambiguity. In the eighth chapter of Judges in the Authorized Version, it is stated that "Gideon, the son of Joash, returned from the battle before the sun was up," but in the Revised Version that he "returned from the battle from the ascent of Heres." There was a mount Ḥeres, a mount of the sun, in the portion of the Danites held by the Amorites, but that cannot have been the Ḥeres of Gideon. Still the probability is that a mount sacred to the sun is meant here as well as in the reference to the Danites; though ḥeres as meaning the sun itself occurs in the story of Samson's riddle, for the men of the city gave him the answer to it which they had extorted from his wife, "before the sun (ḥeres) went down." Shemesh, the Samas of the Babylonians, is the usual word for the sun; and we find it in Beth-shemesh, the "house of the sun," a Levitical city within the tribe of Judah, the scene of the return of the ark after its captivity amongst the Philistines. There was another Beth-shemesh in Naphtali on the borders of Issachar, and Jeremiah prophesies that Nebuchadnezzar "shall break also the images of Beth-shemesh, that is in the land of Egypt," probably the obelisks of the sun in On, or Heliopolis. It was from this city that Joseph, when vizier of Egypt, took his wife, the daughter of the high priest there. The images of the sun, and of Baal as the sun-god, seem to have been obelisks or pillars of stone, and hence had to be "broken down"; whilst the Asherah, the "groves" of the Authorized Version, the images of Ashtoreth as the moon-goddess, were wooden pillars, to be "cut" or "hewn down."

Another "city of the sun" in the land of Egypt is also mentioned by Isaiah, in his prophecy of the conversion and restoration of the Egyptians. "Five cities in the land of Egypt shall speak the language of Canaan, and swear to the Lord of hosts; one shall be called The city of destruction;" lit. of Ḥeres, or of the sun. It was upon the strength of this text that Onias, the son of Onias the high priest, appealed to Ptolemy Philometer to be allowed to build a temple to Jehovah in the prefecture of Heliopolis (the city of the sun), and obtained his permission to do so, B.C. 149.[68:1]

The epithet applied to the sun in Cant. vi. already quoted, "Clear as the sun," may be taken as equivalent to "spotless." That is its ordinary appearance to the naked eye, though from time to time—far more frequently than most persons have any idea—there are spots upon the sun sufficiently large to be seen without any optical assistance. Thus in the twenty years from 1882 to 1901 inclusive, such a phenomenon occurred on the average once in each week. No reference to the existence of sun-spots occurs in Scripture. Nor is this surprising, for it would not have fallen within the purpose of Scripture to record such a fact. But it is surprising that whilst the Chinese detected their occasional appearance, there is no distinct account of such an observation given either on Babylonian tablets or by classical or mediaeval writers.

The achievement of the Chinese in this direction is very notable, for the difficulty of looking directly at the sun, under ordinary circumstances is so great, and the very largest sunspots are so small as compared with the entire disc, that it argues great perseverance in watching such appearances on the part of the Chinese, for them to have assured themselves that they were not due to very small distant clouds in our own atmosphere.

It has often been the subject of comment that light is mentioned in Gen. i. as having been created on the first day, but the sun not until the fourth. The order is entirely appropriate from an astronomical point of view, for we know that our sun is not the only source of light, since it is but one out of millions of stars, many of which greatly exceed it in splendour. Further, most astronomers consider that our solar system existed as a luminous nebula long ages before the sun was formed as a central condensation.

But the true explanation of the creation of light being put first is probably this—that there might be no imagining that, though gross solid bodies, like earth and sea, sun and moon might require a Creator, yet something so ethereal and all-pervading as light was self-existent, and by its own nature, eternal. This was a truth that needed to be stated first. God is light, but light is not God.

The other references to the sun in Scripture do not call for much comment. Its apparent unchangeableness qualifies it for use as an expression for eternal duration, as in the seventy-second, the Royal, Psalm, "They shall fear Thee as long as the sun and moon endure;" and again, "His name shall endure for ever: His name shall be continued as long as the sun." And again, in the eighty-ninth Psalm, it is said of David: "His seed shall endure for ever, and his throne as the sun before Me."

The daily course of the sun from beyond the eastern horizon to beyond the western gives the widest expression for the compass of the whole earth. "The mighty God, even the Lord, hath spoken, and called the earth, from the rising of the sun unto the going down thereof." "From the rising of the sun, unto the going down of the same, the Lord's name is to be praised." The sun's rays penetrate everywhere. "His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid from the heat thereof." Whilst in the Book of Ecclesiastes, the melancholy words of the Preacher revert over and over again to that which is done "under the sun." "What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?"

It should be noted that this same Book of Ecclesiastes shows a much clearer idea of the sun's daily apparent motion than was held by many of the writers of antiquity. There is, of course, nowhere in Scripture any mention of the rotation of the earth on its axis as the mechanical explanation of the sun's daily apparent motion; any more than we should refer to it ourselves to-day except when writing from a purely technical point of view. As said already, the Hebrews had probably not discovered this explanation, and would certainly have not gone out of their way to mention it in any of their Scriptures if they had.

One passage of great beauty has sometimes been quoted as if it contained a reference to the earth's rotation, but when carefully examined it is seen to be dealing simply with the apparent motion of the sun in the course of the year and of the day.

"Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days; And caused the dayspring to know his place; That it might take hold of the ends of the earth, That the wicked might be shaken out of it? It is turned as clay to the seal; And they stand as a garment."

