"Art Thou not It that cut Rahab in pieces,
That pierced the dragon?
Art Thou not It that dried up the sea,
The waters of the great deep;
That made the depths of the sea a way for the redeemed to pass over?"
And in Psalm lxxxix. we have—
"Thou rulest the raging of the sea;
When the waves thereof arise Thou stillest them.
Thou hast broken Rahab in pieces as one that is slain,
Thou hast scattered Thine enemies with Thy strong arm."
So the prophet Ezekiel is directed—
"Son of man, take up a lamentation for Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and say unto him, thou wast likened unto a young lion of the nations: yet art thou as a dragon in the seas."
In all these passages it is only in an indirect and secondary sense that we can see any constellational references in the various descriptions of "the dragon that is in the sea." It is the crocodile of Egypt that is intended; Egypt the great oppressor of Israel, and one of the great powers of evil, standing as a representative of them all. The serpent or dragon forms in the constellations also represented the powers of evil; especially the great enemy of God and man, "the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan." So there is some amount of appropriateness to the watery dragons of the sky—Hydra and Cetus—in these descriptions of Rahab, the dragon of Egypt, without there being any direct reference. Thus it is said of the Egyptian "dragon in the seas," "I have given thee for meat to the beasts of the earth, and to the fowls of the heaven;" and again, "I will cause all the fowls of the heaven to settle upon thee," just as Corvus, the Raven, is shown as having settled upon Hydra, the Water-snake, and is devouring its flesh. Again, Pharaoh, the Egyptian dragon, says, "My river is mine own, and I have made it for myself;" just as Cetus, the Sea-monster, is represented as pouring forth Eridanus, the river, from its mouth.
ANDROMEDA AND CETUS.[ToList]
But a clear and direct allusion to this last grouping of the constellations occurs in the Apocalypse. In the twelfth chapter, the proud oppressor dragon from the sea is shown us again with much fulness of detail. There the Apostle describes his vision of a woman, who evidently represents the people of God, being persecuted by a dragon. There is still a reminiscence of the deliverance of Israel in the Exodus from Egypt, for "the woman fled into the wilderness, where she hath a place prepared of God, that there they may nourish her a thousand two hundred and threescore days." And the vision goes on:—
