The Great Christ Comet (89 page)

42
 Hans Bielenstein, “An Interpretation of the Portents in the Ts'ien Han Shu,”
Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities
22 (1950): 127–143; idem, “Han Prognostications and Portents,”
Bulletin of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities
56 (1984): 97–112. Cf. R. de Crespigny,
Portents of Protest in the Later Han Dynasty: The Memorials of Hsiang-k'ai to Emperor Huan
(Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1976), 45n15.

43
 Martin Kern, “Religious Anxiety and Political Interest in Western Han Omen Interpretation: The Case of the Han Wudi Period (141–87 B.C.),”
Ch
Å«
goku shigaku
10 (2000): 1–31.

44
 So, for example, Eberhard, “Political Function,” 70; cf. 66.

45
 Ibid., 60–62, lists the 15 people whose reported portents were included in
Han shu
, series b, noting their political allegiances and biases and their tendencies to submit omens that furthered their private political agenda. Eberhard comments that “most of them had outspoken political loyalties and utilized their ‘science' for the realization of their political aims” (62). With respect to fabrication, Zhang Lan and Zhao Gang, “The Identification of Comets in Chinese Historical Records,”
Science China—Physics, Mechanics and Astronomy
54 (2011): 150–151, caution those working with the Chinese records to appreciate that “some records” may have been “fabricated for political or other reasons.” See also Eberhard, “Political Function,” 50–51, 56, 59–60, and Loewe,
Divination
, 69, including footnote 18. Loewe states that because of, among other things, the possibility of fabrications in the Han astronomical records, “it is difficult to count the number of different [cometary] appearances that were recorded” (69).

46
 Dubs,
History
, 1:151; cf. Pankenier, “Reliability,” 200–212.

47
 Pankenier, “Reliability,” 211 (cf. Dubs,
History
, 3:559), highlights that deceiving the emperor by fabricating astronomical phenomena was a capital crime and indeed maintains that it was “suicidal” because such inventions could be “easily detected.”

1
 Again, see Johannes P. Louw and Eugene A. Nida,
Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament
:
Based on Semantic Domains
(New York: United Bible Societies, 1988), §79.31.

2
 With KJV, NIV, and NLT (“crowns”); also CEB and ISV (“royal crowns”).

3
 With NIV (“swept”) (cf. NASB, NET, and HCSB [“swept away”]), and KJV and RV (“drew”).

4
 However, this text seems to have in mind both the Messiah's birth and the transition into the messianic age.

5
 By definition, meteor storms have at least 1,000 meteors an hour (or, more technically, would have a rate of 1,000 meteors per hour if the radiant were at the zenith) (Mark Littmann,
The Heavens on Fire: The Great Leonid Meteor Storms
[Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 276 note c).

6
 Peter V. Bias,
Meteors and Meteor Showers: An Amateur's Guide to Meteors
(Cincinnati, OH: Miracle Publishing, 2005), 11. I am grateful to the author for helping me secure a copy of this outstanding introduction to meteors.

7
 Ibid., 12. Although it is common to refer to “the 1998 Leonid Fireball Storm,” it was technically only a meteor shower.

8
 Littmann,
Heavens on Fire
, 16.

9
 Ibid., 17–18. To observers it seemed that the meteors, regardless of where in the sky they started, were radiating out from a particular point in the constellation Leo (ibid., 1–2). At the radiant, the meteors were little more than brightening dots (heading straight for the observer!); near the radiant they were short streaks; and farther out from the radiant they consisted of longer streaks (ibid., 253). Although meteoroids travel in parallel paths, striking Earth's atmosphere at one point, they seem to radiate out as they come closer, like parallel railway tracks or like snowflakes sweeping toward a speeding car's windscreen during a blizzard. Littmann (253) gives a wonderful description of what a meteor shower/storm looks like if you gaze directly at the radiant (italics his):

Out of the corners of your eyes, you will catch meteors streaking past, creating the impression that you are flying through space . . .
which of course you are
.
Your spaceship Earth is racing around the Sun at 18.5 miles per second (29.8 kilometers per second), but almost never can you sense this motion. The one exception is during a meteor storm, as the Earth dashes through a stream of particles. Then and only then can you truly sense the Earth in motion, in high-speed flight, a little like in
Star Trek
when the
Enterprise
travels at warp speed.

10
 One witness of the 1799 Leonid meteor storm stated that “there was not a space on the firmament equal in extent to three diameters of the moon which was not filled every instant with bolides and falling stars” (Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland,
Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the Years 1799
–
1804
, vol. 1, trans. T. Ross [London: George Bell & Sons, 1907], chapter 1.10).

