The Bible never mentions other galaxies. The concept of a galaxy, a massive system of stars bound together by gravity, wasn’t established until 1924, when Edwin Hubble proved that the Andromeda nebula was a separate star system far beyond our own Milky Way. Biblical authors, writing thousands of years earlier, had no framework for this idea. What the Bible does contain are sweeping references to stars, heavens, and the vastness of creation that modern readers naturally connect to what we now know about the scale of the universe.
How Biblical Authors Pictured the Universe
The writers of the Bible worked from the same understanding of the cosmos shared across the ancient Near East. They saw three broad domains: heaven above, the earth below, and the seas. The earth was pictured as a flat disk, either floating on water or resting on foundational pillars. Above it sat a solid, dome-like structure called the firmament, which held back waters above and served as the surface where the sun, moon, and stars were placed. Rain, hail, and snow came through gates or windows in this dome.
This wasn’t a quirk of one biblical author. It shows up across multiple books. Genesis describes God setting lights “in the firmament.” Joshua depicts the sun stopping in the sky as though it orbits the earth. Job references the pillars of the earth. The Bible didn’t set out to teach astronomy. It assumed the cosmology its audience already understood and used that framework to communicate theological ideas about God’s power and relationship with humanity.
What “The Heavens” Actually Meant
The Hebrew word for the heavens, shamayim, is a flexible term that covers everything above the ground. It could mean the sky where birds fly, the space where stars appear, or the dwelling place of God. A tradition reflected in Paul’s letters to the Corinthians divides this into three layers: the first heaven is the atmosphere, the second is the realm of the sun, moon, and stars (what we’d call outer space), and the third is the highest heaven where God dwells.
None of these layers maps onto the modern understanding of galaxies, galaxy clusters, or the large-scale structure of the cosmos. The “second heaven” is the closest equivalent to outer space, but for biblical writers, stars were small points of light set into the firmament. The idea that each point of light could be a sun with its own planets, let alone that billions of such suns could form a galaxy, and that billions of such galaxies could fill an observable universe, was simply outside the scope of what anyone could have known.
Stars in the Bible: Numbers and Names
Several passages do emphasize the sheer number of stars as a sign of God’s power. Genesis 15:5 uses the uncountable stars as a metaphor for Abraham’s descendants. Psalm 147:4 goes further: “He determines the number of the stars; He gives to all of them their names.” The point is theological. Counting and naming the stars is presented as something only God could do, a demonstration of infinite knowledge and care.
Modern astronomy puts that claim in striking perspective. The European Space Agency estimates there are roughly 100 billion stars in the Milky Way alone, and somewhere between 100 billion and a trillion galaxies in the observable universe. That gives a total of roughly 10 to the 22nd to 10 to the 24th power individual stars. The biblical writers couldn’t have known these numbers, but the rhetorical force of the passage, that the stars are beyond human counting, turns out to be dramatically true.
Specific Constellations the Bible Names
The Bible does reference a handful of recognizable star groupings. Job 38:31 asks, “Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion?” The Pleiades is an open star cluster visible to the naked eye, and Orion’s Belt is one of the most recognizable patterns in the night sky. These are not galaxies. They are clusters and patterns of stars within our own Milky Way, close enough to see without a telescope. Their mention in Job serves the same purpose as most biblical references to the sky: to highlight the gap between human ability and divine power.
“Stretching Out the Heavens”
One phrase that gets particular attention in modern discussions appears in Isaiah 40:22: God “stretches out the heavens like a curtain and spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.” Similar language appears in at least five other passages, including Psalm 104, Isaiah 44, Isaiah 45, Isaiah 48, and Isaiah 51. Some readers see in this a poetic anticipation of the expanding universe, the discovery made in the 20th century that galaxies are moving apart from one another and that space itself is stretching.
In its original context, though, the metaphor describes God unfurling the sky the way someone pitches a tent. It conveys sovereignty and craftsmanship, not a scientific model of cosmic expansion. The image is of a builder at work, not a prediction of Hubble’s law. That said, for readers who approach the text devotionally, the resonance between “stretching out the heavens” and an expanding universe feels significant regardless of authorial intent.
Why the Bible Doesn’t Address Galaxies
The Bible’s silence on galaxies isn’t an oversight. It reflects what the text was written to do. As one commentator on Genesis 1:16 put it, the stars “are spoken of as they appear to us, without telling their number, nature, place, size, or motions; for the Scriptures were written, not to gratify curiosity, or make us astronomers, but to lead us to God.” The creation account in Genesis spends a single clause on the stars: “He made the stars also.” This brevity isn’t a lack of interest in the cosmos. It’s a statement of priorities. The text is concerned with God’s relationship to creation, not with cataloging what’s in it.
Humanity didn’t even know other galaxies existed until December 30, 1924, when Hubble announced that what had been called the Andromeda nebula was actually a separate galaxy, proving the Milky Way was one of many. Before that moment, the scientific consensus was that the Milky Way was the entire universe. Expecting a Bronze Age text to discuss a concept that eluded modern science until the 20th century misreads what the Bible is trying to accomplish.
Theological Implications of a Vast Universe
While the Bible doesn’t mention galaxies, some theological traditions do grapple with what a universe of this scale means. One line of thinking, rooted in passages like Psalm 8 and Isaiah 45:18, holds that Earth and humanity occupy a unique place in God’s attention. Isaiah 45:18 specifically describes God forming the earth “to be inhabited,” with no similar statement made about other worlds. Psalm 8 marvels that the God who made the heavens still cares about individual people.
This raises questions the Bible doesn’t directly answer. If there are hundreds of billions of galaxies, each containing hundreds of billions of stars, could other inhabited worlds exist? The Bible neither confirms nor denies it. Some theologians argue that the existence of other intelligent life would create complex problems for doctrines built around humanity’s unique spiritual status, particularly the idea that all of creation was affected by human sin and that redemption came through a single event on Earth. Others see a universe of staggering scale as simply a larger canvas for the same theological point the biblical authors were making: that the God who made all of this still counts the hairs on your head.
The honest answer is that the Bible was written in a world where galaxies were unknown, for an audience that needed to understand who God is rather than what the universe contains. Its references to stars, heavens, and the vastness of creation are powerful precisely because they scale with discovery. The more we learn about the size of the cosmos, the more weight those passages carry.