“The sun, the moon, and the stars” is used idiomatically to mean ‘everything’ or ‘anything’ in twentieth and twenty-first century English. This is not the case in Hebrew.
In the New Testament, there are five occurrences in which ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ and ‘stars’ appear in the same sentence.
While these words in English are simply nouns which refer to astronomical bodies, in Hebrew they were simultaneously names for the idols worshipped by the neighboring pagan nations which surrounded Israel. This placed the authors of the Tanakh into tricky situations: In Genesis, the author uses a circumlocution, referring to the “greater light” and the “lesser light” in order to avoid using the words ‘sun’ and ‘moon’ which are actually the names of heathen gods.
Moses uses these three astronomical terms as a circumlocution to indicate idolatry in general (Deuteronomy 4:19).
Although the authors needed to use care to avoid inadvertently seeming to acknowledge the pagan deities, the semantic fields of these Hebrew words also enabled the authors to construct linguistic slights which insult those idols.
The dynamic of these three words is similar but fainter in the New Testament, the Greek words being less directly connected to the mythological Gods. When Matthew quotes Jesus as saying that “the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from heaven,” the meaning is not eschatological, as is often supposed, but rather deals with the destruction of the Temple (Matthew 24:29). He explains that this astronomical collapse will occur “after” 70 A.D., when the Roman army plundered Jerusalem. Given that the sun, moon, and stars are not significantly different now than what they were two thousand years ago, a literal physical interpretation of this text is not plausible. What then might Jesus have meant?
It is arguable that Jesus is referring to the decline of the polytheistic mythological systems which were ubiquitous and which were, for the most part, the only alternative to the Judaism of the first three decades of the first century. For practical purposes, at the time, if one wasn’t a follower of the Hebrew God, then one embraced belief systems of the ancient world, all of which acknowledged some set of gods and goddesses. The Greco-Roman, Egyptian, Babylonian, Hindu, Celtic, and other ancient cultures each had their own distinctive mythologies, all of which had, however, at least these two features in common: they were polytheistic, and they lacked a fervent devotional relationship between the individual and a deity. Their rituals were widely observed, but did not reflect a personal piety.
Following the day of Pentecost, in the mid-30s A.D., faith in Jesus spread rapidly, and millions of people abandoned the polytheistic mythologies. The speed and ease with which individuals walked away from those religious systems is expressed in Christ’s statement that the sun was darkened, the moon gave no light, and the stars fell.
It is plausible to assert that in history, rarely or never have so many people discarded a religion or a belief system so quickly and with so little hesitation.
Jesus is reported as using this phraseology in Luke 21:25, where, like the Matthew instance, it occurs in a transition between Christ’s discussion of the destruction of the Temple and his discussion of the end of this world. Many commentators see this remark in Luke as eschatological, but it possibly, plausibly, and even persuasively can be read as applying to high rates of conversion to Christianity in the decades immediately after the Temple’s destruction.
From where did Jesus get this imagery? One source is probably a text (II Kings 23:5) in which King Josiah worked to free the nation from paganism:
He deposed the priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to make offerings in the high places at the cities of Judah and around Jerusalem; those also who burned incense to Baal, to the sun and the moon and the constellations and all the host of the heavens.
In this text, one sees clearly how “sun, moon, stars,” with ‘constellations’ substituting for ‘stars,’ can easily be read as referring to idols. Why the substitution was made is a question for a separate investigation, but the synonymy is clear enough.
Likewise, a couplet from a hymn (Psalm 148:3) alludes to heathenism’s false gods:
Praise him, sun and moon,
praise him, all you shining stars!The Psalmist performs two tasks at once: first, the couplet is part of a longer listing of all aspects of creation praising God; second, the couplet demotes the idols, which, far from being gods, are creations made by God, and far from being praised, praise Him.
Likewise, Isaiah uses (13:10) these three astronomical words in his description of the judgment and downfall of Babylon. This can be read as not only the physical destruction of the city and empire, but also the discrediting of their idols, which are revealed to be null and void.
In like manner, Ezekiel (32:7) uses a similar structure in discussing the downfall of Egypt. Joel (3:15) does the same in describing the downfall of “the nations” (Tyre, Sidon, Philistia, et al.) which had behaved badly toward the kingdom of Judah, although there is a possible eschatological reading of this couplet. Not only do these nations fall, but their gods are revealed to be nothing.
Jeremiah (31:35) indicates that the sun, moon, and stars are subject and subservient to God, and implies, as Genesis (1:14-15) more explicitly states, that these astronomical bodies are to serve mankind by marking times and seasons, and that humans therefore do not serve them.
Analysis of the following is left as an exercise for the reader:
Elsewhere in the Old Testament, this vocabulary triad appears to be used not in reference to pagan deities (cf. Genesis 37:9, Ecclesiastes 12:2, Joel 2:10).
In the New Testament, too, not every time these three words appear together is a reference to false gods (cf. I Corinthians 15:41; Revelation 8:12, 12:1).
