All the arguments you ever wanted to read about ANE raquia, firmament, sky, cosmology

Faith & Science Conversation
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@Jon_Garvey

I think you have gone over the top with your attempt to send the readers in the wrong direction.

First you say, there are no images of domes in Mesopotamia.
Then you say, vaults don’t exist either, because there are no written mentions of domes.
Then when the dust finally clears, and the word “vault” includes domes, but doesn’t require them.
Then you say that you can’t see through firmaments made of jewel stone or other stone!
Yes, and you can’t see through bronze either - - and it isn’t relevant to the exercise.

As your last ditch effort, you start talking about the Firmament as some mystical equivalent to the Temple in the heavens.
Wow… talk about the fire of apologia burning in a man’s belly!

Look, you act as though the firmament is the only instance of the limitations of the world view of the ancient writers… there’s others, and you just want us to forget about them until you can knock those down with special pleading too, one at a time over time.

Job also includes those storehouses of snow and hail. And let’s not even forget the impossible story of Samson killing 3000 by pulling down a temple. Is there a single building anywhere in the ANE that could kill 3000 people by knocking down 2 pillars? The total death count on 9/11 with 3 buildings and 4 planes was about 3000. The total American death count on D-Day was not even 3000. The total death count at Pearl Harbor wasn’t 3000.

I accepted a long time ago that when God inspired literature, he sometimes didn’t spoon feed the writers with the details. Naturally, this is my personal view… and should not be construed as being anything like the BioLogos formal views and statements.

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Ha! Hey, that was pretty good. And I know… I tell jokes to torture my readers!

The point being, is that vaulted is an English word that mostly refers to things that are significantly tall … unusually high … it is not consistently a synonym for Dome.

And as far as “dome” goes, I will be making sure I never throw that word around except when it is warranted. The OT’s view of the sky is that it has a firmament. It could be a flat firmament… a sloped firmament… but by golly, you are right, it doesn’t have to be a Domed Firmament!

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Hi John,

When I said that we all have to accept a vault (to Marty), I only meant we have to accept the idea of a raqia, whatever that is. I only said, “vault” since that’s the translation the NIV uses these days - I’m actually surprised that in their latest harmonizing quest they didn’t change it to, “expanse” (I’m not down on the NIV, it’s actually my daily reading version).

I was wondering if we could make common-sense, Occam’s Razor conclusions from the text alone, and not after reading scholarly books that play to our personal, “vibe” then argue about it in Biologos. So, I perused though 10 or so translations of Genesis 1, including American, British and Jewish. Some things in common:

  • They all have the light created in Day 1 called, “day”.
  • Lights on day 4 were, “in” the raqia.
  • Only 1 version had birds flying, “in” the raqia, and that had a footnote giving the option of, “in the face of”. The rest had birds flying, “below” or “across” the raqia
  • Lights on day 4 were for separating light from darkness and shining light on the earth

Based on those commonalities, I think in the minimum we can safely conclude that:

  1. the raqia is the sky
  2. light of day 1 is referring to sunlight and not some sort of luminescence, since light on earth should come from the luminaries from day 4 per the author, and since the light in day 1 is called, “day” and the darkness called, “night”, and the sun and the moon are made governors of day and night in day 4.

Therefore, the waters after the separation on day 2 have to be above the sky, and can’t be attributed to the clouds. As well, there is an incongruity with light, “created” in day 1 and the sun and moon on day 4. To rebut your claim that the bible elsewhere makes no claim of cosmic waters, consider the following passages (NIV):

  • “When he thunders, the waters in the heavens roar” (Jeremiah 10:13)

  • “When he thunders, the waters in the heavens roar” (Jeremiah 51:16)

  • “Praise him, you highest heavens, and you waters above the skies.” (Psalm 148:4)

So then, it seems as if there is an, even if it’s small, OT motif of water, “in the heavens/above the sky”. Therefore, the OT Hebrews most likely, just based on the OT itself, did have the idea of a cosmic ocean (maybe not boundless), that was probably due to the oral tradition that we know today as Genesis 1, which may or not have been influenced by their neighbors. That being the case, it just make sense that the raqia is solid, since it has to hold up this heavenly body of water.

