The explanation ~of the Bible text is obvious: The writers lived at a time when mankind thought that stars were fixed to a firmament and could fall on earth ike a common stone, because they thought that the earth was the centre of the universe. And the phenomena of shooting stars and comets strengthened their conviction.
Now they liked to frighten mankind in order to bring them to repentance. (We see the same method practised by the Chinese sects. So tempests, tidal waves and earthquakes had to be predicted and all other scares. But what would be the most terrifying prediction of all?
Comparing the firmament with the earth, that had its earthquakes, tidal waves and other scares, the firmament, as its name expresses, seemed serene. Nothing looks more unshakable in their course than the stars, the sun etc., moving round the earth, fixed to their orbits in the firmament.
Therefore an unusual amount of shooting stars, a comet, that seemed to detach itself from the sky to visit us, seemed deviations of the eternal rules, that were to be regarded as woe-predicting events.
So the most terrible experience of all, the highest degree of perdition would be the pouring down upon us of the fragments of heaven, just as a roof falls on us in an earthquake.
Nobody thought of what precisely it would mean. Nobody knew about the rea) bigness of stars, their distances and consist tence.
Certainly the literal destruction to be caused by a million stars, a million times bigger each than our poor earth, was not in their minds. Nor could they understand that long before these stars were to reach us, our earth would have evaporated by the heat that they would have sent to us with the velocity of light.
They did not know all that.
They thought like the simple peasants of to-day, who have an idea of a roof falling in. Well, such a sensation, a hundred times greater, they wished to create by the falling in of the firmament. They believed in it, actually as they did believe the earthquakes and tempests were governed at God's: will, the comet that led the Kings to Jesus' cradle, the sun that stood still to prolong the day of victory.
They wore simple-minded, hones, worshippers of their. God Almighty. Our prophets of to-day are children of a hybrid education. They know too much to believe in the falling stars, though not enough to understand the falling stars of the Bibles Tan, etc., PROTESTANT, Peking, Sept. 22, 1993.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.