The sky scripture names

The teaching

As the King James Bible teaches it.

Lights for signs and seasons

The first chapter of Genesis gives the lights of the sky their work: “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.” Then: “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.” The lights are made things with a task, to divide, to mark and to rule, and the Hebrew word behind seasons is the word for the appointed times of the feasts.

The Moon and the feasts

The feasts keep that appointment. Passover falls at the full moon of the first month of spring and the feast of Tabernacles at the full moon of the seventh month, and the new moon is greeted with the trumpet: “Blow up the trumpet in the new moon, in the time appointed, on our solemn feast day.”

Jeremiah makes the order of the sky a pledge that does not fail: “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.” As long as those ordinances hold, he says, so will the covenant.

The heavens declare

The nineteenth psalm hears the sky speak without words: “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.” It follows the Sun across the heavens like a bridegroom and a runner, from one end of the sky to the other, with nothing hid from its heat, and then turns to the law of God, which it praises in the same breath.

The eighth psalm draws the opposite lesson from the same night sky: “When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; What is man, that thou art mindful of him?” And another psalm gives the stars their keeper: “He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them all by their names.”

Job's stars

Job names the constellations twice. “Which maketh Arcturus, Orion, and Pleiades, and the chambers of the south.” And in the voice from the whirlwind: “Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons?”

The Hebrew names are Kimah, the Pleiades, a close cluster of stars; Kesil, Orion, a word that also means a fool, and whose bands suggest a giant bound in the sky; and Ash or Ayish, which the King James gives as Arcturus and many now take for the Bear, with his sons the stars that follow it. Mazzaroth may be the constellations, the signs of the zodiac or a single group of stars, and the chambers of the south may be the stars of the southern sky. The words behind sweet influences can also be read as chains, and many later versions bind the Pleiades with them.

The same speech remembers the morning of creation: “When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”

Amos and the seven stars

Amos calls on his hearers: “Seek him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark with night.” The seven stars are the Pleiades. In the same chapter he condemns the worship of a star: “But ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves.” Chiun is the Babylonian name of Saturn, and Stephen quotes the verse in the book of Acts.

Stars in the stories

Abraham is shown the sky as a promise: “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.” Joseph dreams it: “Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and the moon and the eleven stars made obeisance to me.” Deborah sings that the sky itself took her side: “They fought from heaven; the stars in their courses fought against Sisera.” And Joshua commands it in battle: “Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.”

The host of heaven forbidden

The scriptures know the worship of the sky and refuse it. Deuteronomy warns: “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, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them.” King Josiah put down the priests who burned incense “to the sun, and to the moon, and to the planets, and to all the host of heaven”; the word given as planets is mazzalot, which the King James margin offers as the twelve signs or constellations.

Jeremiah adds the counsel that keeps the sky from being read as a threat: “Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them.”

The morning star

Isaiah's taunt over the king of Babylon uses the planet that rises before the dawn: “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!” In Hebrew it is the shining one, son of the dawn, the morning star, which climbs and then fades as the Sun comes up. The New Testament gives the same star to Christ: “I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.” And Peter speaks of waiting “until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts.”

The star of the wise men

Matthew tells of travellers from the east: “For we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.” And later: “and, lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.” The text calls them wise men, magi, and gives no number; the three come from their three gifts, and the crowns from later tradition.

Signs at the end

The prophets and the Gospels darken the sky at the end of an age. Isaiah: “For the stars of heaven and the constellations thereof shall not give their light,” where the word for constellations is the plural of Kesil, Orion. Luke: “And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars.” Revelation shows “a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars,” and explains its own figure of seven stars in a hand: “The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches.”

Reading them

These passages are read with the book open and in their places, a chapter around each verse, noting what is named, what is said of it and who is speaking. Then, on a clear winter evening, a reader can find Orion and the Pleiades for themselves, as Job's first hearers could. Taken together, the texts use the stars to praise their maker, to measure how small a person is beside them, and to keep time for the feasts, and they refuse both to worship the stars and to fear them.