The Scientific Foreknowledge of the Jewish Sages

There is something tantalizing about the notion that ancient people may have had a far greater level of insight into the nature of reality than for which they’ve been given credit. Here are some compelling examples of Jewish sages being aware of aspects of the natural world that, all things being equal, they should not have known.

The Number of Stars in the Universe

The naked eye can perceive about 4000 stars in the night sky. Though the ancients might have wondered if there were any others beyond our perception, there is no logical reason to assume that the number that they would imagine would be in the quintillions. There is even less reason to imagine that they would have suggested a number that is close (on a galactic scale) to the number that cosmology currently posits.

This is what the Talmud had to say about it almost 2000 years ago:

“I (God) created 12 constellations in the firmament, and for each constellation, I created 30 hosts (clusters of stars), and for each host, I created 30 legions (30 legions of stars for each host), and for each legion, I created 30 divisions, and for each division I created 30 battalions, and for each battalion I created 30 camps, and to each camp I have attached 365,000 tens of thousands of stars (3,650,000,000), corresponding to the days of the solar year, and all of them I have created only for your sake.” (Brachot 32B)

Doing the calculations, we see that:

• each camp has 3,650,000,000 (365,000 x 10,000)
• 30 camps x 30 battalions x 30 divisions x 30 legions x 30 hosts x 12 constellations = 291,600,000 camps
• 3,650,000,000 x 291,600,000 = 1,064,340,000,000,000,000.

It is interesting to note that in 1997 NASA concluded there were 10 to the power of 21 stars in the Universe. Other sources suggest both smaller and larger numbers. The Jewish sages said it was 10 to the power of 18. Whatever the actual number may be, what would have prompted them to speculate on such a massive scale?

Continental Drift

Genesis 1:19 says, “Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place and let the dry land appear. And it was so.” Around 2000 years ago, the Zohar Chadash (12:1) explained that “one single continent came out of the water, and from it, seven continents were formed.” (There is a dispute between academics and religious scholars on the issue of the Zohar’s age, but either way, the texts are, by any standard, pre-scientific revolution).

There are manuscripts and references to the Zohar that go back as early as the 14th century, yet the first scientist to talk about continental drift was Alfred Lothar Wegener in his book The Origin of Continents and Oceans in 1915. By what means would these sages have acquired the notion a) of a single land mass that broke apart and b) the correct number of continents before they were even discovered? Why would they even discuss it?

The Sheath of the Sun

When we look at the sun with the naked eye, it looks uniform. In reality, it contains several different layers with unique characteristics. The sun’s interior enjoys a balmy 15,000,000 Celsius. Thankfully, there is an outer layer called the photosphere that has a much more tolerable temperature of 6000 Celsius. This layer does the unknown and thankless work of protecting the Earth from destruction by absorbing the massive amount of radiation caused by ultraviolet rays, X-rays, and Gamma Rays.

As Dr. N Vidal, a senior astronomer at the Greenwich Observatory in England, explained, “If these rays were to reach the Earth directly, they would incinerate the entire world.”

These critical features of the sun were only discovered in recent times. It’s odd, then, to note that the Midrash (Bereshit Rabba 6:6) claims that “There is a sheath around the sun’s orb.” It goes on to explain that this is the meaning of a line in the Book of Psalms (19:5) that says, “He has set up a tent for the sun.”

There are several places in the writing of the sages where they suggest that this sheath protects life on Earth from destruction (For one example see Bereshit Rabbah 26:6). Could it just be allegory or metaphor? Or did they perhaps have access to information that would not become available for 2000 years?

These three are just a sampling; there are many other examples that seem strangely parallel to our modern scientific understanding.

How could human beings living hundreds or thousands of years ago have known about matters that they could not have verified through experimentation or that would have required knowledge of parts of the world that had not yet been discovered or phenomena that are fully invisible to the naked eye?

One possibility is that they didn’t know anything about these matters and that it’s just wishful thinking or reverse engineering of facts that make it seem as though it were true. Another is that they speculated so often about so many matters that occasionally they just got lucky about a few random facts and supporters just cherry-pick the ones that work and have discarded the more embarrassing ones.

As it happens, in the cases described above, the Jewish People have been familiar with the quoted sources for an extremely long time – the Talmud, the Zohar, and other ancient texts were well-known and widely dispersed, so it’s not as if the examples have been culled from some wholly esoteric source and then spun at some later date to sound like a more recent scientific discovery. The examples are also quite clear and specific – there is no convenient ambiguity that can be interpreted in a variety of ways.

While not all scientific facts mentioned in the works of the sages match today’s scientific knowledge, there are clear indications that they knew more than they could have known by what was available to them at the time. It is interesting to note that in many examples they give, which do appear to be correct, they claim to know through tradition (lessons taught from teacher to student over many generations) and not through any particular inquiry. If true, what would be the logical source of their knowledge?

For the believing Jew, they are examples of the revealed wisdom of a transcendental power whose foreknowledge as the designer of the universe is all-encompassing and complete. That is a simple, elegant and intriguing solution to the question. If that is not the source, what is?