"There view'd the Pleiads, and the Northern Team,
And Great Orion's more refulgent beam,
To which, around the axle of the sky,
The Bear, revolving, points his golden eye."
It seems natural to conclude that these constellations, the most striking, or at all events the most universally recognized, would be those mentioned in the Bible.
The passages in which the Hebrew word Kīmah, is used are the following—
(God) "maketh Arcturus, Orion, and Pleiades (Kīmah), and the chambers of the south" (Job ix. 9).
"Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades (Kīmah), or loose the bands of Orion?" (Job xxxviii. 31).
"Seek Him that maketh the seven stars (Kīmah) and Orion" (Amos v. 8).
In our Revised Version, Kīmah is rendered "Pleiades" in all three instances, and of course the translators of the Authorized Version meant the same group by the "seven stars" in their free rendering of the passage from Amos. The word kīmah signifies "a heap," or "a cluster," and would seem to be related to the Assyrian word kimtu, "family," from a root meaning to "tie," or "bind"; a family being a number of persons bound together by the very closest tie of relationship. If this be so we can have no doubt that our translators have rightly rendered the word. There is one cluster in the sky, and one alone, which appeals to the unaided sight as being distinctly and unmistakably a family of stars—the Pleiades.
The names ‘Ash, or ‘Ayish, Kĕsīl, and Kīmah are peculiar to the Hebrews, and are not, so far as we have any evidence at present, allied to names in use for any constellation amongst the Babylonians and Assyrians; they have, as yet, not been found on any cuneiform inscription. Amos, the herdsman of Tekoa, living in the eighth century b.c., two centuries before the Jews were carried into exile to Babylon, evidently knew well what the terms signified, and the writer of the Book of Job was no less aware of their signification. But the "Seventy," who translated the Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, were not at all clear as to the identification of these names of constellations; though they made their translation only two or three centuries after the Jews returned to Jerusalem under Ezra and Nehemiah, when oral tradition should have still supplied the meaning of such astronomical terms. Had these names been then known in Babylon, they could not have been unknown to the learned men of Alexandria in the second century before our era, since at that time there was a very direct scientific influence of the one city upon the other. This Hebrew astronomy was so far from being due to Babylonian influence and teaching, that, though known centuries before the exile, after the exile we find the knowledge of its technical terms was lost. On the other hand, kīma was the term used in all Syriac literature to denominate the Pleiades, and we accordingly find in the Peschitta, the ancient Syriac version of the Bible, made about the second century a.d., the term kīma retained throughout, but kesil and ‘ayish were reduced to their supposed Syriac equivalents.
Whatever uncertainty was felt as to the meaning of kīmah by the early translators, it is not now seriously disputed that the Pleiades is the group of stars in question.