Israel Will Be as Numerous as the Stars: But There Are Only 1022 Stars!

After the war with the four kings, Abram expresses his concern to YHWH about having no heir:

^{בראשית טו:ג} וַיֹּאמֶר אַבְרָם הֵן לִי לֹא נָתַתָּה זָרַע וְהִנֵּה בֶן בֵּיתִי יוֹרֵשׁ אֹתִי.

^{Gen 15:3} Abram said, “But You have granted me no offspring, so my steward will be my heir.”

YHWH responds with a promise that Abram’s steward will not be the one to inherit him, and to make the point stronger, he has Abram go outside and look up at the stars:

^{בראשית טו:ה} וַיּוֹצֵא אֹתוֹ הַחוּצָה וַיֹּאמֶר הַבֶּט נָא הַשָּׁמַיְמָה וּסְפֹר הַכּוֹכָבִים אִם תּוּכַל לִסְפֹּר אֹתָם וַיֹּאמֶר לוֹ כֹּה יִהְיֶה זַרְעֶךָ.

^{Gen 15:5} He (YHWH) took him (Abram) outside and said, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.” And He added, “So shall your offspring be.”

YHWH later reiterates this promise with a comparison to the sand of the seashores:

^{בראשית כב:יז} כִּי בָרֵךְ אֲבָרֶכְךָ וְהַרְבָּה אַרְבֶּה אֶת זַרְעֲךָ כְּכוֹכְבֵי הַשָּׁמַיִם וְכַחוֹל אֲשֶׁר עַל שְׂפַת הַיָּם....

^{Gen 22:17} I will bestow My blessing upon you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars of heaven and the sands on the seashore….

When Jacob, in fear of Esau, prays to YHWH and reminds YHWH of the blessing at Bethel (Gen 28:14), Jacob makes it clear that his understanding was that sand is uncountable:

^{בראשית לב:יג} וְאַתָּה אָמַרְתָּ הֵיטֵב אֵיטִיב עִמָּךְ וְשַׂמְתִּי אֶת זַרְעֲךָ כְּחוֹל הַיָּם אֲשֶׁר לֹא יִסָּפֵר מֵרֹב.

^{Gen 32:13} “Yet You have said, ‘I will deal bountifully with you and make your offspring as the sands of the sea, which are too numerous to count.’”

By comparing the number of Abraham’s descendants to stars, YHWH is assuring him that not only will Abram not remain “childless,” but in reality, he will be the father of descendants too numerous to count—like the stars of the heaven and the sands of the seashore.

Al-Qirqisani: But There Are Only 1022 Stars

Ya‘qub al-Qirqisani, a Karaite Jewish scholar writing in Baghdad in the first third of the tenth century, notes in his Judeo-Arabic commentary on Genesis that contemporaneous astronomy has demonstrated that only a finite amount of stars appear in the sky:^[1]

If someone asks: The mathematicians, specifically, the astronomers, discuss the form of the heavenly orb and clarify it via geometrical proofs that are established by the intellect and the senses. They have stated that the stars in the heavens total one thousand and twenty-two stars. The senses also make this determination, for one who examines the heavens thoroughly does not see more than one hundred stars in a hemisphere at the same time.

One should not accept what the simple folk imagine, which is that there exist an uncountable number of stars, due to distance and intermixing of the rays of light (issuing from the stars). Rather, the matter is as these people [= the astronomers] have stated and according to what is required and attested to by people drawing on intellect.

In the late classical and medieval periods, the pre-eminent work on stars was Claudius Ptolemy’s Greek Mathematical Treatise,^[2] also known as the Great or Greatest Treatise; Ptolemy wrote in 2^nd century C.E. Alexandria, Egypt. Centuries before Hans Lipperhey and Galileo Galilei invented the telescope (17^th cent.), and Heber Curtis and Henrietta Leavitt discovered that the universe was made up of multiple galaxies (20^th cent.), Ptolemy counted the stars in the sky and declared that the sum total is 1,022.

As al-Qirqisani explains, reading such a conclusion into the Torah raises difficult issues for the provocative divine promise as formulated to Abram. The verse implies, he notes, that the stars are infinite in number, or at least uncountable by human standards, and as he will note, the same problem inheres in the speech of Moses in Deuteronomy:

^{דברים א:י} יְ־הוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם הִרְבָּה אֶתְכֶם וְהִנְּכֶם הַיּוֹם כְּכוֹכְבֵי הַשָּׁמַיִם לָרֹב.

^{Deut 1:10} YHWH your God has multiplied you until you are today as numerous as the stars in the sky.

