THE SUN
"And God said Let there be lights in the firmament of the
heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for
signs, and for seasons and for days, and years: and let them
be for lights in the firmament of the heaven, to give light
upon the earth: and it was so. And God made two great lights;
the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to
rule the night: He made the stars also. And God set them in
the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, and
to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the
light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. And the
evening and the morning were the fourth day."
A double purpose for the two great heavenly bodies is indicated
here,--first, the obvious one of giving light; next, that of time
measurement. These, from the human and practical point of view, are the
two main services which the sun and moon render to us, and naturally
sufficed for the object that the writer had before him. There is no
evidence that he had any idea that the moon simply shone by reflecting
the light of the sun; still less that the sun was a light for worlds
other than our own; but if he had known these facts we can hardly
suppose that he would have mentioned them; there would have been no
purpose to be served by so doing.
But it is remarkable that no reference is made either to the
incalculable benefits conferred by the action of the sun in ripening the
fruits of the earth, or to the services of the moon as a time-measurer,
in dividing off the months. Both these actions are clearly indicated
later on in the Scriptures, where Moses, in the blessing which he
pronounced upon the tribe of Joseph, prayed that his land might be
blessed "for the precious things of the fruits of the sun," so that we
may take their omission here, together with the omission of all mention
of the planets, and the slight parenthetical reference to the stars, as
indicating that this chapter was composed at an exceedingly early date.
The chief purpose of the sun is to give light; it "rules" or regulates
the day and "divides the light from the darkness." As such it is the
appropriate emblem of God Himself, Who "is Light, and in Him is no
darkness at all." These images are frequently repeated in the
Scriptures, and it is only possible to give a few instances. David
sings, "The Lord is my light and my salvation." "The Lord shall be unto
thee an everlasting light," is the promise made to Zion. St. John
expressly uses the term of the Son of God, our Lord: "That was the true
Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." Whilst the
more concrete emblem is used as often. In the eighty-fourth psalm, the
psalm of pilgrimage, we read, "The Lord God is a sun and shield;"
Malachi predicts that "the Sun of Righteousness shall arise with
healing in His wings," and St James, with the same thought of the sun in
his mind, speaks of God as "the Father of lights."
But in none of these or the other parallel passages is there the
remotest approach to any deification of the sun, or even of that most
ethereal of influences, light itself. Both are creatures, both are made
by God; they are things and things only, and are not even the shrines of
a deity. They may be used as emblems of God in some of His attributes;
they do not even furnish any indication of His special presence, for He
is equally present where sun and light are not. "The darkness hideth not
from Thee; but the night shineth as the day: the darkness and the light
are both alike to Thee."
The worship of the sun and of other heavenly bodies is one of the sins
most unsparingly denounced in Scripture. It was one of the first
warnings of the Book of Deuteronomy that Israel as a people were to take
heed "lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the
sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest
be driven to worship them and serve them," and the utter overthrow of
the nation was foretold should they break this law. And as for the
nation, so for the individual, any "man or woman that hath wrought
wickedness in the sight of the Lord thy God, in transgressing His
covenant and hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them,
either the sun, or moon, or any of the host of heaven" was when
convicted of working "such abomination" unsparingly to be put to death.
Yet with all this, sun-worship prevailed in Israel again and again. Two
of the reforming kings of Judah, Asa and Josiah, found it necessary to
take away "the sun-images;" indeed, the latter king found that the
horses and chariots which his predecessors, Manasseh and Amon, had
dedicated to sun worship were kept at the very entrance to the temple.
In spite of his reformation, however, the evil spread until the final
corruption of Jerusalem was shown in vision to Ezekiel, "Seventy men of
the ancients"--that is the complete Sanhedrim--offered incense to
creeping things and abominable beasts; the women wept for Tammuz,
probably the sun-god in his decline to winter death; and deepest
apostasy of all, five and twenty men, the high-priest, and the chief
priests of the twenty-four courses, "with their backs toward the temple
of the Lord, and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the
sun toward the east." The entire nation, as represented in its chief
members in State, Society, and Church, was apostate, and its ruin
followed. Five years more and the temple was burned and Jerusalem
destroyed, and in captivity and exile the nation learned to abhor the
idolatry that had brought about its overthrow.
