So let me get this straight: the Jews who had just witnessed all the gods of Egypt aggressively crushed before the Exodus then decide to adopt Egyptian cosmology? “Let’s throw our lot in with the losers of this great cosmic battle!” Does that really make sense?
I understand your comment … and it is my fault that I haven’t given you the full context of what I meant.
The one thing about Egypt’s theology and metaphysics is that they are the exemplar par excellence of an ancient culture with an optimistic future in the afterlife. The Greeks were not nearly as optimistic; unless they engaged in a mystery school, some of which are supposed to have been influenced by Egyptian thinking.
But here’s the conundrum, Marty: You would expect 200 or 400 years of exposure to Egyptian religion would have left the Hebrew of the Old Testament with a profound appreciation of the one thing that should have been intrinsic to Judaism - - serving as a bridge to the New Testament conversions of Jews and Non-Jews - - of a general hope of salvation in the afterlife.
But what do we see in the Old Testament? Hardly a peep! The story line around Endor seems to be more about not thinking about an afterlife to avoid witchcraft - - rather than a hope of a happy afterlife. There are, perhaps 3 verses in the Old Testament that suggest an afterlife, but they don’t suggest a universal expectation. And by the time we get to the Roman Greek period, the Sadducees are said to be firmly opposed to any idea of an afterlife.
Frankly, I think this is probably not exactly what the Priests believed. I do think that is what they wanted the other groups to think they believed. I think it is most likely that the Sadducees believed only the priesthood would experience a general resurrection. But I admit that this is, so far, just speculation.
So, to have Judaism be the very root of New Testament salvation, and yet have virtually no discussion of it in the massive O.T. is not exactly resounding proof they spent any time in Egypt. The best evidence for Jewish exposure to Egyptian culture and world view is the Jeremiad community - - the refugees that took Jeremiah to Egypt with them.
Archaeologists say that the Jeremiad settlements seem to go dormant some time after the Persian conquest of Egypt. To me, this makes sense. The international border is now irrelevant. And there is a good chance that the Jeremiad population wanted to participate in revival of Jerusalem. I think this is actually where a lot of Egyptian information and lore comes from … but that should be no surprise to anyone who has read some of my related views.
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Sadly, it didn’t take them long to make a golden calf. I don’t know if @gbrooks9’s analysis is correct or not, but I wouldn’t exactly put it past the Jewish people, regardless of timing.
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There’s an irony there. I had never found anything convincing about the Golden Calf being particularly Egyptian. There was a Golden Calf mentioned in the theology of Mesopotamia … but not until today had I ever seen anything specifically in Egyptian commentary referring to a calf, and in the context of gold (gold was the color associated with the sun).
But if you read the Northern Israel reference to the two calfs, it suddenly sounds like the Exodus text was copied from the Kings text … not the other way around!
1Ki 12:28
"Whereupon the king took counsel, and made two calves of gold, and said unto them …
behold thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt."
Exo 32:4
". . . after [Aaron] had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel,
which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt."
Keep in mind that it is easy as we’re reading stories to imagine that things are happening one after the other and no time in between. Have you ever noticed, for example that in one of the ten plagues we see “all” the Egyptian cattle get killed off, and yet in the very next plague we see the Egyptian cattle (cattle? what cattle?) getting afflicted again for the Egyptians who did not heed the warnings. Sometimes we are explicitly told how many days (maybe 40 in the case of Mt. Sinai?) or maybe the next morning. But mostly we can probably assume by reading between the lines (like with the cattle above) that these ten plagues didn’t happen in only 10 days or anything like that. The old testament is already pretty long (and papyrus probably isn’t cheap – right?) So can you imagine if Moses and the later redactors had felt compelled to also describe everything in between the exciting bits? "Day 3 after Moses disappeared up the mountain. Nothing much happened today. Jonas may have pilfered some of the water rations again … " And assuming they didn’t have any wifi or sports channels to entertain themselves with I can imagine folks getting a bit stir crazy after days of this. Watch what a routy classroom of teenagers can come up with in a “mere” five minutes of leftover unstructured classroom time and a golden calf doesn’t at all seem beyond the pale to me. But the boring bits were all there too I’m sure.
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This shows your rejection of the solid raqia is based on theological concerns rather than looking at the facts.
How?
Have you read the work of Seely and others? Have you submitted anything to peer review on this subject? You seem to be using a lot of weasel words here.
@gbrooks9, this is how the Egyptians thought of the sky.
