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730
SKY AND STABS.
siopeia. But many stars are habitually confounded, as the
Pleiades with the Hyades or Orion, and even with the Wain and
l
Arcturus what is vouched for
;
by glosses alone, is not to be
relied on. Thus I do not consider it proved as yet that the names
plough and eburdrung really belong to Orion. By plough the
Irish Fairy- tales 2, 123 mean the Wain rather than Orion, and
who knows but the throng of boars may really stand for the
TaSe? (from u?) 2 and the Lat. Suculae ? (see Suppl.).
Still more unsafe and slippery is the attempt to identify the
constellations of the East, founded as they are on such a different
way of looking at the heavens. Three are named in Job 9, 9 :
ttfy ash, nD 3 kimeh, ^D3 ksil; 3 which the Septuagint renders
TiXetaSe?, ecnrepos, dp/crovpos, the Vulgate
Hyades/
Arcturus, Orion,
and Luther the Wain, Orion, the
Job 38,
Glucke (hen)/ In
31 kimeh and ksil are given in the LXX as TrXemSe?,
fipicov, in Vulg. as Pleiades, Arcturus/ in Diut. 1,
Siebenstirni, Wagan/
520 as
and in Luther as Siebenstern,
For ksil in Isaiah 13, 10 the LXX has /2/aiW, Vulg.
Orion/
merely
splendor/ Luther Orion/ In Amos 5,
avoided in LXX, but rendered in Vulg.
8 kimeh and ksil are
Arcturus, Orion/ and
by Luther the Glucke, Orion/ Michaelis drew up
his 86
questions on the meaning of these stars, and Niebuhr received
4
the most conflicting answers from Arabian Jews ; on the whole
it seemed likeliest, that (1) ash was the Arabian constellation
om en ndsh, (2) kimeh or chima the Arab, toriye, (3)
ksil the
Arab, shell (sihhel) ; the three corresponding to Ursa major,
1
Keisersperg s Postil 206 : the sea-star or the Wain, or die hennmit den Mnlin
as ye call it. Grobianus 1572 fol. 93b : wo der \vagen steht, und wo die gluck mit
hunkeln geht. Several writers incorrectly describe the diimke, diiming as stebengestirn
even ; Tobler, when he 370t> says three stars of the siebeng. are called
is evidently thinking of the
the Jiorses, near which stands a tiny star, the waggoner, 1
Wain s thill [Germans often take the seven-stars for Ursa instead of Pleiades] .
2
It has long been thought a settled point, that Suculae (little sows) was a blun
dering imitation of TaSes, as if that came from us a sow, whereas it means the
rainers from few to rain ab ( imbribus, Cicero ; pluvio nomine, Pliny). Does
the author mean to reopen the question? Did the later Greeks and Eomans,
ashamed of having these little sows in the sky, invent the rainers theoryj May not Suculae at all events be a genuine old Koman name, taken from some meri
torious mythical pigs ? TKANS.
3 In Hebr. the three words stand in the order ash, k sil, kimah and their
;
transposition here does some injustice to the Vulg. and Luther. As a fact, two out
of the four times that k sil occurs, it is ttpluv in LXX, and the other two times it is
Orion in Vulgate. Luther and the Engl. version are consistent throughout. TRANS.
4 Beschr. von Arabien p. 114 some more Arabian names of stars, pp. 112 6.
;