Four words are translated "sun" in our Authorized Version. Of these one,
used Job xxxi. 26, should really be "light," as in the margin--"If I
beheld the light when it shined,"--though the sun is obviously meant.
The second word is one used in poetry chiefly in conjunction with a
poetical word for the moon, and refers to the sun's warmth, as the other
does to the whiteness of the moon. Thus the Bride in the Song of Solomon
is described as "fair as the moon, clear as the sun." The third word
has given use to some ambiguity. In the eighth chapter of Judges in the
Authorized Version, it is stated that "Gideon, the son of Joash,
returned from the battle before the sun was up," but in the Revised
Version that he "returned from the battle from the ascent of Heres."
There was a mount [H.]eres, a mount of the sun, in the portion of the
Danites held by the Amorites, but that cannot have been the [H.]eres of
Gideon. Still the probability is that a mount sacred to the sun is meant
here as well as in the reference to the Danites; though _[h.]eres_ as
meaning the sun itself occurs in the story of Samson's riddle, for the
men of the city gave him the answer to it which they had extorted from
his wife, "before the sun (_[h.]eres_) went down." _Shemesh_, the
_Samas_ of the Babylonians, is the usual word for the sun; and we find
it in Beth-shemesh, the "house of the sun," a Levitical city within the
tribe of Judah, the scene of the return of the ark after its captivity
amongst the Philistines. There was another Beth-shemesh in Naphtali on
the borders of Issachar, and Jeremiah prophesies that Nebuchadnezzar
"shall break also the images of Beth-shemesh, that is in the land of
Egypt," probably the obelisks of the sun in On, or Heliopolis. It was
from this city that Joseph, when vizier of Egypt, took his wife, the
daughter of the high priest there. The images of the sun, and of Baal as
the sun-god, seem to have been obelisks or pillars of stone, and hence
had to be "broken down"; whilst the Asherah, the "groves" of the
Authorized Version, the images of Ashtoreth as the moon-goddess, were
wooden pillars, to be "cut" or "hewn down."
Another "city of the sun" in the land of Egypt is also mentioned by
Isaiah, in his prophecy of the conversion and restoration of the
Egyptians. "Five cities in the land of Egypt shall speak the language of
Canaan, and swear to the Lord of hosts; one shall be called The city of
destruction;" lit. of _[H.]eres_, or of the sun. It was upon the
strength of this text that Onias, the son of Onias the high priest,
appealed to Ptolemy Philometer to be allowed to build a temple to
Jehovah in the prefecture of Heliopolis (the city of the sun), and
obtained his permission to do so, B.C. 149.[68:1]
The epithet applied to the sun in Cant. vi. already quoted, "Clear as
the sun," may be taken as equivalent to "spotless." That is its ordinary
appearance to the naked eye, though from time to time--far more
frequently than most persons have any idea--there are spots upon the sun
sufficiently large to be seen without any optical assistance. Thus in
the twenty years from 1882 to 1901 inclusive, such a phenomenon occurred
on the average once in each week. No reference to the existence of
sun-spots occurs in Scripture. Nor is this surprising, for it would not
have fallen within the purpose of Scripture to record such a fact. But
it is surprising that whilst the Chinese detected their occasional
appearance, there is no distinct account of such an observation given
either on Babylonian tablets or by classical or mediæval writers.
The achievement of the Chinese in this direction is very notable, for
the difficulty of looking directly at the sun, under ordinary
circumstances is so great, and the very largest sunspots are so small as
compared with the entire disc, that it argues great perseverance in
watching such appearances on the part of the Chinese, for them to have
assured themselves that they were not due to very small distant clouds
in our own atmosphere.
It has often been the subject of comment that light is mentioned in Gen.
i. as having been created on the first day, but the sun not until the
fourth. The order is entirely appropriate from an astronomical point of
view, for we know that our sun is not the only source of light, since it
is but one out of millions of stars, many of which greatly exceed it in
splendour. Further, most astronomers consider that our solar system
existed as a luminous nebula long ages before the sun was formed as a
central condensation.