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Hi Marty,
Maybe you’ve forgotten about this sad episode in Israel’s history, from 2 Chronicles 25:14:
When Amaziah returned from slaughtering the Edomites, he brought back the gods of the people of Seir. He set them up as his own gods, bowed down to them and burned sacrifices to them.
Let’s recap here. The Judean King Amaziah took home the gods he had just defeated and set them up as his own gods. This was after some Judean troops that were left behind, apparently upset, went and slaughtered 3,000 Isrealites from both Judea and Samaria, taking plunder. So given how prone they were to sin, I don’t think it would too much of a stretch to imagine that they obsconded the worldview of the Egyptians.
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Hi Jon,
I appreciate your responses, well thought out as usual.
But you didn’t really address my question. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that someone somehow demonstrates that the raqia was taken to be solid. What essential elements of the faith would be in danger in your mind? Does it mean the bible to you loses its reliability, as I’ve read from you recently?
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We have to be careful with the Seely article … right away he starts using the dreaded word : “Dome” !
He has a a good reason to. He cites a range of sources which identify the sky as a dome. However he also says this.
True, there are occasional variations on the solid dome conception, such as several worlds piled up on top of each other, each with its own firmament; but I know of no evidence that any scientifically naive people anywhere on earth believed that the firmament was just empty space or atmosphere
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Richard
I tried to show above that nothing of salvific importance is directly tied up in the details of the creation story, but that depends greatly on genre considerations. If it could also be shown (as well as the hard raqia) that Genesis was, in fact, attempting to teach scientific cosmology as divine truth, then clearly the whole doctrine of inspiration would be on the table, and hence its reliability on matters theological would also be compromised.
Not every matter of interpretation of the Bible, however, is of salvific importance, but may be of importance in making the best use of the text. If one takes Daniel, for example, I’m quite sure the sheep will not be sorted from the goats by whether they take a preterist or a historical position on apocalyptic visions, but in my view it makes a big difference between the book’s being a key to Kingdom theology or an obscure set of speculations for navel-gazers to match against their newspapers.
And so the broad interpretive framework I set out for Genesis 1 - non-theoretical phenomenology tied into a tight literary and theological theme - I feel to become invisible almost as soon as one starts taking about dependence on ANE myths.
On the other hand, ANE sources can be useful for giving broad hints as to the way nature was experienced in the world of those days. That in itself, is in my view valuable, because how they thought about their world greatly affected how they thought about God, and both are different from our times. We can potentially learn a lot from their worldview.
That would be the metal goddess Nut, I guess, as kindly illustrated by Jon Burke!
This is one of the things I dislike about Seely, even though, being peer reviewed, he cannot be gainsaid by anyone posting here. Apart from making his personal lack of knowledge an argument (as if realistically he had studied the whole world’s primitive cosmologies), he’s using the English translation, “firmament”, of a word occurring uniquely in the Hebrew account, and then saying how every other pre-scientific people employs it.
But they don’t employ it, and neither do the Babylonian sources. One has to map the Hebrew concept to whatever other culturally related concepts there are out there, to see what “raqia” actually might mean in its context. Seely has reflexly mapped it to the triple Babylonian stone heavens, which serve an entirely different function to the raqia, and proceeds without any reasoning or examples to equate it to completely unrelated (and unspecified) cosmologies across the world. And you accuse me of weasel words (as well as the famous “argument from Calvinism” refutation)!
However, in your post to me you have kindly provided an example that directly contradicts Seely’s claim that no cosmologies anywhere have air or space supporting the firmament, and therefore that the raqia must be solid because it is what holds up the sky (as opposed to the biblical function, which is to separate two sets of waters).
Your picture shows the air God Shu holding up the sky goddess Nut. I even note with amusement that the source of your illustration is a web page entited "Discover the legends and myths and religious beliefs surrounding Shu, the Egyptian god of wind, the atmosphere and known as the supporter of the sky."
The web-page’s use of “atmosphere” is of course forgiveably anachronistic (the material nature of air being a Greek discovery). But people may be interested to know that this theogony originated in Heliopolis and is Old Kingdom theology (a millennium and a major Egyptian theological revolution before the earliest date for Genesis). In that ancient theology Shu and the moisture God Tefnut produced two children, Nut, the sky, and Geb, the earth, who indulged in incest and so were forcibly separated by their father to form the upper and lower extremes of the cosmos. Somewhere in there we’ve lost the celestial ocean above and below, and solid materials don’t figure at all, because it’s a theogony, not a scientific cosmology.
For my money Egyptian “cosmologies” are a self-contradictory labyrynth that won’t get any of us very far on views on the material world - though there are some fascinating theological parallels in the New Kingdom period that are a lot more significant.
