The Astronomy of the Bible Part 6

CHAPTER VI

THE SUN

"And G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d as "the Father of lights."

But in none of these or the other parallel pa.s.sages 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 G.o.d; they are things and things only, and are not even the shrines of a deity. They may be used as emblems of G.o.d 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 G.o.d, in transgressing His covenant and hath gone and served other G.o.ds, 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, Mana.s.seh 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-G.o.d 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 x.x.xi. 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 ?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 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-G.o.d, 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-G.o.ddess, 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 _?eres_, 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 a.s.sistance. 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 cla.s.sical 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 circ.u.mstances 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 a.s.sured 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. G.o.d is light, but light is not G.o.d.

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 compa.s.s of the whole earth. "The mighty G.o.d, 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 pa.s.sage 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 pa.s.sing 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 G.o.d'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 pa.s.s 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."

G.o.d, 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 G.o.d. 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 pa.s.sage 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 const.i.tution being a mere matter of inference. The "photosphere" is a sh.e.l.l of incandescent cloud surrounding the nucleus, but the depth, or thickness of this sh.e.l.l 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.

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 acc.u.mulate. In a few hundred years, knowledge of the const.i.tution 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 const.i.tution 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 acc.u.mulated, 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 acc.u.mulation 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 att.i.tude 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, a.n.a.lyzed, 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 a.s.sailed, and they must stand or fall together. The believer in one G.o.d cannot acknowledge a Sun-G.o.d, 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 ant.i.thesis restated of the Hebrew and the heathen. The believer in one G.o.d 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 a.s.syrian religions.

But polytheism--whether in its gross form of many G.o.ds, 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.