The Astronomy of the Bible

e 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 als

nd the morning we

ces 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;

s. 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

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 concre

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

t 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

til 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

at he "returned from the battle from the ascent of Heres." There was a mount ?eres, a mount of the sun, in the portion of the Danites held by the Amorites, but that cannot have been the ?eres 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 ?eres 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 (?eres) 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

nguage of Canaan, and swear to the Lord of hosts; one shall be called The city of destruction;" lit. of ?eres, or of the sun. It was upon the strength of this text that Onias, the son of Onias the

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 woul

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 app

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

oss solid bodies, like earth and sea, sun and moon might require a Creator, yet something so ethereal and all-pervading as light wa

, 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

oing 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 i

re 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 pure

ce to the earth's rotation, but when carefully examined it is seen to be dealing s

nded the morning

dayspring to

ke hold of the e

d might be sha

d as clay t

stand as

and this, we know, takes place, morning by morning, in consequence of the diurn

ed as clay u

s stand forth

ed over it. So a garment, laid aside and folded up during the night, is shapeless, but once again takes form when the wearer put

ing 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 t

k 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

eans 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 pro

ve, and cometh down from the Father of Lights, with

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 l

ge and of their changes. The physical facts that we have learned in

sphere is certainly pretty sharply defined, though very irregular, rising at points into whiter aggregations, called "facul?," 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 t

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

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 var

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 hypothe

to be given to such evidence, there is continual conflict-if it may so be called-between the old and the new science, between t

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 th

ought 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 phras

ion 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 f

n and earth are-whether he can treat them as things that can be weighed, measured, compared, analyzed, as, a

em, 'in Him we live and move and have our being.' The planets are

hat t

r, having Love

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

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

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 the

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s, Antiquities