Part 18 (1/2)

CHAPTER VI

THE PLEIADES

The translators of the Bible, from time to time, find themselves in a difficulty as to the correct rendering of certain words in the original.

This is especially the case with the names of plants and animals. Some sort of clue may be given by the context, as, for instance, if the region is mentioned in which a certain plant is found, or the use that is made of it; or, in the case of an animal, whether it is ”clean” or ”unclean,” what are its habits, and with what other animals it is a.s.sociated. But in the case of the few Scripture references to special groups of stars, we have no such help. We are in the position in which Macaulay's New Zealander might be, if, long after the English nation had been dispersed, and its language had ceased to be spoken amongst men, he were to find a book in which the rivers ”Thames,” ”Trent,” ”Tyne,” and ”Tweed” were mentioned by name, but without the slightest indication of their locality. His attempt to fit these names to particular rivers would be little more than a guess--a guess the accuracy of which he would have no means for testing.

This is somewhat our position with regard to the four Hebrew names, _Kimah_, _Kesil_, _'Ayish_, and _Mazzaroth_; yet in each case there are some slight indications which have given a clue to the compilers of our Revised Version, and have, in all probability, guided them correctly.

The constellations are not all equally attractive. A few have drawn the attention of all men, however otherwise inattentive. North-American Indians and Australian savages have equally noted the flas.h.i.+ng brilliancy of Orion, and the compact little swarm of the Pleiades. All northern nations recognize the seven bright stars of the Great Bear, and they are known by a score of familiar names. They are the ”Plough,” or ”Charles's Wain” of Northern Europe; the ”Seven Plough Oxen” of ancient Rome; the ”Bier and Mourners” of the Arabs; the ”Chariot,” or ”Waggon,”

of the old Chaldeans; the ”Big Dipper” of the prosaic New England farmer. These three groups are just the three which we find mentioned in the earliest poetry of Greece. So Homer writes, in the Fifth Book of the _Odyssey_, that Ulysses--

”There view'd the Pleiads, and the Northern Team, And Great Orion's more refulgent beam, To which, around the axle of the sky, The Bear, revolving, points his golden eye.”

It seems natural to conclude that these constellations, the most striking, or at all events the most universally recognized, would be those mentioned in the Bible.

The pa.s.sages in which the Hebrew word _Kimah_, is used are the following--

(G.o.d) ”maketh Arcturus, Orion, and Pleiades (_Kimah_), and the chambers of the south” (Job ix. 9).

”Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades (_Kimah_), or loose the bands of Orion?” (Job x.x.xviii. 31).

”Seek Him that maketh the seven stars (_Kimah_) and Orion”

(Amos v. 8).

In our Revised Version, _Kimah_ is rendered ”Pleiades” in all three instances, and of course the translators of the Authorized Version meant the same group by the ”seven stars” in their free rendering of the pa.s.sage from Amos. The word _kimah_ signifies ”a heap,” or ”a cl.u.s.ter,”

and would seem to be related to the a.s.syrian word _kimtu_, ”family,”

from a root meaning to ”tie,” or ”bind”; a family being a number of persons bound together by the very closest tie of relations.h.i.+p. If this be so we can have no doubt that our translators have rightly rendered the word. There is one cl.u.s.ter in the sky, and one alone, which appeals to the unaided sight as being distinctly and unmistakably a family of stars--the Pleiades.

The names _'Ash_, or _'Ayish_, _Kesil_, and _Kimah_ are peculiar to the Hebrews, and are not, so far as we have any evidence at present, allied to names in use for any constellation amongst the Babylonians and a.s.syrians; they have, as yet, not been found on any cuneiform inscription. Amos, the herdsman of Tekoa, living in the eighth century B.C., two centuries before the Jews were carried into exile to Babylon, evidently knew well what the terms signified, and the writer of the Book of Job was no less aware of their signification. But the ”Seventy,” who translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, were not at all clear as to the identification of these names of constellations; though they made their translation only two or three centuries after the Jews returned to Jerusalem under Ezra and Nehemiah, when oral tradition should have still supplied the meaning of such astronomical terms. Had these names been then known in Babylon, they could not have been unknown to the learned men of Alexandria in the second century before our era, since at that time there was a very direct scientific influence of the one city upon the other. This Hebrew astronomy was so far from being due to Babylonian influence and teaching, that, though known centuries before the exile, after the exile we find the knowledge of its technical terms was lost.

On the other hand, _kima_ was the term used in all Syriac literature to denominate the Pleiades, and we accordingly find in the Peschitta, the ancient Syriac version of the Bible, made about the second century A.D., the term _kima_ retained throughout, but _kesil_ and _'ayish_ were reduced to their supposed Syriac equivalents.

Whatever uncertainty was felt as to the meaning of _kimah_ by the early translators, it is not now seriously disputed that the Pleiades is the group of stars in question.

The word _kimah_ means, as we have seen, ”cl.u.s.ter” or ”heap,” so also the word _Pleiades_, which we use to-day, is probably derived from the Greek _Pleiones_, ”many.” Several Greek poets--Athenaeus, Hesiod, Pindar, and Simonides--wrote the word _Peleiades_, i. e. ”rock pigeons,”

considered as flying from the Hunter Orion; others made them the seven doves who carried ambrosia to the infant Zeus. D'Arcy Thompson says, ”The Pleiad is in many languages a.s.sociated with bird-names, . . . and I am inclined to take the bird on the bull's back in coins of Eretria, Dicaea, and Thurii for the a.s.sociated constellation of the Pleiad”[217:1]--the Pleiades being situated on the shoulder of Taurus the Bull.

The Hyades were situated on the head of the Bull, and in the Euphrates region these two little groups of stars were termed together, _Mas-tab-ba-gal-gal-la_, the Great Twins of the ecliptic, as Castor and Pollux were the Twins of the zodiac. In one tablet _'imina bi_, ”the sevenfold one,” and _Gut-dua_, ”the Bull-in-front,” are mentioned side by side, thus agreeing well with their interpretation of ”Pleiades and Hyades.” The Semitic name for the Pleiades was also _Temennu_; and these groups of stars, wors.h.i.+pped as G.o.ds by the Babylonians, may possibly have been the _Gad_ and _Meni_, ”that troop,” and ”that number,”

referred to by the prophet Isaiah (lxv. 11).

On many Babylonian cylinder seals there are engraved seven small discs, in addition to other astronomical symbols. These seven small stellar discs are almost invariably arranged in the form :::' or::: much as we should now-a-days plot the cl.u.s.ter of the Pleiades when mapping on a small scale the constellations round the Bull. It is evident that these seven little stellar discs do not mean the ”seven planets,” for in many cases the astronomical symbols which accompany them include both those of the sun and moon. It is most probable that they signify the Pleiades, or perhaps alternatively the Hyades.

Possibly, reference is made to the wors.h.i.+p of the Pleiades when the king of a.s.syria, in the seventh century B.C., brought men from Babylon and other regions to inhabit the depopulated cities of Samaria, ”and the men of Babylon made Succoth-benoth.” The Rabbis are said to have rendered this by the ”booths of the Maidens,” or the ”tents of the Daughters,”--the Pleiades being the maidens in question.

Generally they are the Seven Sisters. Hesiod calls them the Seven Virgins, and the Virgin Stars. The names given to the individual stars are those of the seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione; thus Milton terms them the Seven Atlantic Sisters.

As we have seen (p. 189), the device a.s.sociated expressly with Joseph is the Bull, and Jacob's blessing to his son has been sometimes rendered--