in the
time of Moses astronomers had already learned, first, to determine the
actual equinox; next, to observe the culmination of stars on the
meridian rather than their risings and settings; and, third and more
important, to determine midnight by some artificial measurement of time.
None of these can have been primitive operations; we have no knowledge
that any of the three were in use in the time of Moses; certainly they
were not suitable for a people on the march, like the Israelites in the
wilderness. Above all, Drach ignored in this suggestion the fact that
the Jewish calendar was a lunar-solar one, and hence that the tenth day
of the seventh month could not bear any fixed relation either to the
autumnal equinox, or to the midnight culmination of the Pleiades; any
more than our Easter Sunday is fixed to the spring equinox on March 22.

The Pleiades were often associated with the late autumn, as Aratus
writes--

"Men mark them rising with Sol's setting light,
Forerunners of the winter's gloomy night."

This is what is technically known as the "acronical rising" of the
Pleiades, their rising at sunset; in contrast to their "heliacal
rising," their rising just before daybreak, which ushered in the spring
time. This acronical rising has led to the association of the group with
the rainy season, and with floods. Thus Statius called the cluster
"Pliadum nivosum sidus," and Valerius Flaccus distinctly used the word
"Pliada" for the showers. Josephus says that during the siege of
Jerusalem by Antiochus Epiphanes in 170 B.C., the besieged wanted for
water until relieved "by a large shower of rain which fell at the
setting of the Pleiades." R. H. Allen, in his _Star-Names and their
Meanings_, states that the Pleiades "are intimately connected with
traditions of the flood found among so many and widely separated
nations, and especially in the Deluge-myth of Chaldaea," but he does not
cite authorities or instances.

The Talmud gives a curious legend connecting the Pleiades with the
Flood:--

"When the Holy One, blessed be He! wished to bring the Deluge
upon the world, He took two stars out of Pleiades, and thus
let the Deluge loose. And when He wished to arrest it, He took
two stars out of Arcturus and stopped it."[223:1]

It would seem from this that the Rabbis connected the number of visible
stars with the number of the family in the Ark--with the "few, that
is, eight souls . . . saved