he old joke–was it from Elaine Boosler’s standup routine?–is that the Israelites spent forty years wandering the desert because the men wouldn’t stop and ask for directions.
But I have a different theory: that they didn’t know enough astronomy to know that the Sun rises in the East and that the stars at night slowly revolve around a point in the northern sky. At least, that’s what you’d assume based on the fact that there’s scarcely any mention of stars in either the Old or New Testament.
Apart from the Star of Bethlehem, is there any mention of any star or other celestial object, anywhere in the Bible? In the Talmud? I’m curious that the records of a pastoral people would not show any awareness at all of constellations, bright individual stars, and planets.
Why do I think the answer might be obvious? I’m thinking that it’s because such knowledge had pagan, polytheistic overtones, and were prohibited from public discourse long before the books that went into the Bible were written down. But I don’t know, I’m just guessing.
Let me be the first to completely disagree with you. I don’t have an answer for you, but I seriously doubt that mankind “forgot” astronomy for a few years while the Bible was written. The study of the stars has been around a looooonng time and we have mucho archaelogical evidence to prove it.
I had just typed up a long post detailing the number of references to stars in the bible, but then it got lost, for some reason, and I’m not going to repost it. But to summarize what I was saying, there are a lot of references to stars as a whole throughout the bible, the book of Job mentions the Zodiac (and says that it progresses through the seasons), the Great and Little Bear, Orion, and the Pleaides, and the book of Amos condemns the worship of the planet Saturn.
There’s also the recognition that stars have fixed paths throughout the sky.
I didn’t mean to suggest that the Israelites were truly ignorant of astronomy, but merely that any discussion of such in public discourse was no longer tolerated. Especially if astronomy was equated with astrology and fortunetelling, as it was in most early cultures, I could see how you might not want to advertise the fact that you knew what time Jupiter would rise, or when the next lunar eclipse would appear.
When I attributed the wandering in the desert to ignorance of astronomical facts, I was being facetious.
Also, the Talmud talks about the paths of the planets and constellations, talks about how to calculate direction based on the position of Taurus and Scorpio, that the planet Jupiter influences the weather, that the position of the planets at someone’s birth influences their personality, as well as a bunch of other stuff.
In addition to that, the Hebrew calender is lunar, so there’s a lot in there about calculating the phases of the moon
If you reflect on this notion for a moment, perhaps you’ll realize how utterly ridiculous it is. Of all the bone-obvious, consistent, impossible-to-ignore phenomena in the world, the Sun rising in the East is right up there with rain coming from up above. I find it inconceivable that any humans, anywhere, anytime did not know that.
I’m probably being whooshed, but they weren’t wandering in the desert because they were lost. They were being led by a pillar of cloud (by day) and a pillar of fire (by night) and were being divinely guided. And the divine plan was that they spend 40 years (a generational change) before arriving at the land.
The episode of the Golden Calf made it clear that the generation that was enslaved would not accept their new status, but constantly looked back to how good they had it in Egypt. They needed a new generation to take over, one that did not have nostalgia for a remembered Egypt.
So, their knowledge of astronomy and ability to navigate were irrelevant. They were being deliberately led in circles.
SoP: *Especially if astronomy was equated with astrology and fortunetelling, as it was in most early cultures, I could see how you might not want to advertise the fact that you knew what time Jupiter would rise, or when the next lunar eclipse would appear. *
Actually, astrology per se (horoscopes and houses and ascendants and stuff) wasn’t developed until a couple of centuries before the beginning of the current era. The Mesopotamians apparently did have systems of astral omens, which are more general forms of celestial divination (“Venus rises with the Sun: crops will be plentiful” and that sort of thing), from around 2000 BCE onward. But they don’t seem to have become widespread in neighboring cultures till the first millennium BCE or thereabouts.
There’s no evidence that the Israelites of the early Old Testament ever had a better-than-basic understanding of astronomical phenomena. Sure, they recognized the existence of stars, and knew the basic facts about days and months and seasons, but there’s no reason to think that they were predicting complicated phenomena like planetary motions, such as the rising of Jupiter and so forth. The sophisticated astronomy and calendrics that Captain Amazing is talking about dates from a somewhat later period, when Babylonian mathematical astronomy had become well known in the Near East.
You may be right, though, that the Biblical Israelites at some point viewed astronomical calculation with suspicion, because of its association among their pagan neighbors with celestial divination and other types of witchcrafty unGodly stuff. Consider the rebuke in Isaiah 47:13:
Predicting the appearance of the new lunar crescent was a standard Babylonian astronomical technique as well as being connected with celestial divination, but the Hebrews probably regarded the whole thing as suspect and probably idolatrous.
Is there something divine that’s keeping the rest of you from stating the more basic truth?
The whole wandering in the desert for 40 years is a fictional allegory. It never happened. There’s no evidence that any of the events SoP is referring to occurred in real life. None. Not a shred.
It’s a story. A fable. An instructional tale. It doesn’t have to conform with reality.
True, it probably has as much accurate science as many of today’s movies.
If so, then I provided a factual answer to the OP.
It supplements the points given by the other posters, but it is a necessary beginning to any discussion here. The astronomical knowledge of characters in fiction cannot be directly addressed in GQ: only peripheral issues can.
If SoP wants to take this to Care Society alongside of the discussions of the science of Star Trek, then people can argue anything they please.
If they existed at all, they were nomads. Wandering is what nomads do. Nomads are not lost, looking for a permanent settlement location; nomads are pastoral; they move around with the seasons, crops, grazing opportunities, whatever. Exhausted the foliage nearby? Move on to better pastures.
As for the biblical stars, they are not ignored. Even the morning stars “sang together” says Job 38:7.
No, you didn’t. You just asserted that the events narrated in the bible didn’t happen. That’s as may be, but it doesn’t answer the question of why the stars are “virtually ignored in the Bible”.
We can consider the astrological beliefs and astrolonomical awareness of the <i>authors</I> of the biblical text just as readily as about the beliefs and awareness of the <i>characters in it</i>. Whether the events actually happened as related, or at all, may be irrelevant to the issue of why stars are treated as they are in the scriptures. Factors which might lead actual Israelites wandering in the desert to ignore the navigational utility of stars might equally lead actual Israelites framing a narrative about wandering in the desert to ignore the navigational utility of stars.
