Scripture: Job 38:31–32; Job 9:9; Amos 5:8
"Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion?" (Job 38:31). A popular claim says this shows knowledge that the Pleiades stars are held together by gravity while Orion's are drifting apart.
The Pleiades are an whose stars move together through space, and the stars of Orion's belt are not a bound group, so the claim gets some astronomy right. But open clusters do not stay bound: astronomers expect the Pleiades to disperse over the next few hundred million years. The Hebrew is also uncertain. "Pleiades" and "Orion" are Greek names: Job uses Kimah (probably "heap" or "cluster") and Kesil ("fool"), which the Greek translated as Pleias and Orion, and English Bibles followed through the Latin and the King James Version. The identifications are old and widely accepted but not certain, and the word rendered "chains" (ma'adannot) is obscure; the KJV reads "sweet influences". In context, God is asking Job whether he can control the seasonal stars that rule the sky, a statement about divine power.
