from this city that Joseph, when vizier of Egypt, took his wife, the daughter of the high priest there. The images of the sun, and of Baal as the sun-god, seem to have been obelisks or pillars of stone, and hence had to be "broken down"; whilst the Asherah, the "groves" of the Authorized Version, the images of Ashtoreth as the moon-goddess, were wooden pillars, to be "cut" or "hewn down." Another "city of the sun" in the land of Egypt is also mentioned by Isaiah, in his prophecy of the conversion and restoration of the Egyptians. "Five cities in the land of Egypt shall speak the language of Canaan, and swear to the Lord of hosts; one shall be called The city of destruction;" lit. of _Ḥeres_, or of the sun. It was upon the strength of this text that Onias, the son of Onias the high priest, appealed to Ptolemy Philometer to be allowed to build a temple to Jehovah in the prefecture of Heliopolis (the city of the sun), and obtained his permission to do so, B.C. 149.[68:1] The epithet applied to the sun in Cant. vi. already quoted, "Clear as the sun," may be taken as equivalent to "spotless." That is its ordinary appearance to the naked eye, though from time to time--far more frequently than most persons have any idea--there are spots upon the sun sufficiently large to be seen without any optical assistance. Thus in the twenty years from 1882 to 1901 inclusive, such a phenomenon occurred on the average once in each week. No reference to the existence of sun-spots occurs in Scripture. Nor is this surprising, for it would not have fallen within the purpose of Scripture to record such a fact. But it is surprising that whilst the Chinese detected their occasional appearance, there is no distinct account of such an observation given either on Babylonian tablets or by classical or mediæval writers. The achievement of the Chinese in this direction is very notable, for the difficulty of looking directly at the sun, under ordinary circumstances is so great, and the very largest sunspots are so small as compared with the entire disc, that it argues great perseverance in watching such appearances on the part of the Chinese, for them to have assured themselves that they were not due to very small distant clouds in our own atmosphere. It has often been the subject of comment that light is mentioned in Gen. i. as having been created on the first day, but the sun not until the fourth. The order is entirely appropriate from an astronomical point of view, for we know that our sun is not the only source of light, since it is but one out of millions of stars, many of which greatly exceed it in splendour. Further, most astronomers consider that our solar system existed as a luminous nebula long ages before the sun was formed as a central condensation.