But the true explanation of the creation of light being put first is
probably this--that there might be no imagining that, though gross solid
bodies, like earth and sea, sun and moon might require a Creator, yet
something so ethereal and all-pervading as light was self-existent, and
by its own nature, eternal. This was a truth that needed to be stated
first. God is light, but light is not God.
The other references to the sun in Scripture do not call for much
comment. Its apparent unchangeableness qualifies it for use as an
expression for eternal duration, as in the seventy-second, the Royal,
Psalm, "They shall fear Thee as long as the sun and moon endure;" and
again, "His name shall endure for ever: His name shall be continued as
long as the sun." And again, in the eighty-ninth Psalm, it is said of
David: "His seed shall endure for ever, and his throne as the sun before
Me."
The daily course of the sun from beyond the eastern horizon to beyond
the western gives the widest expression for the compass of the whole
earth. "The mighty God, even the Lord, hath spoken, and called the
earth, from the rising of the sun unto the going down thereof." "From
the rising of the sun, unto the going down of the same, the Lord's name
is to be praised." The sun's rays penetrate everywhere. "His going forth
is from the end of the heaven, and his circuit unto the ends of it: and
there is nothing hid from the heat thereof." Whilst in the Book of
Ecclesiastes, the melancholy words of the Preacher revert over and over
again to that which is done "under the sun." "What profit hath a man of
all his labour which he taketh under the sun?"
It should be noted that this same Book of Ecclesiastes shows a much
clearer idea of the sun's daily apparent motion than was held by many of
the writers of antiquity. There is, of course, nowhere in Scripture any
mention of the rotation of the earth on its axis as the mechanical
explanation of the sun's daily apparent motion; any more than we should
refer to it ourselves to-day except when writing from a purely technical
point of view. As said already, the Hebrews had probably not discovered
this explanation, and would certainly have not gone out of their way to
mention it in any of their Scriptures if they had.
One passage of great beauty has sometimes been quoted as if it contained
a reference to the earth's rotation, but when carefully examined it is
seen to be dealing simply with the apparent motion of the sun in the
course of the year and of the day.
"Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days;
And caused the dayspring to know his place;
That it might take hold of the ends of the earth,
That the wicked might be shaken out of it?
It is turned as clay to the seal;
And they stand as a garment."
The earth appears to be spoken of as being "turned" to the sun, the
dayspring; and this, we know, takes place, morning by morning, in
consequence of the diurnal rotation. But the last two lines are better
rendered in the Revised Version--
"It is changed as clay under the seal;
And _all things_ stand forth as a garment."
The ancient seals were cylinders, rolled over the clay, which, formless
before, took upon it the desired relief as the seal passed over it. So a
garment, laid aside and folded up during the night, is shapeless, but
once again takes form when the wearer puts it on. And the earth,
formless in the darkness, gains shape and colour and relief with the
impress upon it of the morning light.
It is quite clear that the Hebrews did not suppose that it was a new sun
that came up from the east each morning, as did Xenophanes and the
Epicureans amongst the Greeks. It was the same sun throughout. Nor is
there any idea of his hiding himself behind a mysterious mountain during
the night. "The sun," the Preacher tells us, "ariseth and the sun goeth
down, and hasteth to his place where he arose." The Hebrew was quite
aware that the earth was unsupported in space, for he knew that the Lord
"stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth
upon nothing." There was therefore nothing to hinder the sun passing
freely under the earth from west to east, and thus making his path, not
a mere march onward ending in his dissolution at sunset, but a complete
"circuit," as noted by the writer of the nineteenth Psalm.
The fierceness of the sun's heat in Palestine rendered sun-stroke a
serious danger. The little son of the Shunammite was probably so smitten
as he watched his father at work with the reapers. So the promise is
given to God's people more than once: "The sun shall not smite thee by
day." "They shall not hunger nor thirst; neither shall the heat nor sun
smite them." The martyrs who pass through the great tribulation "shall
hunger no more, neither thirst any more; neither shall the sun light on
them, nor any heat."
There are fewer references in Scripture to the vivifying effects of
sunlight upon vegetation than we might have expected. The explanation is
possibly to be found in the terrible perversion men had made of the
benefits which came to them by means of this action of sunlight, by
using them as an excuse for plunging into all kinds of nature-worship.