Since, at least to me, it seems pretty obvious that Genesis 1 refers to a solid sky and cosmic ocean, I have to ask myself, “why has Jon invested so much time and energy trying to show otherwise”. THAT’S why I’ll read that 29 page article, since I really want to know what essential elements of the faith some believe are in danger if one takes the view that, “God, through the author of Genesis 1, used the worldview of the day that happens to contain errors per modern science, to couch His theological lesson.”

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Richard, I think your comment about NIV shows that, even if we avoid the contradictory scholars, the translators don’t, and are bound to slant their word-choices according to what side they come down on. “Vault” is one such extrapolation from a word that, whatever it means, never means that. One general observation is that translators are likely to be more influenced by biblical scholars than by Assyriologists, and there are particular “fashions” in both camps.

In the end we all have to make our choices, and it’s clearly better to do it from as many translations as possible than from one. Unless we just learn Hebrew…

I’m very happy to agree with you that the raqia is the sky. Personally I see good reasons for thinking the writer meant no more or less than that, even to the point of being as flexible as we are in the particular way he uses it at different times: today I flew a kite in the sky, even though when I look at stars in the night sky I have an entirely different thing in mind.

I’ll make no comment on our disagreement on how much water is up there, except to note an interesting point by Poythress (in a different paper, I think!) that Gen 1 is concerned to deal with phenomena that matter to his readers: and it completely fails to deal with clouds or rain, which matter a great deal more than a theoretical cosmic ocean would… unless the firmament is about clouds and rain (I should add that there are numerous biblical references to rain coming from clouds).

I’m interested in your attribution of the light on Day 1 to sunlight, because it seems to commit you to some kind of belief (as far as the story goes) that the sun was there from the start rather than being actually created on Day 4, but hidden from view in some way.

A lot of commentators taking the “framework” position use the light-before-the-sun idea for some kind of spiritual lesson, eg that God can make light even without the sun if he wants, or that v3 refers to the everlasting light surrounding God. That seems spurious to me, though I’m happy to agree with the “framework” idea that day is created on Day 1, and the sun to rule/populate it in Day 4, as far as its literary purpose goes.

But when I read that the early pre-philosophical Greeks based their word for the upper air on the word “light”, I remembered my childhood mystification at being told that the sun makes the sky light blue, when intuitively (like the moon) it shines on its own.

It seems to me that phenomenologically there is no necessary link between the sun and daylight, which would of course make the Gen 1 account, if it separated the two, just as erroneous scientifically as it would by positing a solid raqia. But that is only significant if the account were “ancient science”, and I don’t believe it is. Phenomenologically speaking, it would be stating what is observed, without any theory (but with the theological lessons of the poetic framework, which are still of value).

That brings me to your point about my time and energy. It’s certainly true that I see pitfalls in the attribution of scientific error to Scripture, as outlined in detail by Poythress. Peter Enns is an example - it’s not long before he extends the scientific fallibility of Scripture to theological fallibility, built on the same theory of “incarnational inspiration”.

But at least as much as that is the conviction of the scientist (or medic) in me that says that faulty understandings tend to end in faulty conclusions: truth tends to resolve apparent conflicts simply. I simply found that once I read the relevant texts in the Scriptures carefully I could find neither a cosmic ocean, nor a solid firmament, and that the texts made much more sense without them. It’s the same kind of motivation that would make me argue against the Creationists’ “vapour canopy” if any of them still believed in it, and that makes me argue against the concept of a “fallen creation” on the same grounds.

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@Jon_Garvey

Are you and I in agreement on this issue of the “Light of the Sky”!!! I think we are … .I think.

For me, your key sentence is: “It seems to me that phenomenologically there is no necessary link between the sun and daylight, which would of course make the Gen 1 account, if it separated the two, just as erroneous scientifically as it would by positing a solid raqia.”

This has been my position - - that the ancients saw the sky as a separate source of light … that merely regularly correlated with the Sun as a source of light. And so for the ancient writers, it was perfectly acceptable for the first 3 days to have daylight … even without the sun.

But something tells me you would reject this particular interpretation… but why reject it when you actually implicitly propose it? Where am I misunderstanding what I think your thoughts are?

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Nope -quite agree, though it would have been a simple assumption from observation, not a matter of theory.

