The oldest book in the Bible is called “Job” and was written almost 4,000 years ago. It is about a man who goes through an incredible amount of pain and loss - emotionally, physically and materially. As the story unfolds, he and some men who come to comfort him, voice their opinions on why Job is suffering, what part God plays in it, the purpose of life, what the after-life is like, etc. Eventually God interrupts their dialogue and starts asking questions that only He knows the answers to – to show Job how limited his human knowledge and power is compared to God’s. Included in these questions are references to things that no human could have recognized at the time this book was written which is intriguing. I’m choosing just one example of these references for this post.
In Job 38:32, we read - Can you bring the constellations in their season? Or can you guide the Bear with its sons? Obviously no human can change the location or timing of the constellations nor can we guide or control the path of any stars but the question doesn’t refer to guiding any stars but a specific collection – “the Bear and its sons”. Is that just a random reference thrown in for effect or should the reader dig deeper into this detail? Sadly, there wasn’t a way for readers of Job to dig deeper into this detail for thousands of years. They could observe that the Bear (aka Arcturas) was a very bright star and they might have surmised that it was somehow connected to other lesser bright stars. Maybe they thought these and other stars were moving through space so it made sense to refer to guiding the Bear as an example of guiding all the stars that are moving. That’s about all they could conclude.
But now we can dig deeper because of what we started to discover in the 1700s and know even more about today: The Bear or Arcturus is the fastest moving of any first-magnitude star except Alpha Centauri. However, it is not moving in the broad plane of the Milky Way, but almost perpendicularly to the galaxy’s plane and it is not alone in its headlong plunge through the Milky Way – it is accompanied by 52 other stars, which are collectively known as the Arcturus Stream. The speed of these stars is about 10 times the speed of other stars and about 20 times faster than our sun.
The reason this relatively recent information is important is - we can now see that the reference to guiding “the Bear with its sons” is the best possible example to use if someone is trying to describe a band of fast-moving stars that need to be guided through the heavens. No humans could have known this when the book of Job was written so it either reveals God’s involvement and knowledge or it is another incredible coincidence.
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