Should we look for signs from heaven?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Genuinely disputed among scholars

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

Jeremiah 10:2 sits inside a tightly constructed anti-idolatry polemic (10:1-16) that critical scholars frequently assign to a Deutero-Jeremianic or exilic editorial hand, given its thematic and lexical overlap with Second Isaiah's mockery of idols (Isa 40:18-20; 44:9-20). Robert Carroll, in the Old Testament Library Jeremiah, reads the unit as deliberate exilic-period polemic against Babylonian astral religion — precisely the celestial-omen system that produced the great cuneiform series Enūma Anu Enlil, in which lunar eclipses, planetary motions, and stellar appearances were read as messages from the gods bearing on the fate of kings and nations. Jack Lundbom, in the Anchor Bible Jeremiah, notes that the phrase 'otot ha-shamayim, 'signs of the heavens,' functions as technical vocabulary for exactly this Mesopotamian astrological practice. The verse's force is sociological as much as theological: it is a boundary-marker that distinguishes Israelite Yahwism from the surrounding Mesopotamian cultures by forbidding the reading of the sky for guidance. The prohibition belongs to the same legal-theological stream as Deuteronomy 18:9-14, which lists astrologers, augurs, and diviners among the abominations of the nations Israel must not imitate, and Deuteronomy 4:19, which warns against being 'led astray' to worship the sun, moon, and 'host of heaven.'

Luke 21:11 occupies an entirely different cultural and literary moment. The Synoptic Apocalypse (Mark 13 // Matt 24 // Luke 21) draws on the deep reservoir of Jewish apocalyptic tradition in which eschatological cosmic disturbances — earthquakes, eclipses, falling stars, blood and fire — are read as legitimate revelatory data announcing the Day of YHWH. Joseph Fitzmyer, in the Anchor Bible Luke X-XXIV, traces the literary background through Isaiah 13:10, Joel 2:30-31, and 1 Enoch, where celestial phenomena are the standard furniture of the end. François Bovon, in the Hermeneia Luke commentary, reads the Lukan phrase ap' ouranou sēmeia megala — 'great signs from heaven' — as straightforward apocalyptic-tradition material treating such portents as authentic eschatological markers. John Collins, in The Apocalyptic Imagination, documents at length how Jewish apocalyptic literature (Daniel, 1 Enoch, the Qumran scrolls) is saturated with cosmological signs that the Jeremianic author would have catalogued as Babylonian astrology, and James VanderKam's work on Qumran calendrical and astronomical texts shows how thoroughly Second Temple Judaism had absorbed the very celestial science Jeremiah's polemic rejected. Francesca Rochberg's study of Mesopotamian celestial divination demonstrates that the technical apparatus of reading the heavens as portents passed into the wider ancient world rather than being abolished.

The strongest harmonization, advanced for centuries by Christian commentators, distinguishes two acts: forbidden astral divination, in which one studies the heavens to forecast events and shape decisions (Jeremiah's target), versus passive recognition of God-given signs that accompany the eschaton (Luke's subject). On this reading Jeremiah condemns the diviner's craft, while Luke merely describes phenomena God will send. The distinction is genuine and does dissolve part of the tension: Luke 21 does not counsel anyone to take up horoscopy, and Jeremiah 10 is not denying that God can act in the heavens. The genre gap — legal-paraenetic prohibition versus apocalyptic prediction — reinforces the partial reconciliation. Yet the distinction collapses at the crucial point. The eschaton-announcing signs of Luke 21 are functionally identical to the divinatory signs of Babylonian astrology: cosmic disturbances read as portents of regime change and divine intervention. The Lukan apocalypse has imported the interpretive technique — heavenly events as decodable messages about the fate of nations — that the Jeremianic polemic existed to suppress. The deepest tension is therefore not 'look at the sky' versus 'don't,' but between an anti-divination strand of Israelite religion that defined faithfulness as refusing to read celestial portents, and an apocalyptic strand that wholeheartedly adopted the same celestial-omen semiotics because they had become useful for mapping the end.

Where the critical reading lands: partially harmonizable on genre and act, but the underlying clash between anti-astral monotheism and apocalyptic cosmic semiotics is real.