The number twelve belonged both to Israel’s tribes and to the signs of the zodiac. Sir William Drummond (c. 1770–1828) believed such correspondences helped explain what the biblical narratives meant. In Oedipus Judaicus (1811), he used names, numbers, and episodes from Scripture to investigate an astronomical meaning beneath the account of events. The patriarchs and the stopping of the sun could enter the same inquiry because both might preserve knowledge of the heavens. His classical and linguistic learning gave the proposal an extensive scholarly presentation.
George Stanley Faber (1773–1854) answered him in print. For Faber, comparisons among sacred stories recovered the history of the Flood and the family that survived it. Drummond’s astronomy threatened the historical standing of the very figures on which that explanation depended. A biblical name that Faber read as the name of an ancestor might become, in his opponent’s account, a figure for a celestial phenomenon. The dispute placed two extensive readings of ancient religion in direct conflict.
Neither account was established by the number twelve alone. Drummond still had to establish that the people who composed and transmitted the text intended the meaning he assigned to it. Faber faced corresponding demands when he identified pagan gods with biblical patriarchs. Their disagreement became a published exchange in which readers could see how the same habits of comparison led learned interpreters toward incompatible accounts of the familiar biblical world.