Texts in Conversation
Jude calls false teachers wayward stars doomed to darkness, describing the stars and planets as living beings that can go astray. Philo similarly describes the stars as having rational divine natures, beings given mind and soul and set in the heavens.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Philo, On the Creation 1:50
Classical
But since every city with properly established laws has a regular constitution, this citizen of the world had to adopt the same constitution as the one that prevailed in the whole world. This constitution is the right reason of nature, more properly called law, a divine arrangement by which everything suitable and appropriate is assigned to each individual. But this city and constitution must have had some citizens before man, who could rightly be called citizens of a mighty city, since they had received the widest imaginable circumference to live in and had been enrolled in the largest and most perfect commonwealth. And who could these have been but rational, divine natures, some incorporeal and perceptible only by the intellect, others not lacking bodily substance, as the stars in fact are? And the one who associated and lived among them naturally lived in unmixed happiness. Being akin and closely related to the ruler of all, since a great deal of the divine spirit had flowed into him, he was eager to say and do everything that might please his father and king, following him step by step along the paths that the virtues prepare and make plain, the paths on which only those souls may walk who regard becoming like God, who made them, as the proper end of their existence.
Date: 20–50 CE (based on scholarly estimates)
Jude 1:13
New Testament
12 These men are dangerous reefs at your love feasts, feasting without reverence, feeding only themselves. They are waterless clouds, carried along by the winds; autumn trees without fruit—twice dead, uprooted; 13 wild sea waves, spewing out the foam of their shame; wayward stars for whom the utter depths of eternal darkness have been reserved. 14 Now Enoch, the seventh in descent beginning with Adam, even prophesied of them, saying, “Look! The Lord is coming with thousands and thousands of his holy ones,
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Notes and References
... At the same time stars were depicted as sentient beings in the Second Temple period. Bruce Malina describes stars, as well as other celestial phenomena like the sun and moon, as "nonhuman personages obedient to God and of service to him." Malina illustrates his point with Baruch 3:34-35, a passage that describes the stars as participants in worship of the divine. Philo also depicts stars as living creatures endowed with mind and soul. 1 Enoch 18:14-16 and Jude 13 preserve traditions, however, about disobedient stars that eventually are punished. These accounts bear witness to a tradition in Judaism that understood stars to be creatures with awareness and with will. Stars also appear in Greco-Roman literature as divine souls or as fiery beings that are souls in the afterlife. Plato (i.e. Phaedrus), Aristophanes (Peace) and the Stoics especially understood stars as sidereal beings connected to the afterlife. ...
Bautch, Kelley Coblentz
A Study of the Geography of 1 Enoch 17-19: “No One Has Seen What I Have Seen.”
(p. 47) Brill, 2003
* The use of references are not endorsements of their contents. Please read the entirety of the provided reference(s) to understand the author's full intentions regarding the use of these texts.
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