The eclipse that sweeps over Texas on Monday will be the latest in a line dating back more than 3000 years. Naturally, eclipses themselves have been going on for much longer than that. But the first recorded observations that survive are from the 2nd millennium B.C.
An eclipse is a phenomenon in the old sense of the word, the one Greek astronomers used. By its nature, it’s something we observe. In Anchorage, Alaska on Monday, there will still be a sun and a moon. But there won’t be an eclipse, because the moon won’t be in the right position to blot out the sun as seen from that far north and west.
It makes no sense to speak of an eclipse except from a certain standpoint, the place on earth where the sun fails (in Greek, ekleipei) to appear (phainein). A total eclipse, where the shadow of the moon doesn’t narrow to a point before it reaches us, happens somewhere once every 18 months or so. But it only happens in the same place about once every 400 years.
The fact that we speak of it happening “in a place” at all shows it’s not just about the moon’s and the sun’s positions: it’s about what those positions cause us to see. That’s what a phenomenon is: it is “that which appears” (to phainomenon).
Since they are in essence something that we see, it’s perfectly natural to assume they have significance for us, which is what people have been doing for as long as they have been watching the sky. Our earliest records of eclipses are omen tablets, meaning they combine astronomical data with conjectures and predictions about how politics is likely to unfold.
One of the old Babylonian kingdoms was supposed to have fallen after a double eclipse of both the moon and the sun; in Ugarit, up the coast from what’s now Israel, many people think a total solar eclipse was observed in the 1200s or 1300s B.C. The details are hotly contested (what fun!) but it looks likely that the sight caused such alarm that palace clerics either 1) sent away to the archives in Babylon for a master guidebook on interpreting eclipses, or 2) expeditiously killed some livestock to inspect their livers for more detailed information (“two livers were examined: danger”).
This isn’t hooey. It’s trial and error. The priests were right that phenomena in the sky follow a pattern, and that we can use that pattern to establish a regular order in the nature of things. They happened to be wrong about some of the particulars, but it took time to figure that out. The Greek Historian Herodotus reports that the philosopher Thales first predicted accurately when an eclipse would happen in the 6th century B.C. If so, he inaugurated the tradition that eventually produced NASA, which you can tell because we are still, in 2024, using Greek words to discuss all this.
This particular eclipse has occasioned predictions of a more Biblical nature. Allegedly it will pass over 8 American towns named Nineveh, which is the Assyrian capital whose downfall featured as a forerunner of the apocalypse in Old Testament prophecy. Only two of those towns will really be in the “path of totality,” meaning they will see the sun completely covered by the moon—and again, eclipses are what you observe. But using them to foretell the coming of doomsday is also a venerable pastime, and it’s not as if Current Era life is lacking in wars or rumors of wars.
Still, I would go so far as to say that if people think the world is going to end on a certain day, then the sole and exclusive thing we know for certain about the timing of the apocalypse is those people are wrong about it. It’s true that the darkening of the sun is loaded with world-ending significance in Scripture. It accompanied the crucifixion. It features repeatedly in visions of yom ha-hu, which is the ominous Hebrew phrase meaning simply “That Day.” It describes the day of the Lord, the final revelation: on That Day, “the sun and the moon grow dark, and the stars lose their brightness.”
But since the subject came up, I noticed something else interesting about those passages recently: none of them, not even the one on Golgotha, looks to me like a description of an eclipse. No eclipse lasts for three hours in the same place, or causes the stars as well as the sun to go dark. If anything, the opposite is true: a darkened sun can let us see the stars during the day, a fact which some of the Babylonian texts mention.
The Bible portents all look to me like miraculous interventions into the usual course of nature, almost as if they’re impossible by design to confuse with what we would now identify as ordinary eclipses. The prophetic tablets from the rest of the Ancient Near East can all be plausibly slotted into the normal rhythms of lunar and solar motion. But the closest thing to an eclipse in the Bible might be when the sun appears to stop in the sky at Joshua’s prayer—it’s just possible that the Hebrew word we translate as “stand still” is related to the Akkadian word for “cease to shine.” But we usually picture that event as something altogether more strange. And anyway it didn’t precede the end of the world.
It’s almost as if the Bible, uniquely among all religious texts from its period, is singularly disinterested in eclipses and what follows them. Far be it from me to say why this is. But it seems like there’s a distinction operative in Scripture between regular patterns of celestial motion—the kind that go on automatically—and miraculous happenings—the kind that really do require a power outside of nature to alter the normal flow of things.
The inhabitants of Ugarit mingled closely with the Canaanites, i.e., the people ancient Jews were most concerned to distinguish themselves from. Eclipses would have looked to Canaanites like extraordinary things, exceptions to the rule. Is it possible God wanted the Jews to set themselves apart by learning to wait for the real exceptions? Genesis 1 describes the lights in the sky as mo’edim—that is, “markers” of the “days and years.” They are dependable, regular measures of repeating cycles.
In this sense the Bible is actually something quite astonishing: it is a text about miracles set against a scientific background. It contains implicit means for distinguishing natural cosmic phenomena from the kind that really break the mold. It’s not that supernatural wonders aren’t possible in the Bible. It’s that they invariably break the patterns of nature and so, by definition, can’t be predicted by scientists. “No one knows the day or the hour”—not even the angels in heaven, and not even the astronomers. Watch ye therefore, and pray.
Rejoice evermore,
Spencer
Image by Michael S Adler, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Listen to the latest from Young Heretics:
I think maybe illegal immigrants flooding the West may be a reverse Tower of Babel to prevent the arrogant from becoming AI gods.
Any thoughts on the whole red heifer thing in Israel? It just feels like something very dark and evil is afoot. I’m totally open to the theory, however, that cern and the eclipses are all a giant distraction from Jesus and Him crucified. I do think we’re a few years off from the end, but I think it’s close.