Were the stars made after the earth, on the fourth day, or before the earth’s foundations were laid?

Job 38 is Hebrew poetry, whose lines usually go in pairs that say the same thing twice. “When the morning stars sang together” is matched by “and all the sons of God shouted for joy” (38:7). In Job ‘the sons of God’ are the angels who come before the Lord (Job 1:6; 2:1), so the ‘morning stars’ of the first line are most naturally the same beings, called stars for their brightness; Revelation too uses stars as a picture of angels (Revelation 1:20). Barnes thought there could be little doubt of it, and the Septuagint, the old Greek translation, renders the second line ‘all my angels praised me’. On this reading the verse says that the angels rejoiced as God founded the earth. It says nothing about when the stars of the sky were made, and Genesis 1 does not tell of the making of the angels at all.

Those who take the morning stars as real stars, as Delitzsch did, are still reading a poem, not a timetable. God pictures the making of the earth as the raising of a building, with its measurements, measuring line, foundations and cornerstone (38:4–6). Delitzsch compared the scene to the day the foundation of the temple was laid, when the priests and Levites “sang together” and all the people “shouted with a great shout” (Ezra 3:10–11): heaven celebrated the founding of the earth as men celebrate the founding of a great building. Its point is that Job was not there. The speech then ranges over the sea, the dawn, the snow and the stars of Pleiades and Orion (38:8–33) in no order of creation, and sets nothing against the order of days in Genesis 1.

The stars made in the beginning

Many old-earth Christians read Genesis 1:1 as including the sun, moon and stars, and take the fourth day as the day they were appointed (or first seen from the earth’s surface) as lights and signs for days and years. On that view the stars existed before the earth was finished. Keil, who held that the stars were completed on the fourth day, still thought their material was made ‘in the beginning’ and formed side by side with the earth.

Stars on the fourth day, angels before

Young-earth writers such as Eric Lyons (Apologetics Press) hold that the sun, moon and stars were made on the fourth day. On that view Job 38:7 speaks of the angels; Got Questions, for example, takes the ‘morning stars’ there to be angels, already in existence when God laid the foundations of the earth.

Creation called to praise

Some take the morning stars as real stars pictured as singing, as all creation is called to praise God in Psalm 148:3: “praise him, all ye stars of light”. The poem then celebrates creation as a whole without dating any part of it.

Interpreters still differ over whether the morning stars are angels, real stars, or both, and Scripture does not say when the angels were made. The Septuagint, which makes the second line about angels, renders the first line ‘when the stars were made’, so it reads that line of the stars themselves. Christians also differ on whether Genesis 1:14–19 tells of the first making of the sun, moon and stars or of their appointment to their task; this site does not take a side on that question.