Yet there are one or two allusions not without interest. As already
mentioned, "the precious fruits brought forth by the sun" were promised
to the tribe of Joseph, whilst the great modern discovery that nearly
every form of terrestrial energy is derived ultimately from the energy
of the sun's rays gives a most striking appropriateness to the imagery
made use of by St. James.
"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and
cometh down from the Father of Lights, with Whom is no
variableness, neither shadow of turning."
God, that is to say, is the true Sun, the true Origin of all Lights, the
true bestower of every good and perfect gift. The word rendered
"variableness," is a technical word, used by ourselves in modern English
as "parallax," and employed in the Septuagint Version to denote the
revolutions of the heavenly bodies, described in the thirty-eighth
chapter of the book of Job, as "the ordinances of the heavens." With the
natural sun, therefore, there is "variableness," that is to say, real or
apparent change of place; there is none with God. Neither is there with
Him any darkness of eclipse; any "shadow" caused as in the case of the
material sun, by the "turning" of earth and moon in their orbits. The
knowledge of "the alternations of the turning of the sun," described in
the Book of Wisdom as a feature of the learning of Solomon, was a
knowledge of the laws of this "variableness" and "turning"; especially
of the "turning" of its rising and setting points at the two solstices;
and St. James may well have had that passage in his mind when he wrote.
For Science deals with the knowledge of things that change, as they
change, and of their changes, but Faith with the knowledge of Him that
abideth for ever, and it is to this higher knowledge that St. James
wished to point his readers.
Science deals with the knowledge of things that change, as they change
and of their changes. The physical facts that we have learned in the
last years about that changeful body the sun are briefly these:--
Its core or inner nucleus is not accessible to observation, its nature
and constitution being a mere matter of inference. The "photosphere" is
a shell of incandescent cloud surrounding the nucleus, but the depth, or
thickness of this shell is quite unknown. The outer surface--which we
see--of the photosphere is certainly pretty sharply defined, though very
irregular, rising at points into whiter aggregations, called "faculæ,"
and perhaps depressed at other places in the dark "spots." Immediately
above the photosphere lies the "reversing layer" in which are found the
substances which give rise to the gaps in the sun's spectrum--the
Fraunhofer lines. Above the "reversing layer" lies the scarlet
"chromosphere" with "prominences" of various forms and dimensions rising
high above the solar surface; and over, and embracing all, is the
"corona," with its mysterious petal-like forms and rod-like rays.
The great body of the sun is gaseous, though it is impossible for us to
conceive of the condition of the gaseous core, subjected, as it is, at
once to temperature and pressure both enormously great. Probably it is a
gas so viscous that it would resist motion as pitch or putty does. Nor
do we know much of the nature of either the sun-spots or the solar
corona. Both seem to be produced by causes which lie within the sun;
both undergo changes that are periodical and connected with each other.
They exercise some influence upon the earth's magnetism, but whether
this influence extends to terrestrial weather, to rainfall and storms,
is still a matter of controversy.
The sun itself is distant from the earth in the mean, about 92,885,000
miles, but this distance varies between January and June by 3,100,000
miles. The diameter of the sun is 866,400 miles, but perhaps this is
variable to the extent of some hundreds of miles. It would contain
1,305,000 times the bulk of the earth, but its mean density is but
one-quarter that of the earth. The force of gravity at its surface is
27-1/2 times that at the surface of the earth, and it rotates on its
axis in about 25 days. But the sun's surface does not appear to rotate
as a whole, so this time of rotating varies by as much as two days if we
consider a region on the sun's equator or at a distance from it of 45°.
The intensity of sunlight at the surface of the sun is about 190,000
times that of a candle-flame, and the effective temperature of the solar
surface is eight or ten thousand degrees centigrade.