The earth appears to be spoken of as being "turned" to the sun, the dayspring; and this, we know, takes place, morning by morning, in consequence of the diurnal rotation. But the last two lines are better rendered in the Revised Version—

"It is changed as clay under the seal; And all things stand forth as a garment."

The ancient seals were cylinders, rolled over the clay, which, formless before, took upon it the desired relief as the seal passed over it. So a garment, laid aside and folded up during the night, is shapeless, but once again takes form when the wearer puts it on. And the earth, formless in the darkness, gains shape and colour and relief with the impress upon it of the morning light.

It is quite clear that the Hebrews did not suppose that it was a new sun that came up from the east each morning, as did Xenophanes and the Epicureans amongst the Greeks. It was the same sun throughout. Nor is there any idea of his hiding himself behind a mysterious mountain during the night. "The sun," the Preacher tells us, "ariseth and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose." The Hebrew was quite aware that the earth was unsupported in space, for he knew that the Lord "stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing." There was therefore nothing to hinder the sun passing freely under the earth from west to east, and thus making his path, not a mere march onward ending in his dissolution at sunset, but a complete "circuit," as noted by the writer of the nineteenth Psalm.

The fierceness of the sun's heat in Palestine rendered sun-stroke a serious danger. The little son of the Shunammite was probably so smitten as he watched his father at work with the reapers. So the promise is given to God's people more than once: "The sun shall not smite thee by day." "They shall not hunger nor thirst; neither shall the heat nor sun smite them." The martyrs who pass through the great tribulation "shall hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on them, nor any heat."

There are fewer references in Scripture to the vivifying effects of sunlight upon vegetation than we might have expected. The explanation is possibly to be found in the terrible perversion men had made of the benefits which came to them by means of this action of sunlight, by using them as an excuse for plunging into all kinds of nature-worship. Yet there are one or two allusions not without interest. As already mentioned, "the precious fruits brought forth by the sun" were promised to the tribe of Joseph, whilst the great modern discovery that nearly every form of terrestrial energy is derived ultimately from the energy of the sun's rays gives a most striking appropriateness to the imagery made use of by St. James.

"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of Lights, with Whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning."

God, that is to say, is the true Sun, the true Origin of all Lights, the true bestower of every good and perfect gift. The word rendered "variableness," is a technical word, used by ourselves in modern English as "parallax," and employed in the Septuagint Version to denote the revolutions of the heavenly bodies, described in the thirty-eighth chapter of the book of Job, as "the ordinances of the heavens." With the natural sun, therefore, there is "variableness," that is to say, real or apparent change of place; there is none with God. Neither is there with Him any darkness of eclipse; any "shadow" caused as in the case of the material sun, by the "turning" of earth and moon in their orbits. The knowledge of "the alternations of the turning of the sun," described in the Book of Wisdom as a feature of the learning of Solomon, was a knowledge of the laws of this "variableness" and "turning"; especially of the "turning" of its rising and setting points at the two solstices; and St. James may well have had that passage in his mind when he wrote. For Science deals with the knowledge of things that change, as they change, and of their changes, but Faith with the knowledge of Him that abideth for ever, and it is to this higher knowledge that St. James wished to point his readers.

Science deals with the knowledge of things that change, as they change and of their changes. The physical facts that we have learned in the last years about that changeful body the sun are briefly these:—

Its core or inner nucleus is not accessible to observation, its nature and constitution being a mere matter of inference. The "photosphere" is a shell of incandescent cloud surrounding the nucleus, but the depth, or thickness of this shell is quite unknown. The outer surface—which we see—of the photosphere is certainly pretty sharply defined, though very irregular, rising at points into whiter aggregations, called "faculae," and perhaps depressed at other places in the dark "spots." Immediately above the photosphere lies the "reversing layer" in which are found the substances which give rise to the gaps in the sun's spectrum—the Fraunhofer lines. Above the "reversing layer" lies the scarlet "chromosphere" with "prominences" of various forms and dimensions rising high above the solar surface; and over, and embracing all, is the "corona," with its mysterious petal-like forms and rod-like rays.

The great body of the sun is gaseous, though it is impossible for us to conceive of the condition of the gaseous core, subjected, as it is, at once to temperature and pressure both enormously great. Probably it is a gas so viscous that it would resist motion as pitch or putty does. Nor do we know much of the nature of either the sun-spots or the solar corona. Both seem to be produced by causes which lie within the sun; both undergo changes that are periodical and connected with each other. They exercise some influence upon the earth's magnetism, but whether this influence extends to terrestrial weather, to rainfall and storms, is still a matter of controversy.

The sun itself is distant from the earth in the mean, about 92,885,000 miles, but this distance varies between January and June by 3,100,000 miles. The diameter of the sun is 866,400 miles, but perhaps this is variable to the extent of some hundreds of miles. It would contain 1,305,000 times the bulk of the earth, but its mean density is but one-quarter that of the earth. The force of gravity at its surface is 27-1/2 times that at the surface of the earth, and it rotates on its axis in about 25 days. But the sun's surface does not appear to rotate as a whole, so this time of rotating varies by as much as two days if we consider a region on the sun's equator or at a distance from it of 45 deg.. The intensity of sunlight at the surface of the sun is about 190,000 times that of a candle-flame, and the effective temperature of the solar surface is eight or ten thousand degrees centigrade.

