CHAPTER IV
THE TRIBES OF ISRAEL AND THE ZODIAC
The earliest reference in Scripture to the constellations of the zodiac occurs in the course of the history of Joseph. In relating his second dream to his brethren he said—
"Behold, I have dreamed a dream more; and, behold, the sun and the moon, and the eleven stars made obeisance to me."
The word "Kochab" in the Hebrew means both "star" and "constellation." The significance, therefore, of the reference to the "eleven stars" is clear. Just as Joseph's eleven brethren were eleven out of the twelve sons of Jacob, so Joseph saw eleven constellations out of the twelve come and bow down to him. And the twelve constellations can only mean the twelve of the zodiac.
There can be no reasonable doubt that the zodiac in question was practically the same as we have now, the one transmitted to us through Aratus and Ptolemy. It had been designed quite a thousand years earlier than the days of Joseph; it was known in Mesopotamia from whence his ancestors had come; it was known in Egypt; that is to say it was known on both sides of Canaan. There have been other zodiacs: thus the Chinese have one of their own: but we have no evidence of any zodiac, except the one transmitted to us by the Greeks, as having been at any time adopted in Canaan or the neighbouring countries.
There is no need to suppose that each of the brethren had a zodiacal figure already assigned to him as a kind of armorial bearing or device. The dream was appropriate, and perfectly intelligible to Jacob, to Joseph, and his brethren, without supposing that any such arrangement had then been made. It is quite true that there are Jewish traditions assigning a constellation to each of the tribes of Israel, but it does not appear that any such traditions can be distinctly traced to a great antiquity, and they are mostly somewhat indefinite. Josephus, for instance, makes a vague assertion about the twelve precious stones of the High Priest's breast-plate, each of which bore the name of one of the tribes, connecting them with the signs of the zodiac:—
"Now the names of all those sons of Jacob were engraven in these stones, whom we esteem the heads of our tribes, each stone having the honour of a name, in the order according to which they were born. . . . And for the twelve stones whether we understand by them the months, or whether we understand the like number of the signs of that circle which the Greeks call the Zodiac, we shall not be mistaken in their meaning."[187:1]
But whilst there is no sufficient evidence that each of the sons of Jacob had a zodiacal figure for his coat-of-arms, nor even that the tribes deriving their names from them were so furnished, there is strong and harmonious tradition as to the character of the devices borne on the standards carried by the four divisions of the host in the march through the wilderness. The four divisions, or camps, each contained three tribes, and were known by the name of the principal tribe in each. The camp of Judah was on the east, and the division of Judah led on the march. The camp of Reuben was on the south. The camp of Ephraim was on the west. The camp of Dan was on the north, and the division of Dan brought up the rear. And the traditional devices shown on the four standards were these:—For Judah, a lion; for Reuben, a man and a river; for Ephraim, a bull; for Dan, an eagle and a serpent.
In these four standards we cannot fail to see again the four cherubic forms of lion, man, ox and eagle; but in two cases an addition was made to the cherubic form, an addition recalling the constellation figure. For just as the crest of Reuben was not a man only, but a man and a river, so Aquarius is not a man only, but a man pouring out a stream of water. And as the crest of Dan was not an eagle only, but an eagle and a serpent, so the great group of constellations, clustering round the autumnal equinox, included not only the Eagle, but also the Scorpion and the Serpent (see diagram, p. [189]).
There appears to be an obvious connection between these devices and the blessings pronounced by Jacob upon his sons, and by Moses upon the tribes; indeed, it would seem probable that it was the former that largely determined the choice of the devices adopted by the four great divisions of the host in the wilderness.
The blessing pronounced by Jacob on Judah runs, "Judah is a lion's whelp: from the prey, my son, thou art gone up: he stooped down, he couched as a lion, and as an old lion; who shall rouse him up?" "The Lion of the tribe of Judah" is the title given to our Lord Himself in the Apocalypse of St. John.
OPHIUCHUS AND THE NEIGHBOURING CONSTELLATIONS.[ToList]
The blessing pronounced upon Joseph by Moses bears as emphatic a reference to the bull. "The firstling of his bullock, majesty is his; and his horns are the horns of the wild-ox."
Jacob's blessing upon Joseph does not show any reference to the ox or bull in our Authorized Version. But in our Revised Version Jacob says of Simeon and Levi—
"In their anger they slew a man,
And in their self-will they houghed an ox."