Al-Qirqisani queries how the finite number of stars that is common astronomical knowledge in his time can coexist with a commitment to the validity of verses like that in Genesis and Deuteronomy:

Given that this is the case, and that our Book is valid from all points of view, and given that two valid things [= statements] may not negate or contradict each other - then is it not the case that the scriptural verses (Gen 15:5), “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them” and “so shall your offspring be” contradict the statement that the stars of the sky total one thousand and twenty-two? Likewise (Deut 1:10), “And you are today as numerous as the stars in the sky,” when they were at that time something close to six hundred thousand (men) of twenty years old and up, and likely the same number of those under twenty (years).

In comparing the Israelite numbers and the stars of the sky, the Torah makes it clear that divine promises regarding fecundity are premised on the stars being innumerable. Stating that “two valid things may not negate or contradict each other,” al-Qirqisani interrogates the contradiction, seeking to remain faithful to the scientific works available in Arabic in the vibrant intellectual center that was Baghdad, but no less so, to the Torah which for him, as a Karaite Jew, was sacred in its every word.

The Stars in the Milky Way are Possibly Infinite

Al-Qirqisani bases his response on more astronomy: the stars called uncountable, he argues, likely refer to the Milky Way, which consists of “small stars with little light, numerous, and close together.” That is, it is indeed true that the total of stars observable and measurable in the heavens is one thousand and twenty-two, but the Milky Way contains a seemingly infinite number of stars, and this specifically is what the Bible refers to in its metaphor.^[3]

Greek Science and Philosophy, in Arabic

Why, though, does this question arise for the first time in Jewish Bible exegesis, in Judeo-Arabic and in Baghdad? Why, in tenth-century Baghdad, did al-Qirqisani take it for granted that his audience of readers would be interested in a question premised on knowledge from the al-Magest (“The Great”), the Arabic translation of Claudius Ptolemy’s Great (Megistē) Treatise, written seven centuries earlier? The reason a Jewish commentator in Baghdad was the first to introduce the limited-number-of-stars problem has to do with how the spread of Arabic and Islamic governance fundamentally changed what Jewish scholars – and their readership – considered basic and essential knowledge.

During the course of the seventh century, conquests by the Islamic armies emerging from the Arabian Peninsula had toppled the vast and ancient Greek- and Persian-speaking empires in the Near East. By 711 these armies had extended Muslim rule all the way from North Africa in the West to the borders of India in the East.

These political changes brought on sweeping linguistic change in the Near East, North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. Prior to the sixth century, the Arabic language had been spoken in relatively circumscribed areas including the Arabian Peninsula and perhaps on its northern borders. With the Muslim conquests of the seventh and early eighth centuries, the Arabic language soon became the lingua franca of many areas of the region, and of the varied religious and ethnic communities living within it.

But Arabic was not only a language for daily communication in the Near East. It had become the foundation of a new – or renewed – intellectual community. At the behest of the ‘Abbasid rulers of the eighth century, ruling from their newly-established capital in Baghdad, books of a wide variety of genres had been translated into Arabic from their original Greek, Syriac, Persian and even Sanskrit. These genres included philosophy, medicine, geography, astronomy, and more.

The Abbasids sponsored these translations for political as well as intellectual reasons; they had interest in materials that would help them establish their authority over broad geographic areas and over diverse ethnic and religious groups.^[4] These translations, though, revolutionized the Arabic literary sphere, and led to an intellectual efflorescence in the urban centers of the Near East.

Judeo-Arabic Education

The Jewish communities of this region were active participants in this intellectual revolution. These communities represented the majority of the Jews in the world, and they appear in sources from about the second half of the ninth century to be native Arabic speakers, most comfortable in that language.

Acquiring Arabic as a spoken language, and increasingly, a language that they could read, meant that Jewish scholars as well as the educated laypeople became part of a cosmopolitan and international world of learning in Arabic, which is often referred to as “Islamicate,” a term coined by the historian Marshall G. S. Hodgson. These sources, made available as part of the ‘Abbasid translation movement, enabled access to a wealth of sources which had previously been inaccessible to Jewish communities.

Judeo-Arabic Works, Including Bible Commentary

Arabic, furthermore, was not only a language for everyday communication and for reading. Over the course of the ninth century, Arabic gradually gained acceptance as a language in which Jewish scholars would compose their works. The traditional world of the Babylonian yeshivot, as well as the newly flourishing Karaite centers of study in Baghdad, Jerusalem and Fustat, became powerhouses of Jewish composition in Arabic.^[5]

Jewish scholars read, it seems, everything they could in Arabic, and they also began to write in Arabic, innovating numerous new genres of writing, and including new types of discussions and points of view in those works. Their writing was at one traditional and innovative, incorporating views from earlier bodies of Jewish tradition, but melding these with the new subjects and points of view they found in contemporaneous Arabic literature.