Such are some of the facts about the sun that are received, or, as it
would be technically expressed, "adopted" to-day. Doubtless a very few
years will find them altered and rendered more accurate as observations
accumulate. In a few hundred years, knowledge of the constitution of the
sun may have so increased that these data and suggestions may seem so
erroneous as to be absurd. It is little more than a century since one of
the greatest of astronomers, Sir William Herschel, contended that the
central globe of the sun might be a habitable world, sheltered from the
blazing photosphere by a layer of cool non-luminous clouds. Such an
hypothesis was not incompatible with what was then known of the
constitution of the heavenly bodies, though it is incompatible with what
we know now. It was simply a matter on which more evidence was to be
accumulated, and the holding of such a view does not, and did not,
detract from the scientific status of Sir William Herschel.
The hypotheses of science require continual restatement in the light of
new evidence, and, as to the weight and interpretation to be given to
such evidence, there is continual conflict--if it may so be
called--between the old and the new science, between the science that is
established and the science that is being established. It is by this
conflict that knowledge is rendered sure.
Such a conflict took place rather more than 300 years ago at the opening
of the Modern Era of astronomy. It was a conflict between two schools of
science--between the disciples of Aristotle and Claudius Ptolemy on the
one hand and the disciples of Copernicus on the other. It has often been
represented as a conflict between religion and science, whereas that
which happened was that the representatives of the older school of
science made use of the powers of the Church to persecute the newer
school as represented by Galileo. That persecution was no doubt a
flagrant abuse of authority, but it should be impossible at the present
day for any one to claim a theological standing for either theory,
whether Copernican or Ptolemaic.
So long as evidence sufficient to demonstrate the Copernican hypothesis
was not forthcoming, it was possible for a man to hold the Ptolemaic,
without detracting from his scientific position, just as it is thought
no discredit to Sir William Herschel that he held his curious idea of a
cool sun under the conditions of knowledge of a hundred years ago. Even
at the present day, we habitually use the Ptolemaic phraseology. Not
only do we speak of "sunrise" and "sunset," but astronomers in strictly
technical papers use the expression, "acceleration of the sun's motion"
when "acceleration of the earth's motion" is meant.
The question as to whether the earth goes round the sun or the sun goes
round the earth has been decided by the accumulation of evidence. It was
a question for evidence to decide. It was an open question so long as
the evidence available was not sufficient to decide it. It was perfectly
possible at one time for a scientific or a religious man to hold either
view. Neither view interfered with his fundamental standing or with his
mental attitude towards either sun or earth. In this respect--important
as the question is in itself--it might be said to be a mere detail,
almost a matter of indifference.
But it is not a mere detail, a matter of indifference to either
scientist or religious man, as to what the sun and earth _are_--whether
he can treat them as things that can be weighed, measured, compared,
analyzed, as, a few pages back, we have shown has been done, or whether,
as one of the chief astrologers of to-day puts it, he--
"Believes that the sun is the body of the Logos of this solar
system, 'in Him we live and move and have our being.' The
planets are his angels, being modifications in the
consciousness of the Logos,"
and that the sun
"Stands as Power, having Love and Will united."
The difference between these two points of view is fundamental, and one
of root principle. The foundation, the common foundation on which both
the believer and the scientist build, is threatened by this false
science and false religion. The calling, the very existence of both is
assailed, and they must stand or fall together. The believer in one God
cannot acknowledge a Sun-god, a Solar Logos, these planetary angels; the
astronomer cannot admit the intrusion of planetary influences that obey
no known laws, and the supposed effects of which are in no way
proportional to the supposed causes. The Law of Causality does not run
within the borders of astrology.
It is the old antithesis restated of the Hebrew and the heathen. The
believer in one God and the scientist alike derive their heritage from
the Hebrew, whilst the modern astrologer claims that the astrology of
to-day is once more a revelation of the Chaldean and Assyrian religions.
But polytheism--whether in its gross form of many gods, of planetary
angels, or in the more subtle form of pantheism,--is the very negation
of sane religion; and astrology is the negation of sane astronomy.
"For the invisible things of Him from the creation of the
world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that
are made, even His eternal power and Godhead; so that they are
without excuse: because that, when they knew God, they
glorified Him not as God, neither were thankful; but became
vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was
darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image
made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted
beasts, and creeping things."
FOOTNOTES:
[68:1] Josephus, _Antiquities_, XIII. iii. 1.