The first line appears to refer to the massacre of the Shechemites; the second is interpreted by the Jerusalem Targum, "In their wilfulness they sold Joseph their brother, who is likened to an ox." And in the blessing of Joseph it is said that his "branches (margin, daughters), run over the wall." Some translators have rendered this, "The daughters walk upon the bull," "wall" and "bull" being only distinguishable in the original by a slight difference in the pointing.
Of Reuben, his father said, "Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel;" and of Dan, "Dan shall be a serpent by the way, an adder in the path, that biteth the horse heels, so that his rider shall fall backward."
These two last prophecies supply the "water" and the "serpent," which, added to the "man" and "eagle" of the cherubic forms, are needed to complete the traditional standards, and are needed also to make them conform more closely to the constellation figures.
No such correspondence can be traced between the eight remaining tribes and the eight remaining constellations. Different writers combine them in different ways, and the allusions to constellation figures in the blessings of those tribes are in most cases very doubtful and obscure, even if it can be supposed that any such allusions are present at all. The connection cannot be pushed safely beyond the four chief tribes, and the four cherubic forms as represented in the constellations of the four quarters of the sky.
These four standards, or rather, three of them, meet us again in a very interesting connection. When Israel reached the borders of Moab, Balak, the king of Moab, sent for a seer of great reputation, Balaam, the son of Beor, to "Come, curse me Jacob, and come, defy Israel." Balaam came, but instead of cursing Jacob, blessed the people in four prophecies, wherein he made, what would appear to be, distinct references to the standards of Judah, Joseph and Reuben.
"Behold the people riseth up as a lioness,
And as a lion doth he lift himself up."
Then again—
"He couched, he lay down as a lion,
And as a lioness; who shall rouse him up?"
And in two passages—
"God bringeth him forth out of Egypt;
He hath as it were the strength of the wild ox."
The wild ox and lion are obvious similes to use concerning a powerful and warlike people. These two similes are, therefore, not sufficient by themselves to prove that the tribal standards are being referred to. But the otherwise enigmatical verse—
"Water shall flow from his buckets,"
appears more expressly as an allusion to the standard of Reuben, the "man with the river," Aquarius pouring water from his pitcher; and if one be a reference to a standard, the others may also well be.
AQUARIUS AND THE NEIGHBOURING CONSTELLATIONS.[ToList]
It is surely something more than coincidence that Joseph, who by his father's favour and his own merit was made the leader of the twelve brethren, should be associated with the bull or wild ox, seeing that Taurus was the leader of the zodiac in those ages. It may also well be more than coincidence, that when Moses was in the mount and "the people gathered themselves unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him," Aaron fashioned the golden earrings given him into the form of a molten calf; into the similitude, that is to say, of Taurus, then Prince of the Zodiac. If we turn to St. Stephen's reference to this occurrence, we find that he says—
"And they made a calf in those days, and offered sacrifice unto the idol, and rejoiced in the works of their own hands. Then God turned, and gave them up to worship the host of heaven."
In other words, their worship of the golden calf was star worship.
It has been often pointed out that this sin of the Israelites, deep as it was, was not in itself a breach of the first commandment—
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me."
It was a breach of the second—
"Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them."
The Israelites did not conceive that they were abandoning the worship of Jehovah; they still considered themselves as worshipping the one true God. They were monotheists still, not polytheists. But they had taken the first false step that inevitably leads to polytheism; they had forgotten that they had seen "no manner of similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto" them "in Horeb out of the midst of the fire," and they had worshipped this golden calf as the similitude of God; they had "changed their glory into the similitude of an ox that eateth grass." And that was treason against Him; therefore St. Stephen said, "God turned, and gave them up to worship the host of heaven;" the one sin inevitably led to the other, indeed, involved it. In a later day, when Jeroboam, who had been appointed by Solomon ruler over all the charge of the house of Joseph, led the rebellion of the ten tribes against Rehoboam, king of Judah, he set up golden calves at Dan and Bethel, and said unto his people, "It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem: behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt." There can be little doubt that, in this case, Jeroboam was not so much recalling the transgression in the wilderness—it was not an encouraging precedent—as he was adopting the well-known cognizance of the tribe of Joseph, that is to say, of the two tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh, which together made up the more important part of his kingdom, as the symbol of the presence of Jehovah.
The southern kingdom would naturally adopt the device of its predominant tribe, Judah, and it was as the undoubted cognizance of the kingdom of Judah that our Richard I., the Crusader, placed the Lion on his shield.
More definitely still, we find this one of the cherubic forms applied to set forth Christ Himself, as "The Root of David," Prince of the house of Judah—
"Behold, the Lion of the tribe of Juda, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof."
FOOTNOTES:
[187:1] Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, III. vii. 5-7.
