Ancient Insights Special thanks to Christopher Kou for helping me research this article!
While it’s absolutely true that the Bible condemns what we would consider modern astrology, that is trying to use the heavenly bodies to learn about your personality or the future or something along those lines (Deuteronomy 18:9-13, Isaiah 8:19-20, 44:24-25, 47:8-15), Scripture nevertheless affirms that the constellations were created by God, and that they serve a certain purpose within creation. We know this because the Word teaches that God is the one who “determines the number of the stars [and] gives to all of them their names” (Psalm 147:4 cf. Isaiah 40:26), and what are the names of the stars? Well, we’re told a few of them:
Who made the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades and the chambers of the south… Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion? Can you lead forth the Mazzaroth in their season, or can you guide the Bear with its children? Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish their rule on the earth? (Job 9:9, 38:31-33)
He who made the Pleiades and Orion, and turns deep darkness into the morning and darkens the day into night, who calls for the waters of the sea and pours them out on the surface of the earth, the Lord is his name. (Amos 9:8)
The Bear, Orion, and the Pleiades are all names of constellations, and Scripture is very clear that it wasn’t pagans who made this stuff up, but rather God who determined the arrangement of the heavens such that these starry images are discernable; and if it’s true that God is behind “the Mazzaroth” (the Hebrew equivalent of the zodiac), then we should be looking for how Scripture uses these heavenly signs, and what it’s trying to teach us through them, which is what this article is going to attempt to do (building heavily on the work of James Jordan’s Through New Eyes and Peter Leithart’s Revelation commentary).
Our first clue that the stars are going to play an important role in the symbolic grammar of Scripture is found right in the beginning: “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to separate the day from the night. And let them be for signs…’” (Genesis 1:14). And indeed, after 1:16, the next time we see the word “stars” is in 15:5 when Abraham is told to “recount the stars if you are able to recount them… So shall your offspring be,” and again in 22:17, “I will surely bless you, and I will surely multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven.” As many scholars have noted, Abraham isn’t just being told about the quantity of his descendants, but also the quality; the sons of Abraham will be like the stars of heaven, which is a theme that we see picked up in the story of Joseph:
“Behold, I have dreamed another dream. Behold, the sun, the moon, and eleven stars were bowing down to me.” But when he [Joseph] told it to his father [Jacob/Israel] and to his brothers, his father rebuked him and said to him, “What is this dream that you have dreamed? Shall I and your mother and your brothers indeed come to bow ourselves to the ground before you?” (Genesis 37:9-10)
In this famous dream, Joseph sees the family of Israel (i.e. the offspring of Abraham) in heavenly images: Jacob himself is the sun, Rachel is the moon, and importantly for our purposes, the twelve sons of Israel are depicted as twelve stars (Joseph himself being the twelfth). This is significant because the idea of “twelve stars” calls to mind the twelve constellations that make up the zodiac, which suggests that the twelve tribes of Israel are each associated with one of the zodiac signs, an idea that I’d argue is confirmed by Scripture’s detailed descriptions of the twelve tribes…
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