orce his way upward into the
zodiac--and the identification of Merodach with him, gives emphasis to
Isaiah's reproach, many centuries later, against the king of Babylon,
the successor of Merodach--

"Thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I
will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also
upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north:
I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like
the Most High."

In the sight of the Hebrew prophets and poets, Merodach, in taking to
himself this group of stars, published his shame and folly. He had
ascended into heaven, but his glittering belt was only his fetter; he
was bound and gibbeted in the sky like a captive, a rebel, and who could
loose his bands?

In the thirteenth chapter of Isaiah we have the plural of
_k[)e]s[=i]l_--_k[)e]s[=i]lim_. It is usually understood that we have
here Orion, as the most splendid constellation in the sky, put for the
constellations in general. But if we remember that _k[)e]s[=i]l_ stands
for "Nimrod" or "Merodach," the first proud tyrant mentioned by name in
Scripture, the particular significance of the allusion becomes evident--

"Behold, the day of the Lord cometh, cruel both with wrath and
fierce anger, to lay the land desolate: and he shall destroy
the sinners thereof out of it. For the stars of heavens and
the constellations"--(that is the _k[)e]s[=i]lim_, the Nimrods
or Merodachs of the sky)--"thereof shall not give their light:
the sun shall be darkened in his going forth, and the moon
shall not cause her light to shine. And I will punish the
world for their evil, and the wicked for their iniquity; and I
will cause the arrogancy of the proud to cease, and will lay
low the haughtiness of the terrible."

The strictly astronomical relations of Orion and the Pleiades seem to be
hinted at in Amos and in Job--

"Seek Him that maketh the seven stars and Orion, and turneth
the shadow of death into the morning, and maketh the day dark
with night."

In this passage the parallelism seems to be between the seven stars, the
Pleiades, with sunrise, and Orion with sunset. Now at the time and place
when the constellations were mapped out, the Pleiades were the immediate
heralds of sunrise, shortly after the spring equinox, at the season
which would correspond to the early part of April in our present
c