“Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them,” the Lord told Abram in a vision, and then added, “So shall your descendants be” (Genesis 15:5).
The Lord appeared to Isaac and told him, “I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven” (Genesis 26:4).
There is a problem with this oft-repeated and oft-referred-to divine promise. There really aren’t that many stars in heaven that can be seen with the unaided eye. Astronomers tell us that without some form of telescope we can see only between 2,000 and 4,000 stars, even on a good night. That’s not really that many descendants. A single generation of Hebrews no doubt exceeded this number at a very early point in their history.
Did the biblical writer think 4,000 was a lot? Or, as he looked into the heavens, did he estimate badly and fail to realize that the number of visible stars was quite limited? Perhaps it seemed to him that there were countless stars in the heavens even though in fact there were only, at most, 4,000 visible to his eyes.
Or perhaps there is another explanation—suggested by other verses in the Bible. Elsewhere in the Bible, the divine promise is expressed not only in terms of the number of stars in the heavens, but in terms of the sands by the seashore and the dust of the earth. Now here we are truly talking about big numbers.
For example, in Genesis 22:17, an angel of the Lord, speaking in the Lord’s name, tells Abraham, “I will bestow my blessing on you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands on the seashore.”
In Genesis 28:14 the comparison is with the dust of the earth. The Lord tells Jacob, “Your descendants shall be as the dust of the earth.”
Surely even a casual observer would know that the grains of sand on the seashore or particles of dust on the earth are far greater than the comparatively few stars in heaven visible to the unaided eye. Why would the biblical writer make such a lopsided comparison? The divine promise was, on the one hand, comparatively quite small (the stars in heaven) and, on the other hand, enormous (the sands of the sea and the dust of the earth). But is the comparison so lopsided? Did the biblical writer know there were billions of stars?
In fact, there are billions of stars, not just 4,000.a But only recently has modern astronomy—with its powerful telescopes—discovered this. The biblical writer could not have known this.
Or could he? If he did, this would indeed have made the analogy to the stars quite apt, as it is for the sand and the dust. It would also make more sense to join the number of stars in the heavens to the number of sands by the sea or to the dust on the earth in the various statements of the divine promise.
Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian, quotes a third-century B.C. Babylonian writer named Becosus to the effect that Abraham was an astronomer. According to Josephus, Becosus described Abraham as “a man righteous and great, and skillful in the celestial science.”1
Is it possible that the biblical writer knew and Abraham understood that there were billions of stars? Could the ancients have had telescopes that revealed stars the naked eye could not see?
A rock-crystal lens found in the ruins of the treasure house at Nineveh suggests that they may indeed have known. Sir David Brewster, an authority on optics, made a 047careful examination of the lens and presented his findings to the British Association in 1852.2 He said the lens had a plano-convex form (the reference says “concave” in one place and “convex” in another, but the latter appears to be correct). Experiments with polarized light showed that its plane face had been “one of the original faces of the six-sided crystal of quartz.” The convex face had been shaped on a lapidary’s wheel, or by some similarly crude method, which gave the lens an unequal thickness, with 0.2 inches as a maximum and a focal length of 4.5 inches. The lens was also imperfectly circular across its faces, having diameters that ranged between 1.6 and 1.4 inches. These dimensions are similar to those of the lenses in Galileo’s first telescope, but a second lens would have been necessary to achieve magnification. Sir David concluded that the crystal “could not be looked on as an ornament, but as a true optical lens.”
This is not the only known ancient lens, however. In July 1930, the British Journal of Physiological Optics published a survey by H. L. Taylor on “The Origin and Development of Lenses in Ancient Times.” As a result of his examination of lenses in eastern Mediterranean museums, including some “perfect lenses” found at Knossus and Mount Ida, Taylor attributed the development of lenses to the Cretans of 1800 B.C. Five glass lenses from Carthage are of particular interest, because two of them hint at a practical function. These two were discovered “in the sarcophagus of a prominent individual, who, it is presumed, suffered from presbyopia and wished to protect himself against this disability in his next existence.”3
Although we have no definite evidence of how these lenses were used, we may wonder: Did the biblical writer make an inept comparison of the patriarch’s descendants with the stars of the heavens, or did the biblical writer know long before modern science that there are, in fact, billions of stars?
The foregoing article was suggested by reader Bill Ickes of Berlin, Pennsylvania, who also supplied the biblical and other references. We are grateful to Dr. Kenneth Brecher, Department of Astronomy, Boston University, and to Dr. Roger A. Bell, professor of astronomy at the University of Maryland, for their comments and corrections. The decoration and quote appear in the Star Garden at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, D.C. The quote comes from Chaucer’s translation of Boethius’s early sixth-century A.D., Christian work, Consolation of Philosophy.
Biblical Astronomy
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