Such are some of the facts about the sun that are received, or, as it would be technically expressed, "adopted" to-day. Doubtless a very few years will find them altered and rendered more accurate as observations accumulate. In a few hundred years, knowledge of the constitution of the sun may have so increased that these data and suggestions may seem so erroneous as to be absurd. It is little more than a century since one of the greatest of astronomers, Sir William Herschel, contended that the central globe of the sun might be a habitable world, sheltered from the blazing photosphere by a layer of cool non-luminous clouds. Such an hypothesis was not incompatible with what was then known of the constitution of the heavenly bodies, though it is incompatible with what we know now. It was simply a matter on which more evidence was to be accumulated, and the holding of such a view does not, and did not, detract from the scientific status of Sir William Herschel.

The hypotheses of science require continual restatement in the light of new evidence, and, as to the weight and interpretation to be given to such evidence, there is continual conflict—if it may so be called—between the old and the new science, between the science that is established and the science that is being established. It is by this conflict that knowledge is rendered sure.

Such a conflict took place rather more than 300 years ago at the opening of the Modern Era of astronomy. It was a conflict between two schools of science—between the disciples of Aristotle and Claudius Ptolemy on the one hand and the disciples of Copernicus on the other. It has often been represented as a conflict between religion and science, whereas that which happened was that the representatives of the older school of science made use of the powers of the Church to persecute the newer school as represented by Galileo. That persecution was no doubt a flagrant abuse of authority, but it should be impossible at the present day for any one to claim a theological standing for either theory, whether Copernican or Ptolemaic.

So long as evidence sufficient to demonstrate the Copernican hypothesis was not forthcoming, it was possible for a man to hold the Ptolemaic, without detracting from his scientific position, just as it is thought no discredit to Sir William Herschel that he held his curious idea of a cool sun under the conditions of knowledge of a hundred years ago. Even at the present day, we habitually use the Ptolemaic phraseology. Not only do we speak of "sunrise" and "sunset," but astronomers in strictly technical papers use the expression, "acceleration of the sun's motion" when "acceleration of the earth's motion" is meant.

The question as to whether the earth goes round the sun or the sun goes round the earth has been decided by the accumulation of evidence. It was a question for evidence to decide. It was an open question so long as the evidence available was not sufficient to decide it. It was perfectly possible at one time for a scientific or a religious man to hold either view. Neither view interfered with his fundamental standing or with his mental attitude towards either sun or earth. In this respect—important as the question is in itself—it might be said to be a mere detail, almost a matter of indifference.

But it is not a mere detail, a matter of indifference to either scientist or religious man, as to what the sun and earth are—whether he can treat them as things that can be weighed, measured, compared, analyzed, as, a few pages back, we have shown has been done, or whether, as one of the chief astrologers of to-day puts it, he—

"Believes that the sun is the body of the Logos of this solar system, 'in Him we live and move and have our being.' The planets are his angels, being modifications in the consciousness of the Logos,"

and that the sun

"Stands as Power, having Love and Will united."

The difference between these two points of view is fundamental, and one of root principle. The foundation, the common foundation on which both the believer and the scientist build, is threatened by this false science and false religion. The calling, the very existence of both is assailed, and they must stand or fall together. The believer in one God cannot acknowledge a Sun-god, a Solar Logos, these planetary angels; the astronomer cannot admit the intrusion of planetary influences that obey no known laws, and the supposed effects of which are in no way proportional to the supposed causes. The Law of Causality does not run within the borders of astrology.

It is the old antithesis restated of the Hebrew and the heathen. The believer in one God and the scientist alike derive their heritage from the Hebrew, whilst the modern astrologer claims that the astrology of to-day is once more a revelation of the Chaldean and Assyrian religions. But polytheism—whether in its gross form of many gods, of planetary angels, or in the more subtle form of pantheism,—is the very negation of sane religion; and astrology is the negation of sane astronomy.

"For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: because that, when they knew God, they glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things."

FOOTNOTES:

[68:1] Josephus, Antiquities, XIII. iii. 1.



CHAPTER VII

THE MOON

"The balmy moon of blessed Israel Floods all the deep-blue gloom with beams divine: All night the splintered crags that wall the dell With spires of silver shine."

So, in Tennyson's words, sang Jephthah's daughter, as she recalled the days of her mourning before she accomplished her self-sacrifice.

It is hard for modern dwellers in towns to realize the immense importance of the moon to the people of old. "The night cometh when no man can work" fitly describes their condition when she was absent. In sub-tropical countries like Palestine, twilight is short, and, the sun once set, deep darkness soon covers everything. Such artificial lights as men then had would now be deemed very inefficient. There was little opportunity, when once darkness had fallen, for either work or enjoyment.

But, when the moon was up, how very different was the case. Then men might say—

"This night, methinks, is but the daylight sick; It looks a little paler: 'tis a day, Such as the day is when the sun is hid."

In the long moonlit nights, travelling was easy and safe; the labours of the field and house could still be carried on; the friendly feast need not be interrupted. But of all men, the shepherd would most rejoice at this season; all his toils, all his dangers were immeasurably lightened during the nights near the full. As in the beautiful rendering which Tennyson has given us of one of the finest passages in the Iliad—

"In heaven the stars about the moon Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid, And every height comes out, and jutting peak And valley, and the immeasurable heavens Break open to their highest, and all the stars Shine, and the Shepherd gladdens in his heart."

