Can You Count the Stars in Heaven?

Wilhelm Hey (1789–1854) was a German pastor — court preacher in the town of Gotha — and one of his country's most beloved children's authors. His illustrated fable books were so popular that for decades Germany knew them by the illustrator's name, not realizing the anonymous verses were the pastor's.

In 1837, tucked into the 'serious appendix' at the back of his second fable book, Hey published a little riddle song: 'Weißt du, wie viel Sternlein stehen?' — 'Do you know how many little stars are standing?' Each verse asks an impossible counting question — the stars, the clouds, the fish, the children who wake up each morning — and each verse gives the same answer: God has counted them, God knows them, and God loves every single one.

Set to a folk melody that predates the words, the song became one of the most beloved lullabies in the German-speaking world — practically every German child learns it, and it still sits in the German Protestant hymnal today. Hey also wrote 'Alle Jahre wieder,' one of Germany's favorite Christmas songs; he had a gift for saying enormous things in words small enough for bedtime.

The English translation came in 1921 from Elmer Leon Jorgenson, a Nebraska-born son of Danish immigrants, for his landmark hymnal Great Songs of the Church. Jorgenson made one telling change: he moved the reassurance — God 'knows and loves you' — to the end of every verse, so the answer always lands last.

German-speaking Latter-day Saint children have sung it for decades — it entered the Church's German children's songbook in 2001. On September 18, 2025, it joined the English hymnbook as #1046 in the fifth batch of Hymns—For Home and Church.

The Church pairs it with a Restoration scripture that answers Hey's riddle at the grandest possible scale: in Moses 1, God tells of creations 'innumerable... unto man,' but adds, 'all things are numbered unto me, for they are mine and I know them.' As the Church's hymn resource puts it: to God, no one is ever insignificant.