The Christmas Star as Seen From Baghdad?
The animation below illustrates a view of the sky looking east from Baghdad on the morning of August 12, 3 B.C. The main difficulty, historically, with thinking that this conjunction of Jupiter and Venus in the constellation Leo could be what set the wise men on their quest for the one born King of the Jews, has been the assumption that Herod died in 4 B.C. However, Jack Finegan, one of the greatest biblical chronologists, recently accepted the theory that Herod may not have died until 1 BC. His reasons are fully explained in the revised edition of Handbook of Biblical Chronology (Peabody Massachusetts, Hendrickson Publishers, 1998).
Regarding this conjunction, Finegan comments:
In the years 3 and 2 B.C. there
were no comets and no novae, but there were planetary and stellar events
even more striking than those of 7 and
6 B C. On the morning of August 12, 3 B.C. Jupiter and Venus rose in the
eastern sky, an event which could have been what was meant when the magi said:
"We have seen his star in the East or "in its rising" (Matt 2:2).
(The word anatolh means both the "rising [of stars]"
and the "place of the rising [of the sun]," i.e., the East) In this
conjunction Jupiter and Venus were so close that they were almost touching each
other. From the point of view of astrological symbolism Jupiter is the king
planet and Venus (Ishtar in Babylonia), a female; so their conjunction can
suggest a coming birth. The conjunction took place in the constellation of Leo (the Lion) and near the bright fixed
star Regulus. Regulus is the king star and the Lion constellation is the tribal
sign of Judah as in Genesis 49:9 where Jacob aliases his son Judah and says,
"Judah is a lion's whelp." Afterward Jupiter moved on to be in close
conjunctions with Regulus three times (a triple conjunction on Sept 14, 3 B.C.,
Feb 17, 2 B.C., then on June 17, 2 B.C., came again into conjunction with
Venus, this time being so close that without a modern telescope the two planets
would have looked like a single star. In the fall and winter 3/2 B.C. Jupiter
appeared to stop several times against the background of the stars, and on June
17, 2 B.C., Jupiter and Venus were in extremely close conjunction and shone
almost like a single bright star in the west--in the direction of Jerusalem as
seen from Babylonia. With these
phenomena we may compare Matthew 2:9: "'The star which they had seen in
the Fast went before them, till it came to rest over the place where the child
was." If the magi were students of these astronomical events it can be
theorized that the appearance of this "star" on June 17, 2 B C, was
the final heavenly sign that impelled the magi to begin the journey that
brought them in the late summer or early fall of 2 B.C. to Jerusalem and Bethlehem,
where they found the child Jesus, who "was born some time during the
previous year and a half."
Martin, followed by Keresztes, explains the statement that the star "came to rest over the place where the child was" (Matt 2:9) as a reference to a "stationary point" of Jupiter and identifies this as occurring on Dec 25 (the date of the winter solstice) in the year 2 B.C. in the constellation of Virgo (the Virgin) when Jupiter was directly over Bethlehem, about 68 degrees above the southern horizon as viewed from Jerusalem where the magi were. This was not the day of the birth of Jesus, which must have taken place somewhat earlier perhaps in mid‑winter 3/2 B C., but it could have had something to do with the later association of Dec 25 with the birthday of Jesus. (pp. 319, 320)
Incidentally, Finegan is the source of many of the detailed dates of biblical history illustrated on the set of Bible Timeline charts I have created. If you haven't seen these beautiful charts, stop by . www.biblelights.com and take a look. Right now you can even receive a free chart by e-mail.
The animation below is 395 Kb and may take some time to load. It was created using the SkyGlobe program from KlassM Software. SkyGlobe is a shareware program that can be downloaded from http://ardan.net/download.html, just click on the SkyGlobe link there. It's a great program if you have any interest or curiosity about astronomy. You can view the sky from anywhere on earth on any date historically or in the future! I used CorelCapture and the Microsoft GIF Animator to create the animation. There is more information in the caption below the image.
Your screen needs to be set
to 800 x 600 pixels or higher to best view the animation.
Sunrise at Baghdad, August 12, 3 BC
Baghdad is about 60 miles (100 km) north of ancient Babylon, the area the magi are assumed to have come from. The brown area at the bottom represents the horizon. The animation starts at 3:44 AM just as Venus and Jupiter rise and progresses at 5-minute intervals until 5:24 AM, just after sunrise. You can clearly see that Venus and Jupiter are in the constellation Leo and close to the king star Regulus. The "E" near the right margin represents due east, so Venus and Jupiter rise just a little north of due east.