A large proportion of the people of Israel, long after their settlement in Palestine, maintained the habits of their forefathers, and led the shepherd's life. To them, therefore, the full of the moon must have been of special importance; yet there is no single reference in Scripture to this phase as such; nor indeed to any change of the moon's apparent figure. In two cases in our Revised Version we do indeed find the expression "at the full moon," but if we compare these passages with the Authorized Version, we find them there rendered "in the time appointed," or "at the day appointed." This latter appears to be the literal meaning, though there can be no question, as is seen by a comparison with the Syriac, that the period of the full moon is referred to. No doubt it was because travelling was so much more safe and easy than in the moonless nights, that the two great spring and autumn festivals of the Jews were held at the full moon. Indeed, the latter feast, when the Israelites "camped out" for a week "in booths," was held at the time of the "harvest moon." The phenomenon of the "harvest moon" may be briefly explained as follows. At the autumnal equinox, when the sun is crossing from the north side of the equator to the south, the full moon is crossing from the south side of the equator to the north. It is thus higher in the sky, when it souths, on each succeeding night, and is therefore up for a greater length of time. This counterbalances to a considerable extent its movement eastward amongst the stars, so that, for several nights in succession, it rises almost at sundown. These nights of the Feast of Tabernacles, when all Israel was rejoicing over the ingathered fruits, each family in its tent or arbour of green boughs, were therefore the fullest of moonlight in the year.[81:1]

Modern civilization has almost shut us off from the heavens, at least in our great towns and cities. These offer many conveniences, but they remove us from not a few of the beauties which nature has to offer. And so it comes that, taking the population as a whole, there is perhaps less practically known of astronomy in England to-day than there was under the Plantagenets. A very few are astronomers, professional and amateur, and know immeasurably more than our forefathers did of the science. Then there is a large, more or less cultured, public that know something of the science at secondhand through books. But the great majority know nothing of the heavenly bodies except of the sun; they need to "look in the almanack" to "find out moonshine." But to simpler peoples the difference between the "light half" of the month, from the first quarter to the last quarter through the full of the moon, and the "dark half," from the last quarter to the first quarter, through new, is very great. Indian astronomers so divide the month to this day.

In one passage of Holy Scripture, the description which Isaiah gives of the "City of the Lord, the Zion of the Holy One of Israel," there is a reference to the dark part of the month.

"Thy sun shall no more go down; neither shall thy moon (literally "month") withdraw itself: for the Lord shall be thine everlasting light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended."

The parallelism expressed in the verse lies between the darkness of night whilst the sun is below the horizon, and the special darkness of those nights when the moon, being near conjunction with the sun, is absent from the sky during the greater part or whole of the night hours, and has but a small portion of her disc illuminated. Just as half the day is dark because the sun has withdrawn itself, so half the nights of the month are dark because the moon has withdrawn itself.

The Hebrew month was a natural one, determined by actual observation of the new moon. They used three words in their references to the moon, the first of which, chodesh, derived from a root meaning "to be new," indicates the fact that the new moon, as actually observed, governed their calendar. The word therefore signifies the new moon—the day of the new moon: and thus a month; that is, a lunar month beginning at the new moon. This is the Hebrew word used in the Deluge story in the seventh chapter of Genesis; and in all references to feasts depending on a day in the month. As when the Lord spake to Moses, saying, "Also in the day of your gladness, and in your solemn days, and in the beginnings of your months, ye shall blow with your trumpets over your burnt offerings, and over the sacrifices of your peace offerings." And again in the Psalm of Asaph to the chief musician upon Gittith: "Blow up the trumpet in the new moon, in the time appointed, on our solemn feast day." This is the word also that Isaiah uses in describing the bravery of the daughters of Zion, "the tinkling ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like the moon, the chains, and the bracelets." "The round tires" were not discs, like the full moon, but were round like the crescent.

Generally speaking, chodesh is employed where either reference is made to the shape or newness of the crescent moon, or where "month" is used in any precise way. This is the word for "month" employed throughout by the prophet Ezekiel, who is so precise in the dating of his prophecies.

When the moon is mentioned as the lesser light of heaven, without particular reference to its form, or when a month is mentioned as a somewhat indefinite period of time, then the Hebrew word yarēach, is used. Here the word has the root meaning of "paleness"; it is the "silver moon."

Yarēach is the word always used where the moon is classed among the heavenly bodies; as when Joseph dreamed of the sun, the moon, and the eleven constellations; or in Jer. viii. 2, where the Lord says that they shall bring out the bones of the kings, princes, priests, prophets, and inhabitants of Jerusalem, "and they shall spread them before the sun, and the moon, and all the host of heaven, whom they have loved, and whom they have served, and after whom they have walked, and whom they have sought, and whom they have worshipped."

The same word is used for the moon in its character of "making ordinances." Thus we have it several times in the Psalms: "He (the Lord) appointed the moon for seasons." "His seed shall endure for ever, and his throne as the sun before Me. It shall be established for ever as the moon, and as a faithful witness in heaven." And again: "The moon and stars rule by night;" whilst Jeremiah says, "Thus saith the Lord, Which giveth the sun for a light by day, and the ordinances of the moon and of the stars for a light by night."

