Astronomy in the Bible

No systematic observations of the heavenly bodies were made by the Jews. Astral worship was rife in Palestine, and they could hardly have attended closely to its objects without yielding to its seductions. Astronomy was, under these circumstances, inseparable from astrolatry, and anathemas of the prophets were not carelessly uttered. As the most glorious works of the Almighty, the celestial luminaries were indeed celebrated in the Scriptures in passages thrilling with rapture; but the appeal to them for practical purposes was reduced to a minimum. Even the regulation of times and seasons was largely empirical. The Jews used a lunar year. It began, for religious purposes, with the new moon next after the spring equinox, and consisted normally of twelve months, or 354 days. The Jewish Calendar, however, depended upon the course of the sun, since the festivals it appointed were in part agricultural celebrations. Some process of adjustment had then to be resorted to, and the obvious one was chosen of adding a thirteenth, or intercalary, month whenever the discrepancy between the ripening of the crops and the fixed dates of the commemorative feasts became glaringly apparent. Before the time of Solomon, the Jews appear to have begun their year in the autumn; and the custom, revived for civil purposes about the fifth century B.C., was adopted in the systematized religious calendar of the fourth century of our era. +