Where is Mazzaroth and the Zodiac in the Bible?

Mazzaroth (or mazaroth) is a weird word that occurs exactly one time in the Bible. It appears in the Book of Job when God is chastising Job about his lack of knowledge of the true, inner workings of the world, and is translated as “constellation”: “Can you bring forth the constellations [mazzaroth] in their seasons or lead out the Bear with its cubs?” (Job 38:32). In the King James version of the Bible, and a few others, the word is left untranslated: “Can you lead the Mazzaroth in their season?” The word is generally understood, not simply as one or another constellation, but as that specific set of constellations that we would call the “Zodiac” – the belt of twelve constellations that change as the Earth orbits the sun. As you might expect, the word Mazzaroth became associated with astrology, and is the root of the Hebrew term “mazel tov” – a Jewish expression which means “good fortune”.

But of course, the moral commands to the ancient Israelites that we see in the Bible generally forbid interaction with astrology and constellations. The text usually categorizes them with worship of the fallen gods and idolatrous religious practice, as in 2 Kings / 3 Kingdoms:

“Then he removed the idolatrous priests whom the kings of Judah had ordained to burn incense on the high places in the cities of Judah and in the places all around Jerusalem, and those who burned incense to Baal, to the sun, to the moon, to the constellations, and to all the host of heaven” (2 Kings 23:5).

The twelve signs of the Zodiac were associated with divine beings in the heavens. Most ancient cultures employed some sort of religious rites to acknowledge or interact with these divine beings. The idea was that the powers of heaven looked down on or watched over the Earth, and it was their influence that affected things that happened on Earth. Pre-modern people – and most non-Western people today – held to a particular way of looking at the world, what we would today call an “enchanted view” of the world. Unlike modern people, who see the physical world as “just” the physical world, with no inherent meaning, ancient people viewed the physical and the spiritual as fundamentally interconnected. This means that there is spiritual significance to all physical things, and that everything in the universe is connected. Nothing is “just” anything – it’s all related, and it all means something. One of common ancient principles that reflects this understanding is, “as above, so below”, which means that things in the heavens (what we would call the sky or outer space) reflect things on the Earth, and vice versa. If something significant were happening on Earth, you could expect to see this reflected in the movements of the heavenly bodies.

Probably the most famous example of this principle is the story of the star of Christ in Matthew’s gospel account. Matthew describes how the Magi – pagan wise men and star gazers – learned that Christ was going to be born on Earth because they saw a sign in the sky: “we have seen his star in the East and have come to worship him” (Matthew 2:2). Almost all ancient cultures had some developed art of looking at the stars to interpret or predict things happening on the Earth, a practice that came to be known as astrology.

Astrology and horoscopes worked, but not anymore

Most people today associate the Zodiac, astrology, and horoscopes with fortune-telling. In the Western Zodiac system, we use the month that you were born and connect that to which constellation was in the sky at the time in order to determine your luck. The Chinese Zodiac is instead based on the year you were born in a rotating twelve-year cycle – as opposed to a twelve-month cycle, but the basic principle is the same.

Modern people tend to be skeptical about this sort of thing, despite the fact that ancient people almost universally believed in one or another model for astrology – no matter what culture they came from. It’s easy, as modern people, to dismiss the ancient idea that the stars could influence our lives on the basis that ancient people were not as “sophisticated” or didn’t have access to telescopes, but many modern people still continue to believe in this sort of art because the idea that the world is enchanted and full of meaning makes a lot of intuitive sense. Which camp did the early Christians fall into? Surprisingly, they neither trusted astrology nor said that it was unreal: they said that astrology was real but had stopped working. Why? Because of the coming of Christ.

Every culture has its cosmological story, most of which feature a variety of gods and spiritual beings. Most people think that Christians only believe in one God and thought that all the pagan gods were fake, but that is not what the Biblical authors and the early Christians believed. They believed in the existence of these other deities, but that their God was the “God of gods” and “Lord of kings” (Daniel 2:47). He is also called the “Lord of hosts” (Isaiah 19:25, 29:6, 37:16, 1 Samuel 1:3, 15:2), meaning the Lord of all the hosts of heaven – in other words, the lord of the angelic powers or “lower gods”. However, some of these “lower gods” rebelled and fell to Earth, creating the whole system of pagan religions as imposter religions, as we’ve covered in another article. This led to a period of time when humans were ruled over by these fallen gods, who taught them to worship in very specific ways, often through use of astrology and other omens. These gods indeed ruled over humans and had real power to determine their destiny.

That is, until Christ came. The early Christians saw Christ’s coming into the world as the dawn of a new age (that’s why the dating system started over with the birth of Christ, and why almost everyone in the world now uses a dating system based on this world-changing event). This wasn’t merely a change to society or government, but a cosmic change, a change to how the universe was goverened. The old cosmic era – the era where the gods ruled over humanity through a mixture of fear, punishment, and reward – had come to an end. Christ de-throned those fallen gods and took the fate of humans out of their hands.

Another important element in ancient people’s fascination with astrology and other forms of fortune-telling is the widespread pagan belief in fate. Prior to Jesus, most people saw themselves as small and relatively weak in the face of the granduer of the universe and the awesome power of the gods. It was very natural to believe that your fate could be determined by when and where and to whom you were born, as ancient man found himself in a world largely outside of his control, where he was not the center of the universe but dependent on the protection and aid of his older cousins, the gods. This is why ancient people put a lot of emphasis on trying to learn their fate.

The new era of Christ as Lord

With the incarnation of God as a man, all of this changed. Instead of being bound by fate, as determined by the old gods, humans now had freedom in Christ – not just freedom from death, as is usually emphasized in Christianity, but freedom from fate as well, including the fate that the stars exercised over us. The early Christian thinker Tertullian explained it in this way: “that science [astrology] has been allowed until the Gospel, in order that after Christ’s birth no one should thenceforward interpret any one’s nativity by the heavens” (Tertullian, Against Idolatry, chpt. 9).

The sign of this cosmic change is that Jesus’ star appeared in the heavens. This indicated that he was greater than the other cosmic powers, in other words, that he really was the God of the gods. As Moses puts it: “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?” (Exodus 15:11.) In the New Testament, Paul explains that Jesus is the one by whom all things were made: “For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers” (Colossians 1:16). While it may be tempting to think of “thrones”, “dominions”, and “powers” as a list of earthly positions, the traditional interpretation of this passage is that St. Paul was talking about ranks of angels: thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers are particular ranks of heavenly beings, understood as members of the divine council over which Christ – as the God of gods – presides. You can see an example of this divine council in the Book of Job, where the angels meet before the throne of God to discuss various matters and decide on them (see Job chapter 1).

Christ is higher than the gods, being the God of gods, but man is still lower. This is why God asks Job rhetorically if he can “bring forth the Mazzaroth in their seasons”, because of course he cannot. But one of the central ideas of Christianity is that Jesus is both God and man, this is what it means that God became “incarnate” – literally that he took on human flesh. When God took on human nature, he united human nature to his divine nature, meaning that man now has the ability to share in the power and glory of God himself. “God became man so that man might become God”, as St. Athanasius put it. And if man can be a participant in God’s power and glory, he is definitely no longer subject to the rule of the fallen gods nor bound by fate through the stars. So is astrology real? The answer, it used to be!