In all passages where reference seems to be made to the darkening or withdrawing of the moon's light (Eccl. xii. 2; Isa. xiii. 10; Ezek. xxxii. 7; Joel ii. 10, 31, and iii. 15; and Hab. iii. 11) the word yarēach is employed. A slight variant of the same word indicates the month when viewed as a period of time not quite defined, and not in the strict sense of a lunar month. This is the term used in Exod. ii. 2, for the three months that the mother of Moses hid him when she saw that he was a goodly child; by Moses, in his prophecy for Joseph, of "Blessed of the Lord be his land . . . for the precious fruits brought forth by the sun, and for the precious things put forth by the months." Such a "full month of days" did Shallum the son of Jabesh reign in Samaria in the nine and thirtieth year of Uzziah, king of Judah. Such also were the twelve months of warning given to Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, before his madness fell upon him. The same word is once used for a true lunar month, viz. in Ezra vi. 15, when the building of the "house was finished on the third day of the month Adar, which was in the sixth year of the reign of Darius the king." In all other references to the months derived from the Babylonians, such as the "month Chisleu" in Neh. i. 1, the term chodesh is used, since these, like the Hebrew months, were defined by the observation of the new moon; but for the Tyrian months, Zif, Bul, Ethanim, we find the term yerach in three out of the four instances.

In three instances a third word is used poetically to express the moon. This is lebanah, which has the meaning of whiteness. In Song of Sol. vi. 10, it is asked—

"Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?"

Isaiah also says—

"Then the moon shall be confounded, and the sun ashamed, when the Lord of Hosts shall reign in Mount Zion, and in Jerusalem, and before His ancients gloriously."

And yet again—

"Moreover the light of the moon shall be as the light of the sun, and the light of the sun shall be sevenfold, as the light of seven days, in the day that the Lord bindeth up the breach of His people, and healeth the stroke of their wound."

It may not be without significance that each of these three passages, wherein the moon is denominated by its name of whiteness or purity, looks forward prophetically to the same great event, pictured yet more clearly in the Revelation—

"And I heard as it were the voice of a great multitude, and as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of mighty thunderings, saying, Alleluia: for the Lord God omnipotent reigneth.

"Let us be glad and rejoice, and give honour to Him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, and His wife hath made herself ready.

"And to her was granted that she should be arrayed in fine linen, clean and white: for the fine linen is the righteousness of saints."

Chodesh and yarēach are masculine words; lebanah is feminine. But nowhere throughout the Old Testament is the moon personified, and in only one instance is it used figuratively to represent a person. This is in the case of Jacob's reading of Joseph's dream, already referred to, where he said—

"Behold I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me."

And his father quickly rebuked him, saying—

"What is this dream that thou hast dreamed? Shall I and thy mother and thy brethren indeed come to bow down ourselves to thee to the earth?"

Here Jacob understands that the moon (yarēach) stands for a woman, his wife. But in Mesopotamia, whence his grandfather Abraham had come out, Sin, the moon-god, was held to be a male god, high indeed among the deities at that time, and superior even to Samas, the sun-god. Terah, the father of Abraham, was held by Jewish tradition to have been an especial worshipper of the moon-god, whose great temple was in Haran, where he dwelt.

Wherever the land of Uz may have been, at whatever period Job may have lived, there and then it was an iniquity to worship the moon or the moon-god. In his final defence to his friends, when the "three men ceased to answer Job, because he was righteous in his own eyes," Job, justifying his life, said—

"If I beheld the sun when it shined, Or the moon walking in brightness; And my heart hath been secretly enticed, And my mouth hath kissed my hand: This also were an iniquity to be punished by the judges: For I should have lied to God that is above."

The Hebrews, too, were forbidden to worship the sun, the moon, or the stars, the host of heaven, and disobeyed the commandment both early and late in their history. When Moses spake unto all Israel on this side Jordan in the wilderness in the plain over against the Red Sea, he said to them—

"The Lord spake unto you out of the midst of the fire: ye heard the voice of the words, but saw no similitude; only ye heard a voice. . . . Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves; for ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire:

"Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female. . . . And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldst be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the Lord thy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven."

We know what the "similitude" of the sun and the moon were like among the surrounding nations. We see their "hieroglyphs" on numberless seals and images from the ruins of Nineveh or Babylon. That of the sun was first a rayed star or disc, later a figure, rayed and winged. That of the moon was a crescent, one lying on its back, like a bowl or cup, the actual attitude of the new moon at the beginning of the new year. Just such moon similitudes did the soldiers of Gideon take from off the camels of Zebah and Zalmunna; just such were the "round tires like the moon" that Isaiah condemns among the bravery of the daughters of Zion.

The similitude or token of Ashtoreth, the paramount goddess of the Zidonians, was the ashera, the "grove" of the Authorized Version, probably in most cases merely a wooden pillar. This goddess, "the abomination of the Zidonians," was a moon-goddess, concerning whom Eusebius preserves a statement by the Phoenician 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 title to this shrine of Ashtoreth owed their origin to the horns of the animal merged in the goddess, 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 worshippers. 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 goddess 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 worship 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 Assyrio-Babylonian goddess Ištar, and the Babylonian legend of the Descent of Ištar may well have been a myth founded on the varying phases of the moon. But it must be remembered that, though Ashtoreth or Ištar might be the queen of heaven, the moon was not necessarily the only aspect in which her worshippers 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 passages as that already quoted from Isaiah (xxx. 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 shines 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 shine out with greater lustre 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 unassisted 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 pronounced 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 (God) 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 God. 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 Assyria and Babylonia, p. 278.



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 unassisted 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 classes, 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 space 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 God.

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 God in the height of heaven? And behold the height of the stars, how high they are."

God 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."



CHAPTER IX

COMETS

Great comets are almost always unexpected visitors. There is only one great comet that we know has been seen more than once, and expect with reasonable certainty to see again. This is Halley's comet, which has been returning to a near approach to the sun at somewhat irregular intervals of seventy-five to seventy-eight years during the last centuries: indeed, it is possible that it was this comet that was coincident with the invasion of England by William the Conqueror.

