unreasonable to suppose that both he and
his descendants were acquainted with them, and that when he and they
looked upward to the glories of the silent stars, and recalled the
promise, "So shall thy seed be," they pictured round those glittering
points of light much the same forms that we connect with them to-day.

FOOTNOTES:

[157:1] Delitzsch is, therefore, in error when he asserts that "when we
divide the zodiac into twelve signs and style them the Ram, Bull, Twins,
etc. . . . the Sumerian-Babylonian culture is still living and operating
even at the present day" (_Babel and Bible_, p. 67). The constellations
may have been originally designed by the _Akkadians_, but if so it was
before they came down from their native highlands into the Mesopotamian
valley.

CHAPTER II

GENESIS AND THE CONSTELLATIONS

As we have just shown, the constellations evidently were designed long
before the earliest books of the Old Testament received their present
form. But the first nine chapters of Genesis give the history of the
world before any date that we can assign to the constellations, and are
clearly derived from very early documents or traditions.

When the constellations are compared with those nine chapters, several
correspondences appear between the two; remarkable, when it is borne in
mind how few are the events that can be plainly set forth in a group of
forty-eight figures on the one hand, and how condensed are the
narratives of those nine chapters on the other.

Look at the six southern constellations (_see_ pp. 164, 165) which were
seen during the nights of spring in that distant time. The largest of
these six is a great Ship resting on the southern horizon. Just above, a
Raven is perched on the stretched-out body of a reptile. A figure of a
Centaur appears to have just left the Ship, and is represented as
offering up an animal on an Altar. The animal is now shown as a Wolf,
but Aratus, our earliest authority, states that he did not know what
kind of animal it was that was being thus offered up. The cloud of
smoke from the Altar is represented by the bright coiling wreaths of the
Milky Way, and here in the midst of that cloud is set the Bow--the bow
of Sagittarius, the Archer. Is it possible that this can be mere
coincidence, or was it indeed intended as a memorial of the covenant
which God made with Noah, and with his children for ever?--"I do set My
bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a cov