1. Names of the Week-Days, Due to an Astrological System:
In astrology the planets were regarded as being 7 in number, but the idea that the number 7 derived its sacredness from this fact is an inversion of the true state of the case. It was that 7 being regarded as a sacred number, the number of the planets was artificially made to correspond by including in the same class as the five wandering stars, bodies that differed so widely from them in appearance as the sun and moon. So artificial a classification cannot have been primitive, and it is significant that in Ge 1:14 the sun and moon are presented as being (as indeed they appear to be) of an altogether different order from the rest of the heavenly bodies. Yet there is one feature that they have in common with the five planets: all move among the stars within the band of the zodiac; each of the seven makes the circuit of the mazzaloth.
We owe the names of the days of the week to this astrological conception of the planets as being 7 in number, and some writers (e.g. R. A. Proctor in his Myths and Marvels of Astronomy, 43-47) have supposed that the week of 7 days owed its origin to this astrological conception and that the 7th day--Saturn's Day--became the Sabbath, the Day of Rest, because Saturn was the planet of ill-omen and it was then unlucky to undertake any work. The way in which the allotment of the planets to the days of the week was arrived at was the following. The Greek astronomers and mathematicians concluded that the planet Saturn was the most distant from the earth and that the others followed in the descending order of Jupiter, Mars, Sun, Venus, Mercury, Moon. In the progress of astrology there came a time when it was found necessary to assign a planet to every hour so as to increase the number of omens it could afford. Starting then with Saturn as presiding over the first hour of the first day, each planet was used three times over on that day, and three planets were used a fourth time. The sun, the fourth planet, took therefore the first hour of the second day, and gave it its name, so that Sunday followed Saturday. In like manner the third day became the moon's day, and so on with the other planets which followed in the order Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and again Saturn. This idea of the relative distances of the planets was that arrived at by the astronomers of Alexandria, and was necessarily subsequent to the reduction of the planetary motions to a mathematical system by Eudoxus and his successors. The division of the day implied was one of 24 hours, not of 12; the Egyptian division, not the Babylonian. But the Egyptian week was one of 10 days, the 7-day week was Semitic, and the week implied in the system is the free week, running on continuously, the Jewish week, not the Babylonian. For the Babylonians, though they paid some attention to the 7th day, began their reckoning afresh at the beginning of each month. This particular astrological system therefore owed its origin to four distinct nationalities. The conception of the influence of the planets was Babylonian; the mathematical working out of the order of the planets was exclusively Gr; the division of the day into 24 hours was Egyptian; the free continuous 7-day week was particularly Jewish. These four influences were brought together in Alexandria not very long before the Christian era. Here therefore and at this time, this particular system of astrology took its origin.
This form of astrology was readily adopted by the Jews in their degenerate days, as we find from references in Talmud. Thus, Rabbi Chanena said to his disciples, "Go and tell Ben Laive, the planetary influence does not depend upon days but hours. He that is born under the influence of the sun (no matter on what day) will have a beaming face"; and so the rabbi went through the whole list of the planets (Shabbath, fol 156, col. 1). The above was spoken as a criticism of Rabbi Shimon Ben Laive who had written, "Whoever is born on the first day of the week will be either a thoroughly good or a thoroughly bad man; because light and darkness was created on that day"; and the rabbi spoke similarly for the other days. We get a relic of this superstition in our nursery rhyme, "Monday's child is full of grace; Tuesday's child is fair of face," etc.; and some present-day astrologers still use the system for their forecasts. It will of course be noted that the system takes no account of the actual positions of the heavenly bodies;. the moon does not shine more or less on Monday than on any other day.
2. Origin of Modern Astrology:
It was from Alexandrian astrology that modern astrology immediately derived its form; but the original source of all astrology in the ancient world lay in the system of planetary idolatry prevalent in the Euphrates valley, and in the fact that this idolatry was practiced chiefly for the purpose of divination. At one time it was supposed that a real astronomy was cultivated at an early time in Babylonia, but Jastrow, Kugler and others have shown that this idea is without basis. The former writes, "The fact however is significant that, with perhaps some exceptions, we have in the library of Ashurbanipal representing to a large extent copies from older originals, no text that can properly be called astronomical ..... It is certainly significant that the astronomical tablets so far found belong to the latest period, and in fact to the age following on the fall of the Babylonian empire. According to Kugler the oldest dated genuinely astronomical tablet belongs to the 7th year of Cambyses, i.e. 522 BC" ("Hepatoscopy and Astrology in Babylonia and Assyria," in Proc. Amer. Phil. Soc., 667).
