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This cluster of stars — the Kesil of the ancient Chaldeans — is by far the most magnificent constellation in the heavens. Its form must be familiar to everyone who has attentively considered the nocturnal sky. It resembles the rude outline of a gigantic human figure. By the Greek mythologists, Orion was supposed to be a celebrated hunter, superior to the rest of mankind in strength and stature, whose mighty deeds entitled him after death to the honours of an apotheosis. The Orientals imagined him to be a huge giant who, Titan-like, had warred against God, and was therefore bound in chains to the firmament of heaven; and some authors have conjectured that this notion is the origin of the history of Nimrod, who, according to Jewish tradition, instigated the descendants of Noah to build the Tower of Babel. The constellation of Orion is composed of four very bright stars, forming a quadrilateral, higher than it is broad, with three equidistant stars in a diagonal line in the middle. The two upper stars, called Betelgeux and Bellatrix, form the shoulders; in the middle, immediately above these, are three small, dim stars, close to each other, forming the cheek or head. These stars are distinctly visible only on a very clear night; and this circumstance may have given rise to the old fable that (Enopion, King of Chios, — whose daughter Orion demanded in marriage, — put out his eyes as he lay asleep on the seashore, and that he recovered his sight by gazing upon the rising sun from the summit of a neighbouring hill. The constellation is therefore represented by the poets, as groping with blinded eyes all round the heavens in search of the sun. The feet are composed of two very bright stars, called Rigel and Saiph; the three stars in the middle are called the belt or girdle, and from them depends a stripe of smaller stars, forming the hunter's sword. The whole constellation, containing seventeen stars to the naked eye, but exhibiting seventy-eight in an ordinary telescope, occupies a large and conspicuous position in the southern heavens, below the Pleiades; and is often visible, owing to the brightness and magnitude of its stars, when all other constellations, with the exception of the Plough, are lost in the mistiness of night. In this country it is seen only a short space above the horizon, along whose ragged outline of dark hills its starry feet may be observed for many nights in the winter, walking in solitary grandeur. It attains its greatest elevation in January and February, and disappears altogether during the summer and autumn months. In Mesopotamia it occupies a position nearer the zenith, and therefore is more brilliant and striking in appearance. Night after night it sheds down its rays with mystical splendour over the lonely solitudes through which the Euphrates flows, and where the tents of the patriarch of Uz once stood. Orion is not only the most striking and splendid constellation in the heavens, it is also one of the few clusters that are visible in all parts of the habitable world. The equator passes through the middle of it; the glittering stars of its belt being strung, like diamonds, on its invisible line. In the beginning of January, when it is about the meridian, we obtain the grandest display of stars which the sidereal heavens in this country can exhibit. The ubiquity of this constellation may have been one of the reasons why it was chosen to illustrate God's argument with Job, in a book intended to be read universally. When the Bible reader of every clime and country can go out in the appropriate season, and find in his own sky the very constellation and direct his gaze to the very peculiarity in it, to which the Creator alluded in His mysterious converse with Job, he has no longer a vague, indefinite idea in his mind, but is powerfully convinced of the reality of the whole circumstance, while his feelings of devotion are deepened and intensified. The three bright stars which constitute the girdle or bands of Orion never change their form; they preserve the same relative position to each other, and to the rest of the constellation, from year to year, and age to age. They afford to us one of the highest types of immutability in the midst of ceaseless changes.

(Hugh Macmillan, D. D.)

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KJV: Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose the bands of Orion?

WEB: "Can you bind the cluster of the Pleiades, or loosen the cords of Orion?