Another Semitic Name in the Eagle

Bezek stands in the same position as Bered among the minor entries of Aquila: a name of Semitic appearance attached to a small star of the eagle, with no recorded planetary nature and no interpretive tradition. Names of this kind entered western star lists in some quantity through the Renaissance interest in Hebrew, when astrologers and scholars sought biblical or Hebrew equivalents for the Arabic and Latin star names then in use, and through such books as the star tables printed with early modern almanacs. Later compilers copied them without always noting their provenance. The honest description is that the entry preserves a name and a longitude and nothing else; it is included in the catalogue for completeness and should not be given a meaning it does not have.

Names of exactly this kind, precise, minor, and largely without an accompanying interpretive tradition, are the bread and butter of Richard Hinckley Allen's 1899 reference Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning, still the standard English source for the fixed-star nomenclature the modern astrological lists inherited; a great many of Allen's Arabic names in turn trace to the seventeenth-century Cairo astronomer Al-Achsasi al-Mouakket, whose star calendar of about 1650 was unknown in the West until Edward Ball Knobel published it in 1895, only four years before Allen's book appeared and folded its contents into general circulation. Bezek's form suggests a Hebrew rendering assembled for exactly this kind of reference work rather than an independent astronomical tradition of its own, one of a scattered handful of such names that entered circulation through Renaissance Christian Hebraism rather than through either the Greek or the Arabic line of transmission.