The conquests of Alexander the Great brought into close connection with each other the Babylonian and Greek systems of thought, and Babylonian astrology was introduced to the Greeks by Berosus the Chaldean priest. In Greek hands, astrology was changed from its character of an oriental religion into the appearance of a science. In Babylonia the stars had been consulted for the benefit of the king as representing the state; amongst the Greeks, with their strong individualistic tendency, the fortunes of the individual became the most frequent subject of inquiry, and the idea was originated of determining the character and fortune of a man from the position of the stars at his birth--genethlialogy--a phase of astrology which never existed in the Euphrates valley. This extension rendered it necessary to increase greatly the complexities of the omens, and the progress which the Greeks had made in mathematics supplied them with the means of doing so. Thus came into existence that complex and symmetrical system of divination of which we have the earliest complete exposition in the writings of Claudius Ptolemy about 130 AD; a system which, though modified in details, is in effect that in use today.
3. "Curious Arts" of Ephesus:
Since this mathematical astrology did not come into existence until about the commencement of the Christian era, it is clear that there could not be any reference to its particular form in the Old Testament. We may probably see one reference in the New Testament (Ac 19:19). Of the converts at Ephesus it is written, "Not a few of them that practiced magical arts brought their books together and burned them in the sight of all; and they counted the price of them, and found it 50,000 pieces of silver." Books of magical incantations and prescriptions were certainly included, but it is also likely that the almanacs, tables and formulas, essential to the astrologer for the exercise of his art, were also in the number. It was of course impossible then, as now, for the convert to Christianity to consult astrologers or to practice astrological divination. Partly because it was an absurdity, for the divisions of the heavens upon which the predictions are based, are purely imaginary; the "signs" of the zodiac, and the "houses" have nothing whatsoever correspending to them in Nature; such division is exactly that denounced by the prophets of old as qecem, "divination." Next, and of more importance, it ascribes to mere creatures, the planets or the spirits supposed to preside over them, the powers that belong to God alone; it was and is essentially idolatrous. As one of the chief living astrologers puts it, "The TRUE astrologer believes that the sun is the body of the Loges 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 Loges" (Knowledge, XXIII, 228). Astrology is indeed referred to in the Old Testament, with other forms of divination, and the idolatry inherent in them, but they are only mentioned in terms of the most utter reprobation. The Jews alone of all the nations of antiquity were taught by their religion neither to resort to such arts nor to be afraid of the omens deduced from them. Isaiah knew the Lord to be He that "frustrateth the signs of the liars, and maketh diviners mad" (Isa 44:25), and Jeremiah declared, "Thus saith Yahweh, Learn not the way of the nations, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the nations are dismayed at them" (Jer 10:2). And what held good for the Jews of old holds good for us today. Above all, astrology is an attempt to ascertain the will of God by other means than those which He has appointed--His Son, who is the Way and the Truth and the Life, and His Holy Scriptures in which we learn of Him, and which are able to make us "wise unto salvation through faith which is in Christ Jesus" (2Ti 3:15).
LITERATURE.
Franz Boll, Sphaera: Neue griechische Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der Sternbilder, 1903; Kugler, Kulturhistorische Bedeutung der babylonischen Astronomie, 1907; Sternkunde und Sterndienst in Babel; E. W. Maunder, Astronomy of the Bible, 1908; The Bible and Astronomy, Annual Address before the Victoria Institute, 1908; E. W. Maunder and A. S. D. Maunder, "Note on the Date of the Passage of the Vernal Equinox from Taurus into Aries," in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, LXIV, 488-507; also three papers on "The Oldest Astronomy" in Journal of the British Astronomical Association, VIII, 373; IX, 317; XIV, 241; R. A. Proctor, Myths and Marvels of Astronomy; R. C. Thompson, Reports of the Magicians and Astrologers of Nineveh and Babylon; G. V. Schiaparelli, Astronomy in the Old Testament; also two papers, "I Primordi" and "I Progressi dell' Astronomia presso i Babilonesi," in Rivista di Scienzia, 1908; C. Virolleaud, L'astrologie chaldeenne. Le livre intitule "Enuma Anu Bel," 1908, 1909.
E. W. Maunder