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Plato describes the stars as living beings, divine and eternal in their fixed paths, set apart from the planets that wander in their paths. 1 Enoch draws on this tradition to describe wandering stars as divine beings that disobey God's commands.
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2500 BCE
1000+ CE
Plato Timaeus 40
Classical
And each member of this class He endowed with two motions, whereof the one is uniform motion in the same spot, whereby it conceives always identical thoughts about the same objects, and the other is a forward motion due to its being dominated by the revolution of the Same and Similar; but in respect of the other five motions they are at rest and move not, so that each of them may attain the greatest possible perfection. From this cause, then, came into existence all those unwandering stars which are living creatures divine and eternal and abide for ever revolving uniformly in the same spot; and those which keep swerving and wandering have been generated in the fashion previously described. And Earth, our nurse, which is globed around the pole that stretches through all, He framed to be the wardress and fashioner of night and day, she being the first and eldest of all the gods which have come into existence within the Heaven. But the choric dances of these same stars and their crossings one of another, and the relative reversals and progressions of their orbits, and which of the gods meet in their conjunctions, and how many are in opposition, and behind which and at what times they severally pass before one another and are hidden from our view, and again re-appearing send upon men unable to calculate alarming portents of the things which shall come to pass hereafter — to describe all this without an inspection of models of these movements would be labor in vain.
Date: 360 B.C.E. (based on scholarly estimates)
1 Enoch 18:15
Pseudepigrapha
11 And beyond that abyss I saw a place which had no firmament of heaven above, and no firmly founded earth beneath it; there was no water upon it, and no birds, but it was a waste and horrible place. 12 I saw there seven stars like great burning mountains, and to me, when I inquired about them, 13 The angel said: 'This place is the end of heaven and earth; this has become a prison for the stars and the host of heaven. 14 And the stars which roll over the fire are those which have transgressed the command of the Lord at the beginning of their rising, because they did not come forth at their appointed times. 15 And He was angry with them, and bound them until the time when their guilt should be consummated, even for ten thousand years.'
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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.”
(pp. 47-48) 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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