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Here is the promised Egyptian material in connection with the Hebrew view of the Firmament … and even some bonus items… It is an old book, but I have not found anyone impugning its scholarship on Egyptian material - - and I find it difficult to imagine too much room for error. The implications of the Egyptian references are marvelously consistent with the Old Testament imagery!
The attachment is a .jpg, which looks pretty legible on my laptop in a 3 pages down 1 page wide format. Once it’s in the posting, if it looks difficult to read, I’ll come up with some other format in the next day or so.
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George
I grant you that your European/Western text isn’t quite Victorian, being from 1916, but since the contention has been about outdated over-materialistic views of ANE cosmology, it scarcely concludes the question.
Here’s what modern writer Wim van den Dungen, discussing a major Egyptian text on Egyptian theology from the New Kingdom, says:
Early 20th century egyptology was modernist, positivist, antiquarian, Hellenocentric (if not Europacentric) and reluctant to accept the fact Ancient Egyptians were also able to speculate, think and be truly spiritual and philosophical. Hellenocentrism, Europacentrism and a refusal (and/or inability) to understand figural and analogical thought by its own standards, compromized the understanding of ancient religious, philosophical & spiritual texts. This mentality is not extinct, although the old crocodiles are nearly all gone to meet the Balance.
On the matter of the metal goddess Nut, with the solar ship sailing over her but under the celestial waters (as opposed to through her body as a number of the texts say), I was led by one popular writer, who said that because biA, translated firmament, is derived from a root meaning either metal or miracle, it must be made of metal, to check the Egyptian lexicon. Here are some possibilities:
biA - heaven, firmament
biA - metal ? bronze, ?iron
biA - a mineral not metal
biAi - wonder, miracle
biAt - gritstone
biAt - beer vessel
biAt - quarry
biAyt - firmament
biAyt - miracle, marvels
biAw - mining region, a mine
biAw - wonders, marvels
biAy - consisting of bronze
Now, unless one has some clue from the original literature (as one does with Akkadian “šamȗ”, heaven, said by one Babylonian text to derive from water, not from bronze or stone), then deriving meaning from etymology is fraught with hazard. It’s the same gig as tracing raqia back to a meaning of metal from a verb meaning to beat out/spread out/stretch out. Which meaning of “biA”, if any of them, is “firmament” derived from, and what nuance is being picked up? Is it metal, non-metal mineral, miraculous, a quarry, a beer-vessel or something else?
Meanwhile, just to show I too can find dubious reconstructions, here’s a pretty western interpretation of Hermopolitan cosmology, by an Egyptologist who actually died the year your book was published, 1916. The challenge is to spot the goddess Nut, the god Shu, the metal firmament, cosmic ocean upper or lower, and the Bark of Re sailing on top of it. Or any of them, really.
Hi Jon,
I have an overall view God that God uses believers to accomplish his goals. So, He used the love for Him and the hard-work driven by faith that biblical authors, translators and transcribers used to get us the bible. Thus, I, as a practice, defer to translators in these type of matters and assume that God used them to, “get it right”. In my apologetic studies I’ve learned that translators and transcribers were serious people who fully understood the seriousness of their respective tasks. Could they they have been influenced by the Greeks, possibly. But in a way where they were far off God’s intended meaning? I’m not sure so sure.
Also, firmamentum came from Jerome, who translated the OT into Latin from Hebrew while in Alexandria at around 400 AD, so I’m not sure how much Greek influence he was under.
Can I just say — I admire the panache with which @Christy has renamed this thread after splitting it!
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Thank for the illustration!
In this illustration, the Barque/Bark/Barge is imagined sailing along an endless looping river high up in the mountain range… circling the entire (presumably flat) Earth. The barge is shown with a nearly round white sail, in the upper left hand side. And of course, the objects hanging from strings are planets and stars.
I’m not sure any Egyptian artist ever presented an image like this … but it is certainly food for thought! In this version, the “heavenly ocean” is a “heavenly river”, and the river is being shown lower than the “roof” (the firmament?) of the world. I’m not sure this image was ever considered correct.
I’m not really sure what your post is trying to say. So I thought I would get clarification from this site below. I found it to be quite impressive!!!
Below is a lengthy section on Egyptian literature and a brief note below that on the Greeks.
At the link, there is also a long treatment on the Hebrew view. I haven’t had a chance to read that section yet, but I did notice a lot of references to rabbis.
At the very least, the Egyptian references the site uses seem modern enough!