That means that in the context of Gen 1, it’s saying “God made the day, and then the sun to govern it” rather than, “Look, you could take away the sun and it would still be light.”

It’s just the same logic as that which makes the land appear with vegetation., and the animals and man to occupy it - it’s not a statement about the scientific order of creation, but of domains and their denizens.

What surprises me is that so few commentators seem to consider the possibility that this is a natural way to see the matter, despite its occurring in ancient Greek thought quite clearly.

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George

Something I should have added - our tendency is to think that the above means the Genesis writer thought of the sky as some light, and the sun as some more light. A bit redundant, in other words. But in fact, the function of the sun and moon are only partly concerned with illumination, but even more to do with “government”, notably serving as signs to mark seasons, days and years, as v14 says.

That astronomical function was vital both to the agricultural cycle, knowing when to plant, reap, breed animals etc, and also to the ritual life. We’re separated from the first by our urban lifestyle (and ultimately because the astronomical cycle has been mapped to calendars, clocks and so on so we don’t appreciate it), and from the second by our modern inability really to get the idea of ritual events like new moons, solstices and so on. But that regulated the lives of ancient peoples, including the Hebrews. In other words, the sun and moon may be lights, but they also, in the view of Genesis, represent the lawlikeness of God’s providence.

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Hi John,

Just time for a quick reply.

I agree that Genesis 1 is a phenomenological description of the world, just as the 3-tiered universe is. Even if there was no ANE literature influencing the G1 author, the Hebrews still observed generally the same topography and I would think have generally come up with the same worldview as their neighbors. If God was inspiring a different account then that would have been made evident, which it was not.

For me, the author calling light, “day” then creating the sun to govern the day AND to provide light on earth is telling me that this author saw the sun as the source of light on earth. Our differences lie in the fact that I’m willing to live with the inconsistency/contradiction between days 2 and 4, and you don’t seem to be able to. As Denis Lamoureux has written, ANE cultures had more than one creation myths that contradicted one another and were inconsistent within themselves. Ancient people were able to see contradictions, they just lived with them. That’s how I see the bible as well - there were inconsistencies that the Hebrews, in the non-essential elements of scripture, lived with.

I’m no ANE expert but I believe that at least the Assyrians believed in a cosmic ocean, maybe you know more. If there was an ANE motif of a cosmic ocean and we have a sky with waters above it, isn’t that a cosmic ocean?

I don’t hold to any form of inerrancy, so I don’t need to explain away clear inconsistencies and /or scientific inaccuracies in scripture and am equally down on concording. I don’t see inerrancy as a biblical concept or one evident in the teachings of the early church fathers. It’s more modern and probably arose to combat Muslims who found, “contradictions” in the bible. I don’t see any essential elements of the faith washed away with inerrancy, rather I see it causing needless headaches.

All that said, I plan on finishing your article this weekend, reading it with an open mind. :slight_smile:

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Hmmm how can Jon and I agree?

Let’s test the waters (No pun intended).

I believe the Genesis writer thinks the sky can be a SOURCE of light.

Which to me is the final nail in the coffin that the Genesis writer had any idea of what he was talking about…

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Richard - likewise briefly.

There’s a saying that if you find a contradiction in the data, you should seek a category distinction. I find that in the literary intentions of Gen 1, though I disagree with you that in the particular instance of “light” there is even an issue. This is how one answers George’s radical “errantism” in the previous post. His very use of the term “source of light” as distinct from “reflected source of light” or “scattered source of light” is entrenched in a restricted modern scientific mindset. Phenomenologically (as you and I agree) the sky is a source of light. End of (until one starts theorizing on how it provides light, or where the photons happened to be before they reached our eyes from the sky - not their concern at all).

The Babylonians (and presumably the Assyrians, whose culture was interlinked) certainly believed in an ocean - marratu - it’s often referred to nowadays as “cosmic”, but that is an anachronism because they had no concept of cosmos (another Greek innovation) - so they never described it as “cosmic”. As Horowitz shows, that ocean just wasn’t “up there” at all - it surrounded the “land” on all sides for some indeterminate distance. It looks pretty similar (on the “Babylonian world map”) to the ocean surrounding the continental mass on mediaeval mappae mundi - where there is no question of an ocean above, because the mediaeval system is Ptolemaic.

