The Astronomy of the Bible - E. Walter Maunder (first e reader .TXT) 📗
- Author: E. Walter Maunder
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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. God is light, but light is not God.
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 compass of the whole earth. "The mighty God, 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 passage 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.
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—
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 passed 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 space, 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 passing 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 God'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 pass 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."
God, 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 God. 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 passage 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 constitution being a mere matter of inference. The "photosphere" is a shell of incandescent cloud surrounding the nucleus, but the depth, or thickness of this shell 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 "faculæ," 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 accumulate. In a few hundred years, knowledge of the constitution 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 constitution 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 accumulated, 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
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