In two passages of the Book of Job a word, ‘Ash or ‘Ayish, is used, by context evidently one of the constellations of the sky, but the identification of which is doubtful. In our Authorized Version the first passage is rendered thus:—

and the second:—

The words (or word, for possibly ‘Ayish is no more than a variant of ‘Ash) here translated "Arcturus" were rendered by the "Seventy" as "Arktouros" in the first passage; as "Hesperos" in the second passage; and their rendering was followed by the Vulgate. The rendering Hesper or Vesper is absurd, as "the sons" of Hesper has no meaning. "Arktouros" is not improbably a misrendering of "Arktos," "the north," which would give a free but not a literal translation of the meaning of the passage. In another passage from Job (xxxvii. 9) where the south wind is contrasted with the cold from another quarter of the sky, the "Seventy"—again followed by the Vulgate—rendered it as "cold from Arcturus." Now cold came to the Jews, as it does to us, from the north, and the star which we know as Arcturus could not be described as typifying that direction either now or when the Septuagint or Vulgate versions were made. The Peschitta, the Syriac version of the Bible, made about the second century after Christ, gives as the Syriac equivalent for ‘Ash, or ‘Ayish, the word ‘iyutha, but it also renders Kesil by the same word in Amos v. 8, so that the translators were evidently quite at sea as to the identity of these constellations. We are also in doubt as to what star or constellation the Syrians meant by ‘Iyutha, and apparently they were in some doubt themselves, for in the Talmud we are told that there was a disputation, held in the presence of the great teacher Rabbi Jehuda, about 150 years after Christ, whether ‘Iyutha was situated in the head of the Bull, or in the tail of the Ram. Oriental scholars now assign it either to Aldebaran in the head of the Bull, the "sons" being in this case the other members of the Hyades group of which Aldebaran is the brightest star; or else identifying it with the Arabic el-‘aiyuq, the name of the star which the Greeks call Aix, and we call Capella, the "sons" on this inference being the three small stars near, called by the Greeks and by ourselves the "Kids." The word ‘Ash is used several times in Scripture, but without any astronomical signification, and is there rendered "moth," as in Isaiah, where it says—

This literal significance of the word does not help, as we know of no constellation figured as a "moth" or bearing any resemblance to one.

But the word ‘ash, or ‘ayish does not differ importantly from the word na‘sh, in Hebrew "assembly," in Arabic "bier," which has been the word used by the Arabs from remote antiquity to denote the four bright stars in the hind-quarters of the Great Bear; those which form the body of the Plough. Moreover, the three stars which form the "tail" of the Great Bear, or the "handle" of the Plough have been called by the Arabs benat na‘sh, "the daughters of na‘sh." The Bear is the great northern constellation, which swings constantly round the pole, always visible throughout the changing seasons of the year. There should be no hesitation then in accepting the opinion of the Rabbi, Aben Ezra, who saw in ‘Ash, or ‘Ayish the quadrilateral of the great Bear, whose four points are marked by the bright stars, Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta, and in the "sons" of ‘Ayish, the three stars, Epsilon, Zeta, and Eta. Our Revised Version therefore renders the word as "Bear."

In both passages of Job, then, we get the four quarters of the sky marked out as being under the dominion of the Lord. In the ninth chapter they are given in the order—

In the later passage they are given with fuller illustration, and in the order—

The parallelism in the two passages in Job gives us the right to argue that ‘Ash and ‘Ayish refer to the same constellation, and are variants of the same name; possibly their vocalization was the same, and they are but two divergent ways of writing the word. We must therefore reject Prof. Schiaparelli's suggestion made on the authority of the Peschitta version of the Scriptures and of Rabbi Jehuda, who lived in the second century a.d., that ‘Ash is ‘Iyutha which is Aldebaran, but that ‘Ayish and his "sons" may be Capella and her "Kids."

Equally we must reject Prof. Stern's argument that Kimah is Sirius, Kesil is Orion, Mazzaroth is the Hyades and ‘Ayish is the Pleiades. He bases his argument on the order in which these names are given in the second passage of Job, and on the contention of Otfried MÜller that there are only four out of the remarkable groups of stars placed in the middle and southern regions of the sky which have given rise to important legends in the primitive mythology of the Greeks. These groups follow one after the other in a belt in the sky in the order just given, and their risings and settings were important factors in the old Greek meteorological and agricultural calendars. Prof. Stern assumes that kesil means Orion, and from this identification deduces the others, neglecting all etymological or traditional evidences to the contrary. He takes no notice of the employment of the same names in passages of Scripture other than that in the thirty-eighth chapter of Job. Here he would interpret the "chain," or "sweet influences" of Kimah = "Sirius the dog," by assuming that the Jews considered that the dog was mad, and hence was kept chained up. More important still, he fails to recognize that the Jews had a continental climate in a different latitude from the insular climate of Greece, and that both their agricultural and their weather conditions were different, and would be associated with different astronomical indications.

