I have to credit Tim Miller for turning me on to this topic. I was in riding in a van with him some time ago and this topic came up in conversation and what he told me was something I had never even heard before...so that set me to exploring and researching. What follows is the result of that work, all thanks to that conversation. This all all overview of what I have learned from others. A book that I highly recommend and which I will cite several times, it entitled, "The Mystery of the Mazzaroth" by Tim Warner. I also recommend a video you can find on YouTube called "The Star of Bethlehem" (Rick Larson). There is another series of 3 videos on YouTube called "Mazzaroth - Story of Yeshua" by Russell Judd which I also highly recommend.
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"The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world." (Psalm 19:1-4, NIV)
There have been times, over the past two and half years, where I feel like God has specifically brought something to my attention and this is one of those things. Generally speaking, if I take something on, I feel the compulsion to research it exhaustively and with God knowing that about me, I believe He does this on purpose. This is one of those things and I have to say at the outset, it has been so profoundly inspiring and encouraging, I couldn't wait to share it. It started, as I mentioned in the brief introduction above, with a relatively benign conversation that I was only a hearer of. Someone who I have a lot of respect for, Tim Miller, had written a children's book several years ago entitled "The Heavens Declare" and someone else asked him a question related to that book. In his answer, Tim was talking about how the constellations tell God's story, which was an idea I had never heard before. That same night, I stayed over at a friend's house and happened to be using one of their kid's rooms (thank you again, Parks' family!) and the next morning, I was getting ready and noticed on the wall a printout of the twelve constellations of the Zodiac. I thought to myself, "what are the odds? I have this stuck in my head and now I see it, randomly, printed out." It felt like God was tapping me on my shoulder saying "Adam, I want you to look at this." And so I started looking into it, and it is more fantastic than I could have imagined. Not only is it reinforcement of God's wonderful plan for the restoration of the Kingdom, but it also reinforces just how thorough and creative and merciful our God is.
This is going to be another multi-part series of posts. I want to introduce the ideas first and then dig deeper in subsequent posts.
First, Why?
Usually I end my posts with the 'why' or the practicality of an issue, but for this series, I want to start with the 'why'.
I have always sought to understand the foundations of my Faith, of our Faith. I am a person who needs to know and understand why I believe something. In large part, this is a product of my upbringing. I have a father who is a scientist and come from a family of scientists and engineers. Whether spoken or unspoken, knowing the details of how things work and being able to answer the 'why' of something has always been a virtue in our family. As it relates to Faith, I approach my faith very rationally. If there is a God who created the World and mankind, then He had to have a reason for doing that. Not only that, it stands to reason from reading Scripture that the same God who created humanity only to place a Curse on it (due to disobedience) also has a plan to restore mankind to the relationship He originally intended. Therefore, anything that increases my confidence in who He is and what He is doing toward that end, is something I find valuable for increasing my trust in Him as someone who will do what He said He is going to do. What I will present here is further evidence that God is trustworthy. He is a God worthy of placing our complete trust in. To that end, I share this as a means of increasing the confidence we have for Faith in Yahweh Elohim (The Lord of Lords). I don't want to puff myself up with knowledge, or to simply know things for the sake of knowing them...no, rather, I want to further increase my Faith, and our Faith together, so that I can continue the daily work of laying my life down for Him, knowing that a glorious reward awaits those who endure and persevere in their Faith, to the End.
Astronomy, not Astrology
If you watch some of the videos that have been done on this subject, or read the books, there is almost always this caveat somewhere in them...and its an important one. The fact of the matter is that The Zodiac and all of its modern context of horoscopes and astrology is a perversion of what was at one time God's story. Astronomy is the study of the objects out in space (planets, stars, sun, moon, etc). Astrology is, essentially, the worship of the stars or having some sense that their movements rule or influence our lives. Astronomy is observational, astrology is manipulative. Interestingly, the language of the ancient Hebrews also seems to capture this distinction. Mazzaroth seems to be the Hebrew word for the equivalent of Astronomy in English. In Job 38:32, the only place in the entire Bible where we see this word, God is, ahem, 'cross-examining' Job shall we say, and He says, "Can you bring forth the constellations (Mazzaroth) in their seasons or lead out the Bear with its Cubs?" In 2 Kings 23:5, we see a very similar word, Mazzalot, but the context is completely different. It says, "He [God] did away with the idolatrous priests appointed by the kings of Judah to burn incense on the high places of the towns of Judah and on those around Jerusalem - those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun and moon, to the constellations [Mazzalot] and to all the starry hosts." I don't think I have to go into it here - the difference between these two passages is stark. In Job, God is talking about what He has created. In 2 Kings, he is condemning the priests who are worshipping the sun, moon, and constellations as a means of manipulating them for some kind of benefit. Astronomy vs. Astrology. What I am engaging in here is Astronomy - I am not ascribing any divine qualities to these objects, rather, I am suggesting that God has created this all for a specific purpose, and that through observation and study, we can see and know the story God is telling.
What is the Mazzaroth?
What we refer to as the 'Zodiac' is actually a Greek term (Zodiac means "the way" in Greek) for the Hebrew word 'Mazzarot(h)', which is translated literally as "garland of crowns". It is specifically speaking about the twelve constellations that something called the 'ecliptic' runs through. The ecliptic is the imaginary path or track that the Sun follows through the sky. Every year, the Sun passes "through" the same twelve constellations and those constellations are what modern folks call the Zodiac and what ancient Hebrews called 'The Mazzaroth'. Each month, the sun rises "in" a different constellation and through Jewish history and the histories of some other cultures, we can know which constellation is the 'first' one in the line of the Zodiac. It is also worth noting that no matter where you are on the Earth, you see the Sun pass through these same twelve constellations. Because of the tilt of the Earth's axis, the sun's path in the sky is not a straight line, but is instead a wavy line. This means that whether you are in the Northern Hemisphere or the Southern Hemisphere, you see the same thing (*Sidenote: This cannot be said for the other 76 named constellations in the skies. Many of those can only be seen from one hemisphere or the other.)