The field of Bible exegesis was one of the fields that flourished among Jews in the new Arabic intellectual environment. By the late ninth century, Jewish scholars composed their exegesis in the form known as Judeo-Arabic, a means of writing the Arabic language that was often in Hebrew letters. This genre was an amalgam: While some of the questions asked about the Bible, and some of the answers given, were traditional and identifiable from earlier sources, much was new. Bible commentaries were structured in a new verse-by-verse method; they were composed by individual authors who asserted their authorship of their work; and many dimensions of their contents were dizzyingly new.

It is in this Arabophone intellectual context, in which Jews were native and active participants, that the contradiction between the Ptolemaic star count and the biblical verses about uncountable stars first arose.

The fact that this specific question arises among Jewish scholars in the Arabic-speaking period, and that it did not arise in earlier Greek-speaking contexts, in which Ptolemy would have been known at least to some degree, underscores a more general point: The deep and long-lasting involvement of large numbers of Jewish scholars in the Arabic-Islamicate intellectual environment is an unparalleled phenomenon in other “Jewish languages” (ex: Yiddish and Ladino), and was unparalleled in Jewish history until the modern era.

Why Command Abram to Count the Uncountable Stars of the Milky Way?

Al-Qirqisani’s lengthy astronomical discussion brings him to question why, if the stars of the Milky Way are indeed uncountable, why does God even suggest to Abraham that he count them:

Now we will return to mention an objection that was raised to the first issue, which is that someone may say, If the number of the stars and counting them is impossible for humans, then what is the meaning of his commanding him to count them, in the verse “and count,” (Gen. 15:5) and is this not a vain act?

Al-Qirqisani’s question is based on contemporaneous theological conceptions, in which God never does a vain act (Arabic ‘abath). God’s acts are always carried out for a purpose which is achieved.^[6] This perfection of action contrasts to human acts, which can in the end be vain or useless, despite the effort put forth. To command or request someone to carry out an action which God knows to be impossible to fulfill, would be a vain act, and is impossible. This concept of divine perfection is stated and becomes a basis for exegetical questions during this period of Judeo-Arabic scholarship, for the first time.

Here, al-Qirqisani explains that the verse should not be taken as an actual command to Abraham, but rather, should be reclassified rhetorically. According to his explanation, God’s statement is actually “an exposition of fact and a declaration” of the fact that Abraham will be unable to count the stars.

As a careful reader of the Bible, al-Qirqisani is able to cite a panoply of other verses that exhibit the same rhetorical status. One of these is Elihu’s argumentative statement to Job:

^{איוב לג:ה} אִם תּוּכַל הֲשִׁיבֵנִי עֶרְכָה לְפָנַי הִתְיַצָּבָה.

^{Job 33:5} If you can, answer me; argue against me, take your stand.

Al-Qirqisani explains that here too, an apparent command should actually be understood as a declaration, and what Elihu really means is that Job will not be able to respond to the arguments he will put forth.

A Vast Library of Judeo-Arabic Commentary

Al-Qirqisani’s solution to this theological difficulty is typical to his approach, and is likely one of his innovations as an exegete: He was keenly interested in the analysis and categorization of the style of biblical narrative and indeed, authored a list of thirty-seven exegetical principles, currently preserved only in manuscript, devoted specifically to the narrative sections of the Torah. (Al-Qirqisani authored a separate work on biblical law, The Book of Lights and Watchtowers, which was published in the 1940’s in a Judeo-Arabic edition but which remains untranslated.)^[7]

Al-Qirqisani’s keen interest in narrative was unique to him, however it is important to note that a focus on biblical narrative was also the spirit of the times, among Rabbanite and Karaite scholars alike. During the ninth century and beyond, in the spirit of “book-centered religions” and likely due to the rise of Karaite Judaism, Bible exegesis became a central interest of many Jewish scholars in both Karaite and Rabbanite Judaism.^[8]

A massive body of Judeo-Arabic Bible exegesis was created during this time period. These works were available to Iberian scholars, who were also literate in Judeo-Arabic, and shaped the development of Bible exegesis there. As Iberian scholars began to compose their works in Hebrew instead of in Judeo-Arabic, their Bible commentaries penned in Hebrew became a conduit for echoes – sometimes strong, sometimes faint – of the vast body of scholarship in Judeo-Arabic upon which they depended.^[9]

The approach to the Bible exemplified in the brief citations above provides a glimpse of the many new dimensions of Bible exegesis which developed in Judeo-Arabic. As part of a thriving intellectual center of the world, Jews writing in Judeo-Arabic in the tenth century strived to be faithful to a variety of fonts of knowledge, ancient and new. The approaches they innovated, and the structures and methods that they incorporated into their writing, shaped much of what we consider to be inherent parts of Jewish Bible commentary to this day.