On Sun, 27 Jul 2008 22:34:00 +1000, SolomonW
wrote:

Now the problem here is a person with the naked eye looking at the sky
will only see about 4,000 stars. To the biblical writer clearly 4,000 is
a gross underestimation.

Why should this be a surprise? It is a common mistake to believe that
you can take an ancient fable and treat it as some sort of rigorously
accurate history. Whether ancient astronomers had a fair idea of the
number of visible stars is debatable, but it doesn't matter. As you
note, the writer of the passage is unlikely to have known, and even in
modern times poets and writers use "the number of stars in the sky" as
code for a very large number, even infinity.

These stories were written in a way that encouraged memorization;
mnemonics ("stars in the sky", "sands on a beach") are common.


Now trying to resolve these two quotes one possible solution, the writer
of this chapter states that ancients might have had a telescope. He
claims that several lens such as the one of a rock-crystal lens found in
Nineveh examined by Sir David Brewster in 1852 might have been part of a
telescope.

Extrapolating from a lens, which is quite possible, to a telescope (a
two lens system), which is unlikely, is dangerous. The telescope is such
a useful device for non-astronomical purposes that- once discovered- it
seems unlikely to have been lost, or unrecorded in ancient literature.
So even though the existence of a telescope doesn't change the situation
with respect to ancient mythology and star counts, I'd say that no
telescopes existed back then.
_________________________________________________

Chris L Peterson
Cloudbait Observatory
http://www.cloudbait.com