In grade school, when I was being taught about our little part of the solar system, I didn’t give too much credence to the names of the planets. We have Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Pluto was a planet when I was in school so it will remain as such in my opinion.
As I’ve grown older, I’ve realized that out of all nine planets, there’s one name that sticks out as different: Earth. Why is the Earth called Earth? The rest of the planets are named after gods in Greek mythology, so why wasn’t Earth named Zeus, Olympus, or some other really cool sounding name? It’s called Earth. Which is akin to calling it Dirt.
Why does the single most important planet to human life have the simplest name? Even the sun and moon don’t have names of grandeur. Earth, sun and moon. One would think that something as immense as the sun would have an equally galactic name. But it doesn’t. It’s the sun.
Every language on Earth calls it earth in some format, whether it means land, dirt or the like. No language calls Earth anything different, such as Cybnolg-17. Its name is Earth.
Why is our lovely planet called Earth?
Because in the beginning, God called the dry land “earth”, and that name has been passed on from generation to generation ever since.
Mankind named the other planets after God named the Earth. Our planet was called Earth in the beginning, and so it shall remain Earth until the end.
God said so.
(Photo by: Vedrana Filipovic on Unsplash)
