In a Galaksiya Far, Far Away. (The Forward). The "river of fire" comes originally from Daniel 7:10:
Was Daniel actually referring to the Milky Way? When one considers that his millions of God’s “attendants” must have been angels and that in his age — which is to say, in the second-century BCE — the stars were commonly thought to be angelic beings, he quite possibly was. What other part of the sky is so packed with stars? The rabbis of the talmudic period clearly thought that the River of Fire, far from belonging only to Daniel’s vision, was an objective feature of the heavens. In the talmudic tractate of Hagigah, for example, there is a belief attributed to the renowned Babylonian sage Rav: “Every single day, ministering angels are created from the River of Fire and sing [before God], and cease to exist.” Elsewhere in the same passage, the somewhat different view is ascribed to Rav that the stars of this river are drops of sweat fallen from the attending angels as they rush about, serving their Maker.Cross-file under "Asking the important questions."
Of course, although there may be a distant echo here of the sky-spattering drops of Hera’s milk, this still doesn’t prove that Rav was identifying the River of Fire with the Milky Way. Confirmation of such an identification comes from another passage in the Talmud, this one in the tractate of Berachot, where Rav’s contemporary and fellow Babylonian Shmuel is quoted as saying, “If the tail of Scorpio weren’t in the River of Fire, no one stung by a scorpion would ever live.” Shmuel was a star watcher — “I know the paths of heaven as well as I know those of [his hometown of] Neharda’a,” he boasts in the same place in Berachot. And while it isn’t quite clear what he had in mind (does the sweat of angels magically mitigate the effects of a scorpion’s sting on earth?), the tail of the constellation of Scorpio is indeed just inside the Milky Way.
