What the Bible says About
ECLIPSES OF THE SUN AND MOON
Our calendar to-day is a purely solar one; our months are twelve in number, but of purely arbitrary length, divorced from all connection with the moon; and to us, the Saros cycle does not readily leap to the eye, for eclipses ]of sun or moon seem to fall haphazard on any day of the month or year.
But with the Hebrews, Assyrians, and Babylonians it was not so. Their calendar was a luni-solar one—their year was on the average a solar year, their months were true lunations; the first day of their new month began on the evening when the first thin crescent of the moon appeared after its conjunction with the sun. This observation is what is meant in the Bible by the "new moon." Astronomers now by "new moon" mean the time when it is actually in conjunction with the sun, and is therefore not visible. Nations whose calendar was of this description were certain to discover the Saros much sooner than those whose months were not true lunations, like the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans.
There are no direct references to eclipses in Scripture. They might have been used in the historical portions for the purpose of dating events, as was the great earthquake in the days of King Uzziah, but they were not so used. But we find not a few allusions to their characteristic appearances and phenomena in the books of the prophets. God in the beginning set the two great lights in the firmament for signs as well as for seasons; and the prophets throughout use the relations of the sun and moon as types of spiritual relations. The Messiah was the Sun of Righteousness; the chosen people, the Church, was as the moon, which derives her light from Him. The "signs of heaven" were symbols of great spiritual events, notomens of mundane disasters.
The prophets Joel and Amos are clear and vivid in their ]descriptions; probably because the eclipse of 831 b.c. was within their recollection. Joel says first, "The sun and the moon shall be dark;" and again, more plainly,—
"I will show wonders in the heavens and in the earth, blood, and fire, and pillars of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before the great and the terrible day of the Lord come."
This prophecy was quoted by St. Peter on the day of Pentecost. And in the Apocalypse, St. John says that when the sixth seal was opened, "the sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood."
In these references, the two kinds of eclipses are referred to—the sun becomes black when the moon is "new" and hides it; the moon becomes as blood when it is "full" and the earth's shadow falls upon it; its deep copper colour, like that of dried blood, being due to the fact that the light, falling upon it, has passed through a great depth of the earth's atmosphere. These two eclipses cannot therefore be coincident, but they may occur only a fortnight apart—a total eclipse of the sun may be accompanied by a partial eclipse of the moon, a fortnight earlier or a fortnight later; a total eclipse of the moon may be accompanied by partial eclipses of the sun, both at the preceding and following "new moons."
Writing at about the same period, the prophet Amos says—
"Saith the Lord God, I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day,"
and seems to refer to the fact that the eclipse of 831 b.c. occurred about midday in Judæa.
]Later Micah writes—
"The sun shall go down over the prophets, and the day shall be dark over them."
Isaiah says that the "sun shall be darkened in his going forth," and Jeremiah that "her sun is gone down while it was yet day." Whilst Ezekiel says—
"I will cover the sun with a cloud, and the moon shall not give her light. All the bright lights of heaven will I make dark over thee, and set darkness upon thy land, saith the Lord God."
But a total eclipse is not all darkness and terror; it has a beauty and a glory all its own. Scarcely has the dark moon hidden the last thread of sunlight from view, than spurs of rosy light are seen around the black disc that now fills the place so lately occupied by the glorious king of day. And these rosy spurs of light shine on a background of pearly glory, as impressive in its beauty as the swift march of the awful shadow, and the seeming descent of the darkened heavens, were in terror. There it shines, pure, lovely, serene, radiant with a light like molten silver, wreathing the darkened sun with a halo like that round a saintly head in some noble altar-piece; so that while in some cases the dreadful shadow has awed a laughing and frivolous crowd into silence, in others the radiance of that halo has brought spectators to their knees with an involuntary exclamation, "The Glory!" as if God Himself had made known His presence in the moment of the sun's eclipse.
And this, indeed, seems to have been the thought of ]both the Babylonians and Egyptians of old. Both nations had a specially sacred symbol to set forth the Divine Presence—the Egyptians, a disc with long outstretched wings; the Babylonians, a ring with wings. The latter symbol on Assyrian monuments is always shown as floating over the head of the king, and is designed to indicate the presence and protection of the Deity.
We may take it for granted that the Egyptians and Chaldeans of old, as modern astronomers to-day, had at one time or another presented to them every type of coronal form. But there would, no doubt, be a difficulty in grasping or remembering the irregular details of the corona as seen in most eclipses. Sometimes, however, the corona shows itself in a striking and simple form—when sun-spots are few in number, it spreads itself out in two great equatorial streamers. At the eclipse of Algiers in 1900, already referred to, one observer who watched the eclipse from the sea, said—
"The sky was blue all round the sun, and the effect of ]the silvery corona projected on it was beyond any one to describe. I can only say it seemed to me what angels' wings will be like
It seems exceedingly probable that the symbol of the ring with wings owed its origin not to any supposed analogy between the ring and the wings and the divine attributes of eternity and power, but to the revelations of a total eclipse with a corona of minimum type. Moreover the Assyrians, when they insert a figure of their deity within the ring, give him a kilt-like dress, and this kilted or feathered characteristic is often retained where the figure is omitted. This gives the symbol a yet closer likeness to the corona, whose "polar rays" are remarkably like the tail feathers of a bird.
Perhaps the prophet Malachi makes a reference to this characteristic of the eclipsed sun, with its corona like "angels' wings," when he predicts—
"But unto you that fear My name shall the Sun of Righteousness arise with healing in His wings."
But, if this be so, it must be borne in mind that the prophet uses the corona as a simile only. No more than the sun itself, is it the Deity, or the manifestation of the Deity.
In the New Testament we may find perhaps a reference to what causes an eclipse—to the shadow cast by a heavenly body in its revolution—its "turning."
"Every good gift and every perfect boon is from above, coming down from the Father of Lights, with Whom can be no variation, neither shadow that is cast by turning."