There are other small comets that are also regular inhabitants of the solar system; but, as with Halley's comet, so with these, two circumstances are to be borne in mind. First, that each successive revolution round the sun involves an increasing degradation of their brightness, since there is a manifest waste of their material at each near approach to the sun; until at length the comet is seen no more, not because it has left the warm precincts of the sun for the outer darkness, but because it has spent its substance. Halley's comet was not as brilliant or as impressive in 1835 as it was in 1759: in 1910 it may have become degraded to an appearance of quite the second order.

Next, we have no knowledge, no evidence, that any of these comets have always been members of the solar family. Some of them, indeed, we know were adopted into it by the influence of one or other of the greater planets: Uranus we know is responsible for the introduction of one, Jupiter of a considerable number. The vast majority of comets, great or small, seem to blunder into the solar system anyhow, anywhere, from any direction: they come within the attractive influence of the sun; obey his laws whilst within that influence; make one close approach to him, passing rapidly across our sky; and then depart in an orbit which will never bring them to his neighbourhood again. Some chance of direction, some compelling influence of a planet that it may have approached, so modified the path of Halley's comet when it first entered the solar system, that it has remained a member ever since, and may so remain until it has ceased to be a comet at all.

It follows, therefore, that, as to the number of great comets that may be seen in any age, we can scarcely even apply the laws of probability. During the last couple of thousand years, since chronicles have been abundant, we know that many great comets have been seen. We may suppose, therefore, that during the preceding age, that in which the Scriptures were written, there were also many great comets seen, but we do not know. And most emphatically we are not able to say, from our knowledge of comets themselves and of their motions, that in the days of this or that writer a comet was flaming in the sky.

If a comet had been observed in those ages we might not recognize the description of it. Thus in the fourth year of the 101st Olympiad, the Greeks were startled by a celestial portent. They did not draw fine distinctions, and posterity might have remained ignorant that the terrifying object was possibly a comet, had not Aristotle, who saw it as a boy at Stagira, left a rather more scientifically worded description of it. It flared up from the sunset sky with a narrow definite tail running "like a road through the constellations." In recent times the great comet of 1843 may be mentioned as having exactly such an appearance.

So we cannot expect to find in the Scriptures definite and precise descriptions that we can recognize as those of comets. At the most we may find some expressions, some descriptions, that to us may seem appropriate to the forms and appearances of these objects, and we may therefore infer that the appearance of a comet may have suggested these descriptions or expressions.

The head of a great comet is brilliant, sometimes starlike. But its tail often takes on the most impressive appearance. Donati's comet, in 1858, assumed the most varied shapes—sometimes its tail was broad, with one bright and curving edge, the other fainter and finer, the whole making up a stupendous semi-circular blade-like object. Later, the tail was shaped like a scimitar, and later again, it assumed a duplex form.

Though the bulk of comets is huge, they contain extraordinarily little substance. Their heads must contain some solid matter, but it is probably in the form of a loose aggregation of stones enveloped in vaporous material. There is some reason to suppose that comets are apt to shed some of these stones as they travel along their paths, for the orbits of the meteors that cause some of our greatest "star showers" are coincident with the paths of comets that have been observed.

But it is not only by shedding its loose stones that a comet diminishes its bulk; it loses also through its tail. As the comet gets close to the sun its head becomes heated, and throws off concentric envelopes, much of which consists of matter in an extremely fine state of division. Now it has been shown that the radiations of the sun have the power of repelling matter, whilst the sun itself attracts by its gravitational force. But there is a difference in the action of the two forces. The light-pressure varies with the surface of the particle upon which it is exercised; the gravitational attraction varies with the mass or volume. If we consider the behaviour of very small particles, it follows that the attraction due to gravitation (depending on the volume of the particle) will diminish more rapidly than the repulsion due to light-pressure (depending on the surface of the particle), as we decrease continually the size of the particle, since its volume diminishes more rapidly than its surface. A limit therefore will be reached below which the repulsion will become greater than the attraction. Thus for particles less than the 1/25000 part of an inch in diameter the repulsion of the sun is greater than its attraction. Particles in the outer envelope of the comet below this size will be driven away in a continuous stream, and will form that thin, luminous fog which we see as the comet's tail.

We cannot tell whether such objects as these were present to the mind of Joel when he spoke of "blood and fire and pillars of smoke"; possibly these metaphors are better explained by a sand- or thunder-storm, especially when we consider that the Hebrew expression for the "pillars of smoke" indicates a resemblance to a palm-tree, as in the spreading out of the head of a sand- or thunder-cloud in the sky. The suggestion has been made,—following the closing lines of Paradise Lost (for Milton is responsible for many of our interpretations of Scripture)

"High in front advanced, The brandished sword of God before them blazed, Fierce as a comet,"

—that a comet was indeed the "flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life." There is less improbability in the suggestion made by several writers that, when the pestilence wasted Jerusalem, and David offered up the sacrifice of intercession in the threshing floor of Ornan the Jebusite, the king may have seen, in the scimitar-like tail of a comet such as Donati's, God's "minister,"—"a flame of fire,"—"the angel of the Lord stand between the earth and the heaven, having a drawn sword in his hand stretched out over Jerusalem."

