Hebrew Astronomy: Part 8 The Flaming Sword

When Adam and Eve were ejected from the Garden of Eden for disobeying God, He placed guards at the entrance. It was guarded by angels and a flashing sword. This is a strange detail in the story, and I think it might have an astronomical connections.

Genesis 3 v 24

After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the Tree of Life.

Angels Guarded the Way

It is usually thought that there was a single angel guarding the entrance back into the Garden and a sword, but actually the word ‘cherubim’ in Hebrew is a plural. This means there were either many angels and/or the sword is an angel too.

It’s interesting to see that the word for angel here is ‘cherubim’ and the word for sword in Hebrew is pronounced ‘chereb’. Maybe the writer of Genesis is making a pun, linking the sword and the angels together.

Which may suggest the sword is in fact an angel.

The Flashing Sword in the Night Sky

When we look at the planets from Earth, they appear to make a pattern in the sky. It’s commonly known as the Dance of the Planets.

This is what Venus looks like.

And these are the paths that Saturn and Jupiter make in the night sky:

Mercury is more interesting. It makes either 3 or 4 retrograde motions in a year. And due to its location, it spends a significant amount of time behind the Sun. This means its movement may appear erratic compared to the other planets.

Mercury takes around 116-120 days to complete one orbit around the sky, which is almost 3 times as fast as any of the other planets.

In the image below, the blue line is the orbit of the Earth (E). The grey line is the orbit of Mercury (M) and the white circle is the Sun (S). The white line is the path which Mercury takes in the Night Sky from an observer’s point of view from the Earth. The green part of the line denotes the time Mercury moves into a retrograde motion. Where the white line is blacked out, this is where Mercury is hidden from the view of someone on Earth. At these points, Mercury is behind the Sun.

You can see the orbit appears disjointed. The phrase from Genesis 3 regarding the Sword, “flashing back and forth”, could relate to this movement. The planet is moving back and forth in the sky.

If this correct, it takes this strange element of the story and places it within an astronomical context.

This is the last post in my Hebrew Astronomy series for the time being.

I will revisit this again, but look at how the astronomical data in Genesis might relate to individual Neolithic stone circles. And help understand why they were constructed and how they could have been used to predict the movement of the planets. I will look to publish these later in the year.

If you haven’t already, I would encourage you to read my work on the astronomical significance of Genesis 5 and 11. You will find this posted earlier in this year on Agloria.

Thank you for reading this series. If you have any feedback, I’d like to hear it.