11
 Littmann,
Heavens on Fire
, 273. David Asher and Robert McNaught famously developed a model explaining how the occurrences of the Leonids can be matched against particular past perihelion passages of the parent comet, enabling remarkably precise predictions of meteor outbursts. See R. H. McNaught and D. J. Asher, “Leonid Dust Trails and Meteor Storms,”
WGN, Journal of the International Meteor Organization
27 (April 1999): 85–102; D. J. Asher, “Leonid Dust Trail Theories,” in
Proceedings of the International Meteor Conference, Frasso Sabino, Italy, 23–26 September 1999
, ed. R. Arlt (Potsdam: IMO, 2000), 5–21; and especially the section on the Armagh Observatory's website entitled “Leonid dust trails”:
http://
www
.arm
.ac
.uk
/leonid
/dustexpl
.html
(last modified September 8, 2010).

12
 See Peter Jenniskens and Jeremie Vaubaillon, “3D/Biela and the Andromedids: Fragmenting versus Sublimating Comets,”
Astronomical Journal
134 (2007): 1037–1045.

13
 Bias,
Meteors and Meteor Showers
, 12.

14
 Ibid.

15
 Ibid., 196–197.

16
 Ibid.,
2.

17
 Cf. ibid., 2–3.

18
 Mario Di Martino and Alberto Cellino, “Physical Properties of Comets and Asteroids Inferred from Fireball Observations,” in
Mitigation of Hazardous Comets and Asteroids
, ed. M. J. S. Belton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 156.

19
 Peter Jenniskens¸
Meteor Showers and Their Parent Comets
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 208.

20
 This was discovered by David J. Asher. See David J. Asher, Mark E. Bailey, and V. V. Emel'yanenko, “The Resonant Leonid Trail from 1333,”
Irish Astronomical Journal
26.2 (1999): 91–93; David J. Asher, Mark E. Bailey, and V. V. Emel'yanenko, “Resonant Meteoroids from Comet Tempel-Tuttle in 1333: The Cause of the Unexpected Leonid Outburst in 1998,”
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
304.4 (April 16, 1999): L53–L56.

21
 Bias,
Meteors and Meteor Showers
, 67.

22
 Jenniskens,
Meteor Showers
, 238. Technically, a -14.5-magnitude fireball would classify as a bolide.

23
 This is how most artists have tended to portray it. Ptolemy denominated
γ
(Gamma) Hydrae as “the star after Corvus, in the section by the tail (
prope caudam
)” (
Ptolemy's Almagest
, trans. Toomer, 392)—the Latin
prope caudam
means “beside the tail.” Perhaps Ptolemy is envisioning the tail as curving around a couple of degrees to the side of
γ
Hydrae. However, Ptolemy's predecessors Pseudo-Eratosthenes (
Catasterismi
41) and Hyginus (
Poetica Astronomica
2.40) certainly seem to have regarded
γ
Hydrae as part of Hydra's body, not as being beside it (see Theony Condos,
Star Myths of the Greeks and Romans: A Sourcebook
[Grand Rapids, MI: Phanes, 1997], 120 and 122). Moreover, although we lack the star catalog of Hipparchus, we gather from his extant
Commentary on the Phenomena of Aratus and Eudoxus
that he regarded the tail as ending at
π
(Pi) Hydrae and as encompassing HIP65835, which is just 2½ degrees below
γ
(Gamma) Hydrae. This suggests that he imagined the tail as passing through
γ
Hydrae (see the index to constellations in the forthcoming English translation of Hipparchus's Commentary by Roger MacFarlane and Paul Mills).

24
 Peter Jenniskens of NASA's SETI Institute (personal email messages to the author, October 15 and November 27, 2012) was the first to work on the orbit. Then David Asher (personal email messages to the author, December 31, 2012, January 4, 2013, and August 6–7, 2013) recalculated the orbit in a J2000 ecliptic frame, using positions along the upper section of Hydra's tail in this same reference frame, taking the vectors from NASA's Horizons website. He assumed a viewing on or around 1719522.708333333 (October 19, 6 BC, 05:00 Coordinate Time) from Babylon (a viewing from Jerusalem produces virtually identical results, because it is on essentially the same latitude as Babylon). David took account of zenith attraction, which is an important factor, since the meteor storm is radiating from relatively close to the horizon. I am most grateful to Dr. Asher, who developed a meteor orbit calculation program to determine the possible orbits of the meteoroid stream giving rise to the Hydrid meteor storm of 6 BC.

