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The historian Pliny notes that the seven planets are called wandering stars because of their unusual motion. Jude draws on this tradition when he calls the false teachers wayward stars headed for judgment.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Pliny the Elder, Pliny Natural History 2.12
Classical
(6.) Between this body and the heavens there are suspended, in this aërial spirit, seven stars, separated by determinate spaces, which, on account of their motion, we call wandering, although, in reality, none are less so. The sun is carried along in the midst of these, a body of great size and power, the ruler, not only of the seasons and of the different climates, but also of the stars themselves and of the heavens. When we consider his operations, we must regard him as the life, or rather the mind of the universe, the chief regulator and the God of nature; he also lends his light to the other stars. He is most illustrious and excellent, beholding all things and hearing all things, which, I perceive, is ascribed to him exclusively by the prince of poets, Homer.
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
... our word “planet” is derived from the Greek planētēs, meaning “wanderer.” In the Septuagint the word is only attested in Hosea 9:17 as a translation of the Hebrew nōdědîm, referring to those who “flee, escape, wander about.” In the New Testament (Jude 13), as with all other early Christian literature, planētēs is used only in conjunction with asteres, “star.” So, in the pre-Copernican cosmological systems, planets were viewed as wandering stars, whose heavenly paths were irregular. Incidentally, we will see in the coming chapters that the wandering nature of the planets is what became the most perplexing feature of the Aristotelian and Ptolemaic systems. ...
Greenwood, Kyle
Scripture and Cosmology: Reading the Bible between the Ancient World and Modern Science
(p. 92) InterVarsity Press, 2015
* 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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