Hi Tim - I’ll try… sorry to hog space here.
(1)(4) “Waters above the heavens” are fine if clouds are the waters, of course. The “sky” from top to bottom is what separates them from sea (definition of firmament). Blueness is indeed, however, one reason (even in ancient times, inconsistently) for talking about stone up there - though they may have meant colour, rather than solidity. In Mesopotamia the lowest heaven was jasper (clear/yellow), then blue lapiz, then a couple of others I’ve forgotten in red, etc. Water’s only blue when it reflects the blue sky, so a mental connection doesn’t seem inevitable.
(2)(5) English “Firmament” is certainly “firm” (except in “Old Man Adam and his Chillun”, when it ain’t nothin’ but a fancy word for water!) but is a translation, of course, which coloured the issue in the west early on. Septuagint “stereoma” preceded it, and also means “firm” - but was, of course written within the much later world of Aristotelian astronomy.
The “raqia” root means “something stretched out”, or sometimes “beaten out” to cover something. Etymologically the root can link to metal, but etymology is a dangerous tool and context and usage is more important. One poetic Bible passage talks of the heavens “stretched out like a tent”, which has the “stretching” rather than the “beaten metal” in mind. But you have to ask if the writer thought the sky was cloth, or if he thought it was God’s sacred tabernacle, or if he was just being a poet. He wasn’t thinking of a metal shell, though.
So “expanse” is not “nothing” - even the Egyptian air god Shu is a “something” stretching up to support Nut. “Expanse” then isn’t a great translation, but we don’t have a word for something-stretched-out.
Incidentally, our own English word “sky” derives from “cloud”. Interesting implications about our own beliefs if etymology governs things, and with translations of Genesis!
(3) I agree - and in fact, I think it may be one source of the problem: they describe a temple in temple archtecture terms, and temples have roofs (or tabernacles have fly-sheets, as above). The word used for “lights” in Gen 1 for another example, is the same one often used for the lamps (and nothing else) in the tabernacle in Exodus. That doesn’t mean they believed materialistically that the sun and moon were branches on a menorah, any more than the Egyptians believed you could go to some viewpoint where the sky looked like a naked lady.
The buzz-word in Owen Barfield’s book is “participation” - where things correspond at some deep level of reality - perhaps like a strong Reformed view of bread and wine truly “being” the body and blood of Christ, only spiritually and through faith.
(6) My main issue in this is that reading back Post-Enlightenment worldviews back into Genesis stops us thinking ourselves into their hugely different mindset, so that we badly misunderstand the text.Until folks like Walton and Beale, the temple imagery that’s key to Genesis 1 and unlocks much else in the Bible just didn’t register in the arguments about whether it was “right” (creationists) or “wrong” (scientists). Though Cosmas pretty uniquely discovered it in the 6th century, and then took it too literally!
So a the very term “geocentrism”, as usedback in the Copernican debate, already has that scientific “view from nowhere” bias. Genesis 1 is geocentric (though theocentric before that) in the sense that its point of reference is earth, just as the Babylonians only put Babylonia on their world map. Both put the world near the bottom of things, “things” being primarily a spiritual category.To assume that they therefore had a concept of a geocentric universe that they taught in schools, and would gratefully have received correction from Galileo is anachronistic.
A comparison would be reading about the Australian aboriginal “Dreamtime” worldview and trying to understand it, rather than dismiss it as “primitive and stupid.” You soon realise that saying they believe in flat earth tells you less than nothing about their world. The Hebrew worldview is probably a little easier for us, which is good because it forms the basis of our religion. You can’t apply Scripture rightly to our world unless you’ve got a reasonable idea of what it meant in its own.
PS - Columbus: absolutely right. For any visiting skeptics, the date for near universal acceptance of round earth was closer to 300 BC rather than AD. Of Christian writers only Lactantius (probably on anti-philosophical grounds) and good old seafarer Cosmas (for a mixture of reasons) wrote about a flat earth.