In the 9th verse of the 37th chapter of Job we get an antithesis which has already been referred to—

The Hebrew word here translated "north" is mezarim, a plural word which is taken literally to mean "the scatterings." For its interpretation Prof. Schiaparelli makes a very plausible suggestion. He says, "We may first observe that the five Hebrew letters with which this name was written in the original unpointed text could equally well be read, with a somewhat different pointing, as mizrim, or also as mizrayim, of which the one is the plural, the other the dual, of mizreh. Now mizreh means a winnowing-fan, the instrument with which grain is scattered in the air to sift it; and it has its root, like mezarim, in the word zarah, ... which, besides the sense dispersit, bears also the sense expandit, ventilavit."[263:1]

If Prof. Schiaparelli is correct in his supposition, then the word translated "north" in our versions is literally the "two winnowing fans," names which from the form suggested by the stars we may suppose that the Jews gave to the two Bears in the sky, just as the Chinese called them the "Ladles," and the Americans call them the "Big Dipper" and the "Little Dipper." The sense is still that of the north, but we may recognize in the word employed another Jewish name of the constellation, alternative with ‘Ash or ‘Ayish, or perhaps used in order to include in the region the Lesser as well as the Greater Bear. We should not be surprised at finding an alternative name for this great northern constellation, for we ourselves call it by several different appellations, using them indiscriminately, perhaps even in the course of a single paragraph.

What to Job did the question mean which the Lord addressed to him: "Canst thou guide the Bear and his sons?" To Job it meant, "Canst thou guide this great constellation of stars in the north, in their unceasing round, as a charioteer guides his horses in a wide circle, each keeping to his proper ring, none entangling himself with another, nor falling out of his place?"

What would the same question mean to us, if addressed to us to-day? In the first place we might put it shortly as "Canst thou turn the earth on its axis regularly and continuously, so as to produce this motion of the stars round the pole, and to make day and night?" But modern astronomy can ask the question in a deeper and a wider sense.

It was an ancient idea that the stars were fixed in a crystal sphere, and that they could not alter their relative positions; and indeed until the last century or two, instruments were not delicate enough to measure the small relative shift that stars make. It is within the last seventy years that we have been able to measure the "annual parallax" of certain stars,—that is, the difference in the position of a star when viewed by the earth from the opposite ends of a diameter of the earth's orbit round the sun. Besides their yearly shift due to "annual parallax," most stars have a "proper" or "peculiar motion" of their own, which is in most cases a very small amount indeed, but can be determined more easily than "annual parallax" because its effect accumulates year after year. If, therefore, we are able to observe a star over a period of fifty, or a hundred or more years, it may seem to have moved quite an appreciable amount when examined by the powerful and delicate instruments that we have now at our disposal. Observations of the exact positions of stars have been made ever since the founding of Greenwich Observatory, so that now we have catalogues giving the "proper motions" of several hundreds of stars. When these are examined it is seen that some groups of stars move in fellowship together through space, having the same direction, and moving at the same rate, and of these companies the most striking are the stars of the Plough, that is ‘Ayish and his sons. Not all the stars move together; out of the seven, the first and the last have a different direction, but the other five show a striking similarity in their paths. And not only are their directions of movement, and the amounts of it, the same for the five stars, but spectroscopic observations of their motion in the line of sight show that they are all approaching us with a speed of about eighteen miles a second, that is to say with much the same speed as the earth moves in her orbit round the sun. Another indication of their "family likeness" is that all their spectra are similar. A German astronomer, Dr. HÖffler, has found for this system a distance from us so great that it would take light 192 years to travel from them to us. Yet so vast is this company of five stars that it would take light seventy years, travelling at the rate of 186,000 miles in every second of time to go from the leading star, Merak—Beta of the Bear—to Mizar—Zeta of the Bear—the final brilliant of the five. So bright and great are these suns that they shine to us as gems of the second magnitude, and yet if our sun were placed amongst them at their distance from us he would be invisible to the keenest sight.

Dr. HÖffler's estimate may be an exaggerated one, but it still remains true that whilst the cluster of the Pleiades forms a great and wonderful family group, it is dwarfed into insignificance by the vast distances between these five stars of the Great Bear. Yet these also form one family, though they are united by no nebulous bands, and are at distances so great from each other that the bonds of gravitation must cease to show their influence; yet all are alike, all are marshalled together in their march under some mysterious law. We cannot answer the question, "By what means are ‘Ayish and his sons guided?" much more are we speechless when we are asked, "Canst thou guide them?"

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