Bezek

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.

The atlas records this star at Aquarius 0 degrees 26 minutes, projected from Aquila, and that is the most interesting number in this group of twelve, because it is so small.

Precession advances a fixed star's tropical longitude by about fifty seconds of arc a year, one degree in roughly seventy two years. A star twenty six minutes into a sign has been in that sign for about thirty years. Taking the recorded value for epoch 2000 and applying a uniform rate, this star crossed from Capricorn into Aquarius around 1969, and any fixed-star list printed before about 1970 places it in Capricorn.

That is a concrete demonstration of something the tradition states abstractly and readers often discount: a fixed star is not fixed in the zodiac, and a printed list has a shelf life. A reader who finds this star in Capricorn in an older book and in Aquarius here has not found a contradiction, they have found seventy years of precession, and the crossing date can be recovered from the two figures.

It will be in Aquarius for a long time now, something over two thousand years, before reaching Pisces.

Everything else the existing article says stands: this is a name with no interpretive tradition attached, and the position is the substance of the entry.