Footnotes:

18 Photo by David Harris, Bible Lands Museum, published in Hershel Shanks: “Jerusalem: An Archaeological Biography”, Random House, New York, 1995, page 46.

19 J.E. Cirlot: “A Dictionary of Symbols”, Dorset Press, New York, 1991, page 100 middle.

20 by Arthur Upgren, Plenum Press, New York, 1998, as reviewed in Scientific American, November 1998, page 121.

21 The hill near the center of the Old City where this palace probably stood has not been excavated. It rises only five to six meters above the surrounding terrain, but that is enough for watching stars on the horizon. See Wayne T. Pitard: “Ancient Damascus -- A Historical Study of the Syrian City- State from Earliest Times until its Fall to the Assyrians in 732 BCE”, Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, Indiana, 1987, page 4.

22 By Chris Marriott at www.skymap.com

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Figure 1- 1 is a photograph of this Cherub¹⁸ which I overlaid with a mylar grid to then trace on it  34 of the circles that compose most of its design. The dimensions of the image and the coordinates of those circles are recorded on Cherub Table 1 - 1.

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Figure 1- 2 highlights the arcs in the Cherub design that Figure 1-1 showed as full circles, and it lets you see which centers belong to which arcs, or which hubs to which wheels.  View vector version  52 KB

To view this .dwf format vector drawing, you need a vector viewer plug-in for your browser, such as Express Viewer from Autodesk which you can download free from

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=2787358

king Hazael’s time could see from the roof of his palace on a hill in Damascus²¹, or from any other unobstructed viewing spot at about that latitude. 

The lines crossing at the center of the large circles mark where the celestial north pole was located around 848 BCE, the start of king Hazael's reign.   However, the changes in the sky are so slow that the picture was very similar for several centuries before and after that date.

I made that chart with the SkyMap Pro 4.0 astronomical program²² which lets you pick your observing spot and also allows you to dial the sky backward and forward in time. 

Figure 1- 4 at right shows the Cherub circle centers, plus some connector lines between some of them which I added for comparison with the similar connector lines that I drew between the matching stars on the SkyMap.

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Figure 1-5 at left explains how some of the differences in the shapes of the matching groups can be due to the different distortions caused by the different map projections.

View vector version  28 KB

Hazael's Damascus, but with the modern names of the stars and with modern constellation lines drawn by the SkyMap program.

Figure 1- 7 at right assigns these star names to the corresponding Cherub centers and sizes these according to the star magnitudes.  These star names are also listed for each circle in Cherub Table 1 - 1.