The late R. A. Proctor describes the wanderings of a comet thus:—

"A comet is seen in the far distant depths of space as a faint and scarcely discernible speck. It draws nearer and nearer with continually increasing velocity, growing continually larger and brighter. Faster and faster it rushes on until it makes its nearest approach to our sun, and then, sweeping round him, it begins its long return voyage into infinite space. As it recedes it grows fainter and fainter, until at length it passes beyond the range of the most powerful telescopes made by man, and is seen no more. It has been seen for the first and last time by the generation of men to whom it has displayed its glories. It has been seen for the first and last time by the race of man itself."[108:1]

"These are . . . wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever."



FOOTNOTES:

[108:1] R. A. Proctor, The Expanse of Heaven, p. 134.



CHAPTER X

METEORS

Great meteorites—"aerolites" as they are called—are like great comets, chance visitors to our world. Now and then they come, but we cannot foretell their coming. Such an aerolite exploded some fifteen miles above Madrid at about 9{h} 29{m}, on the morning of February 10, 1896:—

"A vivid glare of blinding light was followed in 1-1/2 minutes by a loud report, the concussion being such as not merely to create a panic, but to break many windows, and in some cases to shake down partitions. The sky was clear, and the sun shining brightly, when a white cloud, bordered with red, was seen rushing from south-west to north-east, leaving behind it a train of fine white dust. A red-tinted cloud was long visible in the east."

Many fragments were picked up, and analyzed, and, like other aerolites, were found to consist of materials already known on the earth. The outer crust showed the signs of fire,—the meteoric stone had been fused and ignited by its very rapid rush through the air—but the interior was entirely unaffected by the heat. The manner in which the elements were combined is somewhat peculiar to aerolites; the nearest terrestrial affinity of the minerals aggregated in them, is to be found in the volcanic products from great depths. Thus aerolites seem to be broken-up fragments from the interior parts of globes like our own. They do not come from our own volcanoes, for the velocities with which they entered our atmosphere prove their cosmical origin. Had our atmosphere not entangled them, many, circuiting the sun in a parabolic or hyperbolic curve, would have escaped for ever from our system. The swift motions, which they had on entering our atmosphere, are considerably greater on the average than those of comets, and probably their true home is not in our solar system, but in interstellar space.

The aerolites that reach the surface are not always exploded into very small fragments, but every now and then quite large masses remain intact. Most of these are stony; some have bits of iron scattered through them; others are almost pure iron, or with a little nickel alloy, or have pockets in them laden with stone. There are hundreds of accounts of the falls of aerolites during the past 2,500 years. The Greeks and Romans considered them as celestial omens, and kept some of them in temples. One at Mecca is revered by the faithful Mohammedans, and Jehangir, the great Mogul, is said to have had a sword forged from an iron aerolite which fell in 1620 in the Panjab. Diana of Ephesus stood on a shapeless block which, tradition says, was a meteoric stone, and reference may perhaps be found to this in the speech of the town-clerk of the city to appease the riot stirred up against St. Paul by Demetrius the silversmith and his companions:—

"Ye men of Ephesus, what man is there who knoweth not how that the city of the Ephesians is temple-keeper of the great Diana, and of the image which fell down from Jupiter?"

Aerolites come singly and unexpectedly, falling actually to earth on land or sea. "Shooting stars" come usually in battalions. They travel together in swarms, and the earth may meet the same swarm again and again. They are smaller than aerolites, probably mere particles of dust, and for the most part are entirely consumed in our upper atmosphere, so that they do not actually reach the earth. The swarms travel along paths that resemble cometary orbits; they are very elongated ellipses, inclined at all angles to the plane of the ecliptic. Indeed, several of the orbits are actually those of known comets, and it is generally held that these meteorites or "shooting stars" are the debris that a comet sheds on its journey.

We can never see the same "shooting star" twice; its visibility implies its dissolution, for it is only as it is entrapped and burnt up in our atmosphere that we see it, or can see it. Its companions in a great meteoric swarm, are, however, as the sand on the sea-shore, and we recognize them as members of the same swarm by their agreement in direction and date. The swarms move in a closed orbit, and it is where this orbit intersects that of the earth that we get a great "star shower," if both earth and swarm are present together at the intersection. If the swarm is drawn out, so that many meteorites are scattered throughout the whole circuit of its orbit, then we get a "shower" every year. If the meteor swarm is more condensed, so as to form a cluster, then the "shower" only comes when the "gem of the ring," as it is termed, is at the intersection of the orbits, and the earth is there too.

Such a conjunction may present the most impressive spectacle that the heavens can afford. The Leonid meteor shower is, perhaps, the most famous. It has been seen at intervals of about thirty-three years, since early in the tenth century. When Ibrahim ben Ahmed lay dying, in the year 902 A.D., it was recorded that "an infinite number of stars were seen during the night, scattering themselves like rain to the right and left, and that year was known as the year of stars." When the earth encountered the same system in 1202 A.D. the Mohammedan record runs that "on the night of Saturday, on the last day of Muharram, stars shot hither and thither in the heavens, eastward and westward, and flew against one another, like a scattering swarm of locusts, to the right and left." There are not records of all the returns of this meteoric swarm between the thirteenth century and the eighteenth, but when the earth encountered it in 1799, Humboldt reported that "from the beginning of the phenomenon there was not a space in the firmament equal in extent to three diameters of the moon that was not filled every instant with bolides and falling stars;" and Mr. Andrew Ellicott, an agent of the United States, cruising off the coast of Florida, watched this same meteoric display, and made the drawing reproduced on the opposite page. In 1833 a planter in South Carolina wrote of a return of this same system, "Never did rain fall much thicker than the meteors fell towards the earth; east, west, north, south, it was the same." In 1866 the shower was again heavy and brilliant, but at the end of the nineteenth century, when the swarm should have returned, the display was meagre and ineffective.



