400 PLEASANT WA YS IN SCIENCE. 



power and influence of the heavenly bodies. The stars are 

 to be for signs, but we read nothing of the power of the 

 wandering stars " to do injury or trouble any one." (That is, 

 not in the book of Genesis. In the song of Deborah we 

 find, though perhaps only in a poetic fashion, the old in- 

 fluences assigned to the planets, when the singer says that 

 the " stars in their courses fought against Sisera." Deborah, 

 however, was a woman, and women have always been loth 

 and late to give up ancient superstitions.) Again, the sun 

 and the moon in Genesis are the greater and the lesser 

 lights, not, as in the Babylonian narrative, the god Shamas 

 and the god Uru. 



We may find a parallel to this treatment of the Baby- 

 lonian myth in the treatment by Moses of the observance of 

 the Sabbath, a day of rest which the Babylonian tablets show 

 to have had, as for other reasons had been before suspected, 

 an astrological significance. The Jewish lawgiver does not 

 do away with the observance ; in fact, he was probably 

 powerless to do away with it. At any rate, he suffers the 

 observance to remain, precisely as the writer of the book of 

 Genesis retains the Babylonian tradition of the creation of 

 the celestial bodies. But he is careful to expurgate the 

 Chaldaean observance, just as the writer of Genesis is careful 

 to expurgate the Babylonian tradition. The week as a 

 period is no longer associated with astrological superstitions, 

 nor the Sabbath rest enjoined as a fetish. Both ideas are 

 directly associated with the monotheistic principle which 

 primarily led to the separation of the family of Abraham 

 from the rest of the Chaldaean race. In Babylonia, the 

 method of associating the names of the sun, moon, and stars 

 with the days, doubtless had its origin. Saturn was the 

 Sabbath star, as it is still called (Sabbatai) in the Talmud. 

 But, as Professor Tischendorf told Humboldt, in answer to 

 a question specially addressed to him on the subject, " there 

 is an entire absence in both the Old and New Testaments, 

 of any traces of names of week-days taken from the planets." 

 The lunar festivals, again, though unquestionably Sabaistic 