One problem with continuing to call the ANE version a “cosmic ocean” is that we think of “cosmos” as “three dimensional universe”, so that water simply replaces “outer space” in our thinking. It did too in the thinking of the Victorian orientalists who coined the term and drew the pictures, but it didn’t in ANE thinking, because they had no concept of cosmos (or even “world” as a geophysical entity), of “nature”, of infinity, of air as a substance, or of a world swimming like a submarine. To them, an ocean always has a surface (as does the tehom in Genesis).

The apsu was a separate underground source of the freshwater springs, perhaps with some ultimate links to the ocean. But what is entirely missing is any description of an ocean above the sky. That’s been my argument all along - if it’s in the Bible, they invented it out of whole cloth despite the worldviews surrounding them, not by imitation.

As to inerrancy, I have had a set of the Ante-Nicene Fathers on my bookshelf for 25 years, and have read them and used them in research. I’m surprised (if you have too) that you don’t find evidence for “any form of inerrancy” in them. Here’s a link to a small selection of quotes.

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@gbrooks9

Hi John,

Yes, I misspoke on inerrancy. While I’m down on even the term, “inerrancy”, especially the way most people use it, as, “no errors in the bible”, I do hold to biblical infallibility (and authority), and some might call that a form of inerrancy.

I’m holding my opinion for now on the so-called, “ANE cosmic ocean”. Maybe you’re right and there isn’t one. If so, I’ll have to think about that.

We actually agree on a lot, but not on the sky being the source of the light. If there was an intended framework, then the light on day 1 is populated by its luminaries on day 4 - "and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” (v.15a). We don’t need to wonder what the light on day 1 was, it was explained to us in day 4. There is no inconsistency with what the author is trying to get across, that God formed the world to have a sky that held it’s light-giving luminaries - it’s obviously not meant to accord to science.

If there was no concept of a cosmos, then the light in day 1 cannot be merely the, “concept” of light, it must be light that can be observed on the earth. Along with that, the light is called, “day”, and the darkness, “night” in day 1, which ends at verse 5b with, “And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.” The source of this light we find out in day 4 are the luminaries. Yes, they have other functions of course, but one of them is still, “to give light on the earth”. In addition, ancient people were plenty smart enough to realize that the sun was the source of daylight. I’m sure they completely understood structure of G! and never thought to themselves, “I wonder why there was light before the sun?”.

I’ll check out those quotes when I finish the article.

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@Richard_Wright1, I disagree with you on this particular point. I think Genesis is the evidence that they really had no idea why the sky was so bright … like an incandescent, glowing stone…

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I did read the article, as well as Poythress’ follow-up giving his own interpretation of Genesis 1, but I’ll hold off on my opinions until you’ve had a chance to read it, too. I did have a couple of quick observations, though. First, I’ll say that I greatly respect Poythress, and his opinions always should be given serious consideration. From the article:

My point is that there seems to be some common patterns. Among these patterns is the idea
that Gen 1 includes pieces of erroneous ancient cosmology.7 (Footnote 7 lists Enns, Lamoreux, Walton, et.al., as examples.) … We want only to show that readers of Gen 1 and readers of the modern writings need to guard against the myths, in order to head off misunderstandings.

Poythress does not criticize all metaphorical interpretations (vehicle-cargo, in his parlance) of Genesis 1, although he doesn’t seem a fan of the above authors. The main dispute, as Poythress himself admits, still comes down to one’s definition of inerrancy:

The vehicle-cargo approach is correct in implying that the Bible does not immediately correct all possible false assumptions about cosmology, biology, or any other field of specialized knowledge. The dispute is not about that, but about what it means for communication to be truthful. It can be truthful if it does not speak about such false assumptions. It cannot be truthful if it actively endorses the assumptions or clearly presupposes them.

Plenty to discuss in that alone.

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Richard

I’ll happily go with the “infallibility” word over “inerrancy” - I should probably have said I’m a William Tyndale man rather than a Lausanne one - all these new-fangled formulations!

