Texts in Conversation
Plato describes the stars as living beings that are divine and eternal, while the wandering planets are the ones that are disobedient. Jude draws on this tradition when he calls the false teachers wayward stars headed for judgment.
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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)
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.”
(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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