The Pleiades, whose "sweet influences" are given by their heliacal rising in spring time, with the sun rising in the East;
Orion, whose "bands" are those of winter, heralded by his acronical rising with the sun setting in the West;
Mazzaroth, the constellations of the zodiac corresponding to the Chambers of the South, which the sun occupies each in its "season."
The Bear with its "sons," who, always visible, are unceasingly guided round the pole in the North.
The parallelism in the two passages in Job gives us the right to argue that ‘Ash and ‘Ayish refer to the same constellation, and are variants of the same name; possibly their vocalization was the same, and they are but two divergent ways of writing the word. We must therefore reject Prof. Schiaparelli's suggestion made on the authority of the Peschitta version of the Scriptures and of Rabbi Jehuda, who lived in the second century a.d., that ‘Ash is ‘Iyūthā which is Aldebaran, but that ‘Ayish and his "sons" may be Capella and her "Kids."
Equally we must reject Prof. Stern's argument that Kīmah is Sirius, Kĕsīl is Orion, Mazzārōth is the Hyades and ‘Ayish is the Pleiades. He bases his argument on the order in which these names are given in the second passage of Job, and on the contention of Otfried Müller that there are only four out of the remarkable groups of stars placed in the middle and southern regions of the sky which have given rise to important legends in the primitive mythology of the Greeks. These groups follow one after the other in a belt in the sky in the order just given, and their risings and settings were important factors in the old Greek meteorological and agricultural calendars. Prof. Stern assumes that kĕsīl means Orion, and from this identification deduces the others, neglecting all etymological or traditional evidences to the contrary. He takes no notice of the employment of the same names in passages of Scripture other than that in the thirty-eighth chapter of Job. Here he would interpret the "chain," or "sweet influences" of Kīmah = "Sirius the dog," by assuming that the Jews considered that the dog was mad, and hence was kept chained up. More important still, he fails to recognize that the Jews had a continental climate in a different latitude from the insular climate of Greece, and that both their agricultural and their weather conditions were different, and would be associated with different astronomical indications.
In the 9th verse of the 37th chapter of Job we get an antithesis which has already been referred to—
"Out of the south cometh the whirlwind: and cold out of the north."
The Hebrew word here translated "north" is mezarīm, a plural word which is taken literally to mean "the scatterings." For its interpretation Prof. Schiaparelli makes a very plausible suggestion. He says, "We may first observe that the five Hebrew letters with which this name was written in the original unpointed text could equally well be read, with a somewhat different pointing, as mizrim, or also as mizrayim, of which the one is the plural, the other the dual, of mizreh. Now mizreh means a winnowing-fan, the instrument with which grain is scattered in the air to sift it; and it has its root, like mezarim, in the word zarah, . . . which, besides the sense dispersit, bears also the sense expandit, ventilavit."[263:1]
