The constellations, therefore, were designed long before the nation of Israel had its origin, indeed before Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees. The most probable date—2700 b.c.—would take us to a point a little before the Flood, if we accept the Hebrew chronology, a few centuries after the Flood, if we accept the Septuagint chronology. Just as the next great age of astronomical activity, which I have termed the Classical, began after the close of the canon of the Old Testament scriptures, so the constellation age began before the first books of those scriptures were compiled. Broadly speaking, it may be said that the knowledge of the constellation figures was the chief asset of astronomy in the centuries when the Old Testament was being written.
Seeing that the knowledge of these figures was preserved in Mesopotamia, the country from which Abraham came out, and that they were in existence long before his day, it is not unreasonable to suppose that both he and his descendants were acquainted with them, and that when he and they looked upward to the glories of the silent stars, and recalled the promise, "So shall thy seed be," they pictured round those glittering points of light much the same forms that we connect with them to-day.
FOOTNOTES:
[157:1] Delitzsch is, therefore, in error when he asserts that "when we divide the zodiac into twelve signs and style them the Ram, Bull, Twins, etc. . . . the Sumerian-Babylonian culture is still living and operating even at the present day" (Babel and Bible, p. 67). The constellations may have been originally designed by the Akkadians, but if so it was before they came down from their native highlands into the Mesopotamian valley.
CHAPTER II
GENESIS AND THE CONSTELLATIONS
As we have just shown, the constellations evidently were designed long before the earliest books of the Old Testament received their present form. But the first nine chapters of Genesis give the history of the world before any date that we can assign to the constellations, and are clearly derived from very early documents or traditions.