Page 178 - Foundations

to present what was basically a large amalgamation of notes into a highly readable form that would
hold the interest of the average reader. Despite what seemed to be a somewhat prejudiced view
against Miss Rolleston’s writing, and recognizing the profit to be gained by hearing multiple views
on a subject, I ordered Mr. Warner’s book with an interest to see how he refuted Frances Rolleston’s
work.

It should be noted that Tim Warner is not antagonistic to the idea of the heavens being used in a
prophetic manner by God. Rather, he finds fault with Miss Rolleston’s interpretation of the heavenly
message and would propose an alternate account of that which God has written in the stars. I was
hoping that Mr. Warner would provide links to the sources he referred to when he stated “the whole
basis for her theory has been thoroughly refuted by Christian apologetic ministries.” I wanted to
know what ministries these were, and what evidence and arguments they had to set forth.

On page 24 of Mystery of the Mazzaroth I found Tim Warner’s refutation of Frances Rolleston’s
work. It was even more terse than the book description on Amazon. He writes:

“More recently, apologetics and creation ministries have debunked the work of Frances Rolleston
(and with it all of the other books based on her work), showing it as non-scientific and subjective, and
rightly so.”

That is it! One sentence, and the labor of a lifetime is cast into the gutter. At the bottom of the page
there was a link to an article written by Dr. Danny Faulkner in 2007 that is located on the Answers
in Genesis website. I hoped the link would still be functional, for I wanted very much to read this
thorough debunking of Miss Rolleston’s magnum opus, a work that kept her attention for decades.
I was relieved to find that the webpage was still active even though the article has a date on it of
December 13, 2007. At the same time I was disappointed to see that the article was only 12
paragraphs long. How do you “thoroughly debunk” a body of information that is spread across more
than 300 pages (as is the case with the book Mazzaroth) in only 12 paragraphs?

After reading the article on the Answers in Genesis website, I had to conclude that Mr. Warner was
guilty of overstatement. Danny Faulkner addressed only two words out of hundreds that Frances
Rolleston provided as evidence in her book. He writes:

As an example of Rolleston’s methodology, consider the meaning that she found for the star Deneb,
the brightest star in the constellation Cygnus. She reasoned that it was a perversion of the Hebrew
dan, which means “judge.” Because Hebrew scribes added marks for vowels much later, one could
suppose that this is possible. However, why search for some other meaning when the traditional
Arabic meaning works so well? The Arab word deneb means “tail,” and it marks the tail of Cygnus.
Incidentally, several other stars contain deneb as a portion of their names, and in each case they
mark the tails of their respective constellations. Yet Rolleston persisted with her reinterpretation of
words...

Far more problematic is the Hebrew word used for Orion. Elsewhere in the Old Testament this word
is translated “fool.” For instance, chesil is the word translated “fool” eight times in Proverbs 26.
Thus, by the Hebrew name for him, we can see that Orion is not an individual worthy of respect and