The Great Christ Comet (47 page)

This was a truly astonishing drama, extending from one constellation to another. It was the stuff of myth! The Magi, along with everyone else who knew their constellations, must have been glued to the heavens each night as they watched the unfolding nightly drama.

While the cometary arrow flew through the sky from bow to forehead, the coma would have steadily shrunk in length from something like 7 degrees to about 4 degrees. Together with the building apparent magnitude as the comet approached the Sun, this shrinking of the coma would have intensified the brightness.

The celestial display had already been remarkable. Having watched what it did, the Magi may have concluded that the Star was signaling the demise of the forces of Chaos and Darkness in the cosmos. These forces were destined to be decisively and overwhelmingly conquered. Order would once again prevail in the cosmos. It is doubtful at this stage, however, whether the Magi associated the Star with the Jewish Messiah. Only later would they conclude that this was all one awesome celestial show to put the forthcoming nativity in cosmological and eschatological perspective. The Magi must have wondered what the Star would do next. Little did they know that all the things that had happened up to this point were just the prelude to the marvels about to occur.

The Wonder on September 15, 6 BC

On September 15, 6 BC, the comet was fast approaching perihelion—it was just 0.47 AU from the Sun and 0.93 AU from Earth (for comparison, Hale-Bopp never came closer to Earth than 1.32 AU). The increasing distance from Earth was because Earth's course had taken it away from the comet even as the comet had crossed the interchange, heading toward the Sun (
fig. 10.14
).

On September 15 the Sun, making its way through Virgo, was located over her womb, while the Moon was under Virgo's feet. The occasion is memorialized in Revelation 12:1.

The comet's range of apparent magnitude values at that time is impressive (
table 10.1
).

If the comet was first discovered from May 29 to December 17 in 7 BC at an apparent magnitude of +3.4 and had an average slope value (i.e., n=4), then its magnitude on September 15 would have been between -10.3 and -12.5. If n=5, then the comet would have been between -12.8 and -15.3 on September 15. These numbers underscore the comet's brilliance. Even at the minimum of these magnitude values, a comet would normally have been visible during the daytime.
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However, because the Bethlehem Star comet was large, the issue is not quite so simple. The coma could have been something like 2 degrees long. Accordingly, only a small part of the coma, namely the region of condensed brightness around the nucleus, would have been detectable during the daytime.

In normal circumstances that evening, observers in both Bab­ylon and Judea, when they scanned the western sky under
λ
Virginis (= Virgo's feet, in Rev. 12:1's conception of the constellation figure; Virgo's left foot, in the imagination of most Greeks) in the wake of sunset, would have seen only the slim crescent of the new Moon. However, this evening, right beside the Moon, they would have seen the comet's coma, with its massive tail sweeping up to the left at a roughly 40-degree angle (relative to the ground). It is possible that the edge of the coma was slightly backlighting part of the edge (limb) of the Moon.

If these observations of the young crescent Moon were the first sightings of the new Moon in Bab­ylon and/or Jerusalem, the comet's presence may have been perceived to be enduing the occasion with special importance.

However, even if this was the first sighting of the new Moon in Bab­ylon, the Bab­ylo­nian method of determining the start of new months by advance calculation would probably have resulted in the new month of Ululu starting on the evening of September 14, so that Ululu 1 was the evening-to-evening day September 14/15.
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Accordingly, what happened after sunset on September 15 would have taken place at the start of Ululu 2.

The Judeans, however, had an observational luni-solar calendar. As a result, if the new crescent Moon went unobserved on September 14, this sighting of the crescent Moon after sunset on September 15 would have coincided with the formal beginning of the new month, Tishri. In the Jewish calendar, Tishri was no ordinary month.
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It was the first month of the civil year. It was the month of months. And the first day of Tishri was no ordinary day—it was the Feast of Trumpets, Rosh Hashanah. It was a holy, solemn, and joyful holiday marked by the
blowing of trumpets. Every Jewish month was announced by the blowing of trumpets, but Tishri 1 was set apart in that it was a day of trumpet blasts, presumably in that trumpets were to be blown all day long (Lev. 23:24; Num. 29:1–2a). The first sighting of the young crescent Moon in September was immediately followed by the blowing of the trumpets announcing the Feast of Trumpets and the beginning of the civil New Year. (See
fig. 10.15
.)

The comet at this time would have been around 90 degrees long, stretching across half the sky. Having played the part of Sagittarius's arrow that slayed the Scorpion at the end of August, the gloriously bright comet may have seemed to assume a new role to mark the beginning of the new Jewish civil year and the Feast of Trumpets. The long-tailed comet may well have looked to observers like an awesome celestial trumpet, with the coma being the mouthpiece (figs. 10.16–20).
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During the whole time from sunset to moonset, the Moon may have appeared to observers to be playing the part of the trumpeter blowing into the trumpet's mouthpiece, proclaiming Rosh Hashanah and the start of the civil New Year. It may have appeared to be drawing the world's attention to the exaltation of Virgo—enthroned, wearing her crown, enrobed with the Sun, and with the Moon as her footstool. This might go some way toward explaining why the scene of Virgo's exaltation on September 15, 6 BC, is highlighted in the narrative of Revelation 12:1–5.
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So spectacular would the celestial sight have been that some might have felt constrained to conclude that the marvel was announcing not just the start of a special month or the inauguration of a new civil year, but also the beginning
of a whole new era in world history.
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