The Astronomy of the Bible, E. Walter Maunder [the reading strategies book TXT] 📗

"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 mediæval 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