25
 The higher the radiant of a meteor shower is relative to the horizon, the more of its meteors are visible (for more on this, see Bias,
Meteors and Meteor Showers
, 30–35). It is estimated that when a radiant is about 15 degrees above the horizon, you will see approximately one quarter of the meteors that would have been visible if the radiant had been at the zenith (ibid., 33 fig. 2.2). If the 6 BC Hydrid meteor storm radiated from HIP59373 and was seen 66 minutes before sunrise, the radiant would have been approximately 15 degrees above the horizon. The 1799 Leonid meteor storm was observed by Alexander von Humboldt when the radiant was low on the eastern horizon from Cumana, Venezuela. During that window of time he reported seeing thousands and thousands of meteors and fireballs radiating out across the sky (von Humboldt and Bonpland,
Personal Narrative
, chapter 1.10). Similarly, the 1766 meteor storm was seen from Cumana, as well as from Quito, Ecuador, when the radiant was very low on the horizon (ibid.). Leonid meteor storms have been recorded with meteor hourly rates of several hundreds of thousands. If the 6 BC Hydrid storm was anything like the 1766, 1799, or 1833 Leonid storms in intensity, tens of thousands may have been visible per hour radiating from the Serpent's tail.

26
 Medium-velocity meteoroids tend to make for brighter meteors than low-velocity meteoroids. Moreover, Gary Kronk notes that we usually see brighter meteors (and more meteors generally) in the period before dawn (“What Is a Meteor Shower?,”
http://
meteor
showers
online
.com
/what
_is.html
[accessed March 26, 2014]). In addition, meteoroid deposits resulting from comet fragmentation events may consist of a higher proportion of larger meteoroids, which make for brighter (and larger) meteors. The fact that some fireballs seem to have occurred during the 6 BC meteor storm (Rev. 12:4; see below) suggests that it was indeed characterized by a preponderance of bright meteors.

27
 On these meteor showers, see P. Brown, D. K. Wong, R. J. Weryk, P. Wiegert, “A Meteoroid Stream Survey Using the Canadian Meteor Orbit Radar. II: Identification of Minor Showers Using a 3D Wavelet Transform,”
Icarus
207.1 (2010): 78 table 4.

28
 Jenniskens,
Meteor Showers
, 110.

29
 Ibid.

30
 If the meteor storm radiated from higher up the tail, i.e., closer to HIP59373 than
γ
(Gamma) Hydrae, the velocity and inclination would be above what is normal for Jupiter-family orbits.

31
 Personal email message to the author, January 5, 2013. Comet Mellish has been linked to the December Monocerotid and November Orionid meteor showers—see Peter Veres, Leonard Kornos, and Juraj Toth, “Meteor Showers of Comet C/1917 F1 Mellish,”
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
412 (2011): 511–521.

32
 The eschatological dimension of this portrayal of Hydra is consistent with the presentation, in verse 1, of Virgo in terms that allude to Israel's eschatological exaltation and sovereignty. What we have in Revelation 12 is a war between the penultimate world empire, represented by Hydra, and the kingdom destined to conquer and replace it, represented by Virgo. The opening volley in this conflict occurred in connection with the birth of the Messiah, the one destined to vanquish Satan and his latter-day henchman and to exercise sovereignty on behalf of Israel over the nations.

33
 
Macon Georgia Messenger
(November 14, 1833), as cited by Littmann,
Heavens on Fire
, 6. Observers frequently employed fiery language to describe what they saw, referring to a “shower of fire,” a “storm of fire,” “the heavens being streaked with liquid fire,” “the atmosphere above and all around rolling up and kindling into innumerable balls of rolling fire,” “balls of livid fire, like burning rockets shooting toward the earth, and emitting numerous sparks,” and “the heavens apparently on fire—millions of stars seeming to fall from their spheres, and the elements, as if about to melt with fervent heat” (“The Meteoric Shower,”
The New-England Magazine
6 [1834]: 47, 52; Denison Olmsted, “Observations on the Meteors of November 13th, 1833,”
American Journal of Science
25.2 (1834): 366, 368, 372, 382). In Greenland, the meteor storm of 1799 was described as having “the semblance of the heavens on fire above; for glowing points and masses, thick as hail, filled the firmament, as if some vast magazine of combustible materials had exploded in the far-off depths of space” (“Celestial Fireworks,”
The National Magazine
11 [1857]: 17).

34
 Littmann,
Heavens on Fire
, 4–7.

35
 From the
Salt River Journal
(November 20, 1833), as cited by Olmsted, “Observations,” 382.

36
 Olmsted, “Observations,” 368, 382, 383; idem, “Observations on the Meteors of November 13th, 1833,”
American Journal of Science
26.1 (1834): 138.

37
 Olmsted, “Observations,”
American Journal of Science
26.1 (1834): 155.

38
 Ibid., 138.

39
 Olmsted, “Observations,”
American Journal of Science
25.2 (1834): 372, citing “Rev. Dr. Humphreys.”