I’m not over-precious about the source of light either, given the literary formulation of Gen 1 - it’s just that it’s often presented as a huge difficulty, when it seems to me pretty intuitive phenomenologically. Likewise, for whatever reason one may give, I agree that “light” must be light observed on earth - John Walton’s idea that the key notion is the progress of time on Day 1 (ie, a functional alternation of day/night) seems pretty useful too.

Likewise (in a spirit of sweet agreement!) it seems to me obvious that Genesis made perfect sense in original context, rather than that the writer, or his sources, were simply self-contradictory and too stupid to notice.

Incidentally I eventually found a complete text version of Horowitz online (thus undercutting Glipsnort’s used copy!), but the format is almost unreadable except for reference purposes. I did, however, find one interesting example of how carefully we need to read these texts. H. points to a not-infrequent reference in the Mesopotamian literature to rain coming from the “teats” or “breasts” of heaven.

He supposes that implies some kind of watery reservoirs were believed to exist (the idea of teats plugged into a cosmic ocean above sounds grossly imaginative!). But he cites one text in which these teats form a poetic parallel with rain-clouds as the source of rain. That suggests either that clouds are a metaphor for breasts, or maybe that breasts are the metaphor and clouds the literal item (in which case the imagery would be about heaven’s care and nurture of the world through rain).

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To that I agree.

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Hi George.

I think the evidence from the text speaks for itself. Let’s start with day 1. (verses 3-5)

“And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.”

So, in this G1 day, God creates light, separates this light from darkness, then names the light, “day” and the darkness, “night”. Immediately following that, there was evening and morning, the first day. Doesn’t it seem obvious that this evening and morning were only made possible from the light and darkness that were just created?

Now, day 4 (verses 14-18a)

“And God said, “Let there be lights in the vault of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark sacred times, and days and years, and let them be lights in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth.” And it was so. God made two great lights—the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars. God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth, 18 to govern the day and the night, and to separate light from darkness.”

If there was, as I believe, an understood framework to G1, then God created light in day 1, separated day from night (the first of the 3, “separations”), both of which he created in day 1, then made luminaries, which he put in the sky, to govern the day and night. So, the sun, which governs the day, governs the light, since per day 2 they are the same. Similar with darkness and night, they are the same per day 1, and God calls on the moon to govern the night. To put the point over the top is, "God set them in the vault of the sky to give light on the earth. So light is from the luminaries, the light of the day from the governor of day, the sun.

Jon and I agree that the descriptions in G1 are written from a phenomenological perspective. Based on the text, though, the ancient Hebrews did seem to think that, DAYlight anyway, was from the sun. And I don’t think it’s that much a stretch to think that someone 4,000 years ago would come to that conclusion,

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Interesting stuff. I’ve known that the OT authors did understand that rain is from the clouds, so I just assumed that the heavens, to them, held some kind of reservoir that replenished the clouds when God wanted it to rain. The, “flood-gates” were only used for deluges like the Genesis flood. Not all that precise, for sure, but 21st century precision probably is not something we should look for or expect in the bible, I’m sure you would agree.

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I would agree. We in our concrete jungles often lose touch with the sunrises, sunsets, and movement of the stars, but to early mankind, they knew the first light of dawn, and had no doubt as to the source of light being the sun.
The statement of the moon ruling the night sort of is puzzling however, as they knew the moon cycles well also, and knew it was out during the day as well, though I guess they knew it was secondary to the sun in that case, and only ruled when the sun was absent.
Poetic talk.

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@Richard_Wright1

Yes, I saw this part of your discussion in an earlier post. I am not very moved by the hypothesis.

I think if the Genesis writer wanted to say the “light of the sky” was from the Sun… I think he would have said God created the Sun on Day 1. And, my goodness, that would have saved us all a lot of time!

But I think the reason “light” comes… and then on the 4th day we have the Sun … is because the Genesis writer might have had a metaphysical reason to think the sky had it’s own light. Let’s not forget the possible connections to “light” and “the divine”. In any case, I do not think the Genesis writer thought the Sky’s light came from the sun.

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Hi George,

Well, here’s why I think that is the case:

If this, “framework” of G1 was undersrood, then the author would have had to have the luminaries come in later. As an aside, I like the, “3 columns of 3” representation better, with a middle, “Separations” column.