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| A visualization of The Ecliptic and the Twelve Constellations of the Ecliptic |
The twelve constellations of the Zodiac are called by very similar names in almost every ancient culture around the world whether you are talking about the Chinese, the ancient Sumerians (the oldest known culture), the Greeks, and so on. When I heard this, it sparked a thought - "If every ancient culture around the World has similar names for these twelve constellations, then it had to have had a very ancient starting point, likely pre-Babel?" In the book "Mystery of the Mazzaroth", Tim Warner addresses this very subject with the following from the Jewish historian Josephus:
"Now this Seth [3rd son of Adam], when he was brought up, and came to those years in which he could discern what was good, became a virtuous man; and as he was himself of an excellent character, so did he leave children behind him who imitated his virtues. All these proved to be of good dispositions. They also inhabited the same country without dissentions, and in a happy condition, without any misfortune falling upon them until they died. They also were the inventors of that peculiar sort of wisdom which is concerned with the heavenly bodies, and their order. [brief aside: 'heavenly bodies' was a common Jewish idiom for sun, moon and stars] And that their inventions might not be lost before they were sufficiently known, upon Adam's prediction that the world was to be destroyed at one time by the force of fire, and at another time by the violence and quantity of water, they made two pillars, the one of brick, the other of stone: they inscribed their discoveries on them both, that in the case the pillar of brick should be destroyed by the flood, the pillar of stone might remain, and exhibit those discoveries to mankind; and also inform them that there was another pillar of brick erected by them. Now this remains in the land of Siriad to this day." (Josephus, Antiquities, Book I, ch. 2-3)
Another quick aside that highlights the importance, if this account is true, of Seth being credited with the etiology of this 'peculiar wisdom': Seth is within the 'righteous' line, extending from Adam to Abraham in Genesis 1-12. If you trace the genealogies that are recorded in that book, there is a family of 'the righteous' (or Faithful) that is traced from Seth, all the way to Abraham, in some great detail (Enoch was one of the members of this line, a man who 'walked with God' (Gen 5:24). The cursed line extending from Adam is the family of Cain. It is worth the time to examine this for yourself in Genesis 1-11.
Getting back on track, if Seth was the person God chose to reveal this story to, then that would have been solidly pre-Babel, and if he indeed created these brick and stone pillars as a means of sharing and preserving this knowledge for others, then it starts to make sense why these constellations of the Zodiac would have continued to have similar names, post-Babel, among the different tongues and tribes of the various nations scattered over the Earth. That the meaning of these constellations and the overall story they tell was perverted and obscured is no surprise either given that outside of Abraham and the nation of Israel, no nation was worshipping Yahweh Elohim, a fact well-documented throughout the Torah and broader Old Testament.
Where Does the Zodiac/Mazzaroth Start?
As I alluded to earlier, the issue of which constellation is the beginning of the Zodiac has its answer from both the Jewish calendar, as well as Egyptian culture. Within the Jewish calendar, which is based on the cycles of the moon, Rosh Hashanah (which means "head of the year") is the first month of the year. Rosh Hashanah, within the Jewish tradition, is the celebration of Creation and it is the beginning of their 'feast of weeks' (Leviticus 23). Within our modern calendar, Rosh Hashanah begins sometime between September 5th and October 5th, when the 'new moon' is first observed. At this time of the year, Virgo (the virgin woman) is the constellation within which the Sun rises.
Further bolstering the case, that Virgo is the first constellation in the cycle, is the Egyptian figure of the Sphinx, which can be visited to this day. The Sphinx is positioned lying East to West, with the head of a human and the body of a lion. The body of the lion (Leo) is to the celestial West, and the head of the human part is to the Celestial East. Quoting again from Tim Warner's book:
"The Sphinx is perfectly oriented to the ecliptic at noon and at midnight on the solstices, and at sunset and sunrise on the equinoxes. This configuration makes the Sphinx a perfect indicator of the point of beginning and ending of the Zodiac. Whether that was its intent, we can only guess." (Tim Warner, "Mystery of the Mazzaroth", ch. 2)
A Story Written in the Heavens
Having gotten all of this preamble out of the way - what follows from here is an absolutely incredible story - it is God's story of what He has done and will do, written in the skies. It is Psalm 19, quoted at the outset of this post, in literal form. Each of the twelve constellations has a meaning and purpose towards the telling of God's redemptive plan in history and the best part of that story is that is it exactly the same story that we see conveyed in Scripture, which I have just gotten done reviewing in my previous series entitled "What is the Gospel?"
In the following posts, I will go through each constellation in some further detail and make the case that the Gospel story itself is conveyed through these constellations:
Virgo - Abrahamic Covenant
Libra - Torah (Mosaic Law)
Scorpio - Israel Wanders in the Wilderness
Sagittarius - Israel Enters the Promised Land
Capricorn - The Davidic Covenant
Aquarius - Israel's Captivity in Babylon
Pieces - Return from Exile in Babylon
Aries - The Lamb of God, Slain for the Sins of the World (Jesus)
Taurus - The Apostolic Ministry
Gemini - Jew/Gentile believers bound together in one Faith, through Jesus
Cancer - The Anti-Christ Empire
Leo - The Second Coming and Triumph of Jesus (the Lion) over Death
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