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Egyptian Literature
The ancient Egyptians had a strong sense of symmetry and balance. A sky above meant that there must be a sky below. Each god had his goddess. Heaven was an ocean that paralleled the earthly ocean. The sun sailed in a ship across the heavenly ocean. They believed that there was a nocturnal ocean beneath the world on which the sun would sail at night. Boats have been dug up around the Great Pyramid so the king would have a boat to sail on the heavenly ocean.
The Pyramid Texts are the oldest Egyptian writings. They are very short, and are mainly concerned with the destiny of the dead in order that they might dwell in the sky like the gods. They could journey with the sun-god in his ship, or live in the fields of the Blessed, the Field of Food-Offerings, or the Field of Iaru. There are many utterances that have been written on the Pyramids. Here are some excerpts from the texts about their view on heaven (Faulkner 1969).
Set the rope aright, cross the Milky Way(?), smite the ball in the meadow if Apis! Oho! Your fields are in fear, you izd-star, before the Pillar of the Stars, for they have seen the Pillar of Kenzet, the Bull of the sky, and the Ox-herd is overwhelmed before him. Ho! Fear and tremble, you violent ones who are on the storm-cloud of the sky! He split open the earth by means of what he knew on the day when he wished to come thence (Utterance 254).
The king takes possession of the sky, he cleaves its iron (Utterance 257).
Stand up, remove yourself, O you who do not know the Thicket of Reeds, that I may sit in your place and row over the sky in your bark, O Re, that I may push off from the land in your bark, O Re. When you ascend from the horizon, my sceptre will be in my hand as one who rows your bark, O Re. You mount up to the sky, you are far from the earth, far from wife and kilt (Utterance 267).
If you wish to live, O Horus in charge of your staff of justice, then you shall not slam shut its door leaves before you have taken the king’s double to the sky (Utterance 440).
From these utterances one learns that there is a heavenly ocean with gates that keep the waters in, and the sun travels by boat across this ocean. There is a parallel underworld ocean and sky.
In utterance 257 the word for “iron” is better translated “bronze,” (Faulkner 1991, 80) which indicates that heaven was made of hard metal. Mercer (1952, 2:142) takes this as a figurative sense meaning “hardness” or “firmness.”
There are a number of drawings on Egyptian walls that explain their view of the world. In the Cenotaph of Seti I at Abydos there is a drawing of the universe on the ceiling in the sarcophagus chamber (Keel 1978, 32, 389). Shu, the god of the air, holds up Nut covered with stars. The sun is born again each morning from Nut’s birth canal, and is swallowed by her mouth at dusk which leads to the underworld. The underworld is both in heaven and under the earth. Those whose souls were lighter than the feather of righteousness could continue on to heaven while the others would be punished in pits of fire. The sun is drawn as a winged disk, and right beside it is written:
The majesty of this god [the sun god] enters the world of the dead through her mouth. The world of the dead is opened when he enters into it. The stars follow him into her and come out again after him, and they hasten to their place (Keel 1978, 32).
In a much later drawing from Ptolemy IX there are two heavens (Ibid., 34, 389). The lower heaven contained the moon while the upper one contained the sun. The Tuat is surrounded by the earth. Sometimes the earth is identified with the underworld. The Egyptian word for earth, t, and the Hebrew xra can designate the upper surface of the earth as well as the interior underworld (Keel, 35; Psalms 7:5, 44:25, 63:9).
A papyrus from the New Kingdom pictures the sky as a heavenly ocean on which the sun sails in its special boat. In the boat is Maat with a feather on her head sitting before the falcon-headed sun god. Maat symbolizes world order (Ibid., 36, 389).
There is a text that states that there are two heavens. There is the heaven that is above, and the heaven that is in the underworld on which the sun’s boats float. The text says:
(Thus) thou shalt be in thy shrine, thou shalt journey in the evening-barque, thou shalt rest in the morning-barque, thou shalt cross thy two heavens in peace, thou shalt be powerful, thou shalt live (ANET, 7).
Greek Literature
In ancient Greek literature heaven was described in similar terms as in the OT. Homer describes heaven several different ways. In Iliad heaven is described as calkeos (brass), and polucalkos (solid brass; LCL, 17:425, 5:504). The Odyssey also describes heaven as sidhreos, meaning “iron” (LCL, 1:2,3). According to Liddell and Scott (1857, 1068), the Greek heaven was like “a concave hemisphere resting on the verge of earth, with an opening in it, through which the peak of Olympus stretched upward into pure ether. It was upborne by the pillars of Atlas” (Odyssey 1:54).
http://www.bibleandscience.com/bible/books/genesis/genesis1_firmament.htm