The Leonid system of meteorites did not always move in a closed orbit round our sun. Tracing back their records and history, we find that in A.D. 126 the swarm passed close to Uranus, and probably at that time the planet captured them for the sun. But we cannot doubt that some such similar sight as they have afforded us suggested the imagery employed by the Apostle St. John when he wrote, "The stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig-tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind. And the heavens departed as a scroll when it is rolled together."

And the prophet Isaiah used a very similar figure—

"All the host of heaven shall be dissolved, and the heavens shall be rolled together as a scroll: and all their host shall fall down, as the leaf falleth off from the vine, and as a falling fig from the fig-tree."

Whilst the simile of a great aerolite is that employed by St. John in his description of the star "Wormwood"—

"The third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters."

St. Jude's simile of the "wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever," may have been drawn from meteors rather than from comets. But, as has been seen, the two classes of objects are closely connected.

The word "meteor" is sometimes used for any unusual light seen in the sky. The Zodiacal Light, the pale conical beam seen after sunset in the west in the spring, and before sunrise in the east in the autumn, and known to the Arabs as the "False Dawn," does not appear to be mentioned in Scripture. Some commentators wrongly consider that the expression, "the eyelids of the morning," occurring twice in the Book of Job, is intended to describe it, but the metaphor does not in the least apply.

The Aurora Borealis, on the other hand, seldom though it is seen on an impressive scale in Palestine, seems clearly indicated in one passage. "Out of the north cometh golden splendour" would well fit the gleaming of the "Northern Lights," seen, as they often are, "as sheaves of golden rays."



CHAPTER XI

ECLIPSES OF THE SUN AND MOON

We do not know what great comets, or aerolites, or "star-showers" were seen in Palestine during the centuries in which the books of the Bible were composed. But we do know that eclipses, both of the sun and moon, must have been seen, for these are not the results of chance conjunctions. We know more, that not only partial eclipses of the sun, but total eclipses, fell within the period so covered.

There is no phenomenon of nature which is so truly impressive as a total eclipse of the sun. The beautiful pageants of the evening and the morning are too often witnessed to produce the same effect upon us, whilst the storm and the earthquake and the volcano in eruption, by the confusion and fear for personal safety they produce, render men unfit to watch their developments. But the eclipse awes and subdues by what might almost be called moral means alone: no noise, no danger accompanies it; the body is not tortured, nor the mind confused by the rush of the blast, the crash of the thunder-peal, the rocking of the earthquake, or the fires of the volcano. The only sense appealed to is that of sight; the movements of the orbs of heaven go on without noise or confusion, and with a majestic smoothness in which there is neither hurry nor delay.

This impression is felt by every one, no matter how perfectly acquainted, not only with the cause of the phenomenon, but also with the appearances to be expected, and scientific men have found themselves awestruck and even overwhelmed.

But if such are the feelings called forth by an eclipse now-a-days, in those who are expecting it, who are prepared for it, knowing perfectly what will happen and what brings it about, how can we gauge aright the unspeakable terror such an event must have caused in ages long ago, when it came utterly unforeseen, and it was impossible to understand what was really taking place?

And so, in olden time, an eclipse of the sun came as an omen of terrible disaster, nay as being itself one of the worst of disasters. It came so to all nations but one. But to that nation the word of the prophet had come—

"Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them."

God did not reveal the physical explanation of the eclipse to the Hebrews: that, in process of time, they could learn by the exercise of their own mental powers. But He set them free from the slavish fear of the heathen; they could look at all these terror-striking signs without fear; they could look with calmness, with confidence, because they looked in faith.

It is not easy to exaggerate the advantage which this must have given the Hebrews over the neighbouring nations, from a scientific point of view. The word of God gave them intellectual freedom, and so far as they were faithful to it, there was no hindrance to their fully working out the scientific problems which came before them. They neither worshipped the heavenly bodies nor were dismayed at their signs. We have no record as to how far the Hebrews made use of this freedom, for, as already pointed out, the Holy Scriptures were not written to chronicle their scientific achievements. But there can be no doubt that, given the leisure of peace, it is a priori more likely that they should have taught astronomy to their neighbours, than have learnt it even from the most advanced.

There must have been numberless eclipses of the moon seen in the ages during which the Canon of Holy Scripture was written. Of eclipses of the sun, total or very nearly total over the regions of Palestine or Mesopotamia, in the times of the Old Testament, we know of four that were actually seen, whose record is preserved in contemporaneous history, and a fifth that was nearly total in Judaea about midday.

The first of the four is recorded on a tablet from Babylon, lately deciphered, in which it states that on "the 26th day of Sivan, day was turned into night, and fire appeared in the midst of heaven." This has been identified with the eclipse of July 31, 1063 B.C., and we do not find any reference to it in Scripture.

The second is that of Aug. 15, 831 B.C. No specific record of this eclipse has been found as yet, but it took place during the lifetime of the prophets Joel and Amos, and may have been seen by them, and their recollection of it may have influenced the wording of their prophecies.

The third eclipse is recorded on a tablet from Nineveh, stating the coincidence of an eclipse in Sivan with a revolt in the city of Assur. This has been identified with the eclipse of June 15, 763 B.C.

The fourth is that known as the eclipse of Larissa on May 18, 603 B.C., which was coincident with the final overthrow of the Assyrian Empire, and the fifth is that of Thales on May 28, 585 B.C.