Biblical “Star” meaning / explanation (aka: Where are planets, meteors, and other celestial objects mentioned in the Bible?)
A preface to this: the Hebrew language has a limited vocabulary, so each word has multiple meanings (plus, originally the vowels were not written down) … which meaning … God will finally determine …
This means that the riddle written on the wall in Babylon the night it fell, is indicative of what it might take to understand the Bible.
Here’s a better known example of how the Hebrew word “heaven” has to have multiple meanings because of the limited Hebrew vocabulary
Heaven:
Where God lives
Where celestial objects and bodies are located
Where the birds fly
(And more rarely, governments - See Isaiah 34:5)
So the same “multiple meanings” issue could be happening below:
MEANING OF “STAR”
A side point about the word translated "star" or "stars" ... (apparently mazza, see below) … the Bible has no word for “planet” or “meteor” … translating the root word mazza, (which might just mean “light in the night sky”) as “star” could be obscuring other meanings like “planets” “comet” “meteor/meteorite”(or even satellite?)
Here is circumstantial evidence toward this view:
PLANETS
Judges 5: 20,21:
“20 From heaven did the stars fight, From their orbits they fought against Sisʹe·ra. 21 The torrent of Kiʹshon washed them away, The torrent of ancient days, the torrent of Kiʹshon.”
(this sure sounds like PLANETS, i.e. little points of light in the sky that seem to orbit the earth or sun … we assume people in the past didn’t have a real clear picture of orbital dynamics, but some points of light “moved around” or were in different locations from day to day)
Interesting additional thought, though, that Moses was taught in "all the wisdom of the Egyptians" which may have included astronomy (and/or astrology, unfortunately). And he may have shared some of that astronomy knowledge with Joshua (who likely wrote this part of Judges)
Now, how could planets fight? Well that’s another rabbit hole related to electric universe theory, and/or writings of Immanuel Velikovsky
ROGUE PLANETS?
Jude 13: “wild waves of the sea that foam up their own causes for shame; stars with no set course, for which the blackness of darkness stands reserved forever.”
(what’s this … the same as a rogue planet? ) A sun-like "star" (our modern translation of the ancient word) emits light, thus the ‘blackness of darkness’) “star” here could be technically a planet without a bright glowing giant gas ball to orbit. I suppose it could be a "black hole" but those are actually theoretical. (Science is not settled on general relativity. For example, they can't seem to identify "dark matter" or "dark energy")
See these links about “rogue planets”
COMET
Mazza-roth can be translated literally as “hairy star” or “corona star” or “crown star”
This is the quote from: The Biblical Flood and the Ice Epoch, Chapter 8 by Donald W.Patten, an online book: (use: find function (Control + F) and look up “Mazza” on the page. It’s near the bottom.)
> “JOB. We will now return to our original point of departure, Job, chapter 38, where Job is discussing "Arcturus and his sons," This portion is requoted:
Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion? Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? Or canst thou guide Arcturus with his sons? Knowest thou the ordinances of heaven; canst thou set the dominion thereon in the earth? (Job 38:31-33, Amplified)
Let us examine the term "Mazzaroth." In Hebrew, "roth" means beard and "mazza" means star. We seem to have here a descriptive term: the bearded, or hairy, star. This is descriptive of cometary phenomena. Orbits were understood only with difficulty by the ancients. Highly eccentric orbits were the most difficult of all to understand, partly because of the chance of being disturbed by some of the larger and remoter planets, such as Jupiter and Saturn. Comets would disappear into the remote oceans of our solar system, and then they would return with renewed brilliance--sometimes in the same orbit and sometimes not, sometimes on schedule and sometimes not--a generation or so later. Apparently, bodies following highly elliptical orbits at that time were of sufficient mass to threaten and occasionally disturb the Earth.”
(see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mazzaroth though I don’t trust Wikipedia very much. Its editors have agendas synonymous with Satan’s goal of “blinding the minds of the unbelievers”. But go to the subheading “translation”, and see the comment of the NET Bible:
Here is the quote from Wikipedia:
“NET: The word מַּזָּלֹות; (mazzarot) is taken by some to refer to the constellations (see 2 Kings 23:5), and by others as connected to the word for "crown," and so "corona.") ”
Comets in the inner solar system have a fuzzy coma surrounding their nucleus. People have made drawing of past comets … and they definitely look like a head of long hair ….
Fuzzy/hairy/corona/crown … can you see the root meaning of the Hebrew word: “Roth”? Anyways … moving on…
METEORS
Matthew 24:29 “Immediately after the tribulation of those days the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the STARS will fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken.”
Mark 13:25 “and the STARS will be falling out of heaven, and the powers that are in the heavens will be shaken.”
Revelation 6:13 (6th seal) “and the STARS of heaven fell to the earth, as when a fig tree shaken by a high wind casts its unripe figs.”
Revelation 12:4 “and its tail drags a third of the STARS of heaven, and it hurled them down to the earth. And the dragon kept standing before the woman who was about to give birth, that, when she did give birth, it might devour her child.” (if what is translated “star” literally means “little light in the sky”, then star could easily mean meteors here … many big ones. This is … if this event will be a future “sign in heaven” (the scripture says “and another sign was seen in heaven”) currently I suspect this is “the sign of the Son of Man” of Matthew 24:30
This is, to be clear … a hypothetical. I’m not asserting this to be definitively so.
Interesting article, thank you. “ … and/or astrology, unfortunately.” Why unfortunately?