The Astronomy of the Bible

trument at once revealed to him the mountains on the moon, the satellites of Jupiter, and the spots on the sun, and brought the celestial bodies under observation in a way that no

mplex; clusters and clouds of stars have been revealed to us, and mysterious nebul?, which suggest by their forms that they are systems of suns in the making. More lately the invention of the spectroscope has informed us of the very elements which go to the composition of these numberless stars,

planets until they yielded him their secret so far that he was able to express them in three simple laws, laws which, two generations later, Sir Isaac Newton demonstrated

in their own ability to discover for themselves. Men's mental powers have developed by their exercise; they would have been stunted had men been led to look to revelation rather than to diligent effort for the satisfaction of their curiosity. We theref

mination of the positions of the heavenly bodies; on the mathematical, the development of geometry and trigonometry for the interpretation of those positions when thus determined. Amongst the great names of this period are those of Eudoxus of Knidus (b.c. 408-355), and Hipparchus of Bithynia, who lived rather more than two centuries later. Under its first leaders astronomy in the Classical age began to advance rapidly, but it soon experienced a deadly blight. Men were no

he Old Testament; so we do not find any reference in Holy Scripture to the astronomical achievements of that period, amo

d, the ecliptic, the celestial equator, and the poles of both great circles were known, and the five principal planets were familiar objects. This Early astronomy must have had its history, its stages of development, but we can only with difficulty trace them out. It cannot have sprung into existence full-grown an

would be imparted to the writers of sacred books, two or three thousand years before the progress of science had brought those facts to light, and we ought not to be surprised if expressions are occasionally used which we should not ourselves use to-day, if we were writing about the phenomena of nature from a technical point of view. It must further be bo

iscover what ideas the ancient Jewish sages held regarding the structure of the universe, what observations they made of the stars, and how far they made use of them for the measurement and division of time"-is open to this criticism,-that sufficient material for carrying it out is not within our reach. If we were to accept i

use. But there is one characteristic of all these references to the phenomena of Nature, that may not be ignored. None of the ancients ever approached the great Hebrew writers

striking as is the superiority of their religious conceptions over those of the surrounding nations. We cannot, of course, conceive of the average Jew as an Isaiah, any more than we can conceive of the average Englishman as a Shakespeare, ye

for the most part the record of a struggle for bare existence; and after three or four centuries of the unequal conflict, first the one and then the other of the two siste

red disruption under his grandson, Rehoboam; and it is significant that tradition has ascribed to Solomon and to his times just such a scientific

Solomon himself described, but other men, contemporaries either of his father David or h

all men; than Ethan the Ezrahite, and Heman, and Chalcol, and Darda, the sons of Mahol: and his fame was in all nations round about. And he spake three thousand proverbs: and his songs were a thousand and five. And he spake of trees, from the cedar-tree that i

is also preserved in the words put into his mouth in the Bo

ns of the solstices and the changes of seasons, the circuits of years and the positions" (margin, constellations) "of stars; the natures of living creatures and the ragings of wild beasts, the violences of

y secret source of knowledge; and the other that of Alexander the Great, as the mightiest of conquerors. It is not unreasonable to beli

d to for their own sake. Every thought leads up to God or to man's relation to Him. Nature, as a whole and in its every aspect and detail, is the handiwork of Jehovah: that is the truth w

hy heavens, the wo

stars, which Th

hat Thou art m

man, that Tho

ed to teach. Following this, it will be of interest to examine what connection can be traced between the Old Testament Scriptures and the Constellations; the arrangement of the stars into constellations having been the chief astronomical work effected during the centuries when those Scriptures were severally composed

TNO

y in the Old T