This is intriguing - can you point me to where I could find access or images of these diagrams from the ancients? I’m afraid I’m ignorant of any such extant diagrams?
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It doesn’t matter what we call it. The question is what did the ancient Hebrews know. I suggest the diagrams we have show what the Hebrews believed about their world.
That can’t be shown if what you mean by “true” is factually correct, or as some say “scientifically accurate”. And any mapping from a ancient, not accurate conception of reality to modern understanding is really meaningless.
If you limit inspiration to theological truth then the physical details don’t matter and can be incorrect.
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They have been recently posted here before your recent return. I will see if I can find them again.
Edit: The only one I could find quickly was the Egyptian cosmology, which derives from the Sumerian.
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Appreciated, but this is a top-down map that includes various cities in ancient Babylon and other geographic features, I don’t think this has much relevancy to the question of how even the Babylonians actually or literally perceived the universe/heavens/earth, much less ancient Israelites, no?
Or did I misunderstand?
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The British Museum sidebar commentary on that webpage can be expanded, and that touches on some worldview context. I have not delved into ANE archeology enough to assess anything for myself, but am interested in finding out more.
- Gen 7:11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened.
- Gen 8:2 The fountains also of the deep and the windows of heaven were stopped, and the rain from heaven was restrained;
Magma pushes up from the great deep and causes the windows of heaven to be opened. A volcanic eruption can cause tons of water to be sent up into the atmosphere and then rain down.
I acknowledge the original audience but believe scripture also speaks to us.
Its not a solid dome in the sky. There are multiple things referred to as heaven. Firmament (yes, solid rock), heaven of heavens, etc. Heaven is the dwelling place of God who is everywhere. He is all things and in all things, just not in imaginary solid domes in the sky.
If nothing else it should help avoid claiming things for scripture that it doesn’t say.
In Genesis 1 it helps grasp the point of “there was evening, there was morning”, though it’s hardly critical.
And that imposing modern worldviews can do the same.
Also about why, which again is a little clearer if you grasp the ancient view, but again hardly critical.
There are some Psalms that don’t make good sense without knowing this, but again it isn’t critical.
Interesting question.
Hi Roymond,
In my previous question, to be honest I also apply my “later worldview” (rotating spherical earth and day&night happen simultaneously).
Because I am not the guy who holds that all text in the Bible is God’s Word, so I don’t push my “worldview” in order to fit with the text I read. Even I don’t push it that “it was evening and it was morning” means : at the same time the earth has its first evening and morning.
So, when I see that my worldview cannot be applied to Gen 1:1-5, then my conclusion: Gen 1:1-5 is not talking about time. As a whole, to me, the texts just mean that God creates in sequential order.
But if for example, my current worldview is “the earth is flat, celestial body moving around the earth, the earth not moving at all”, then most likely I will say that Gen 1:1-5 is talking about time 
.
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I “critiqued” the second diagram; I attacked the last one as sheer nonsense.
That someone can seriously post such bizarre nonsense is indicative that a little knowledge is dangerous: it lets people make associations that not only have no basis in the text but are contrary to it.
Not really. A good way to address this is to ask what a person back then would have drawn if you asked for a sketch of the cosmos. An Egyptian would have sketched Geb as the ground, Nut as the sky, Shu as the air and wind, and so on, with some details depending on where that particular Egyptian lived. A Sumerian would have drawn something like this:
though as I recall it there was a “heaven of clouds and flying creatures” for a total of four levels of heaven. Later Sumerians would have had two diagrams, the above one as what we would call religious, the other astrological (they and the Babylonians at some point went heliocentric!). Other later (religious) diagrams would have shown up to seven heavens [going by memory: clouds/birds, moon, sun, planets, stars, lesser heavenly beings, chief deity] arranged as “crystal spheres”. It’s interesting that they had no trouble with one cosmology for the doings of the gods and another for the movements of things we can see (“visible and invisible” is a summary of “all things that exist” that goes back long before the Nicene Creed).
That could go as a motto in a bakery. 
I’m aware of three: the Egyptian version (which Dr. Walton makes use of), the Sumerian “religious”, and the Sumerian astrological. The Egyptian one is this:
I’m not up to date on the archaeology, but last I knew there weren’t any complete examples of the Sumerian ones, so any diagrams purporting to be one of those will be to a significant degree reconstructions based on texts rather than images. All the rest are to my best knowledge reconstructions based on text (and the assumption that all the ancient near eastern views were similar).
Absolutely.
The top one is the best, the third also has some good points – plus a nice set of verses to go with it.
Definitely. The truth in the older version is in its spiritual cosmology, not anything material – though that itself is a modern distinction!
And that’s a really hard concept for anyone who has never grappled with the fact that there are different worldviews and that they go far beyond the petty differences some literalists invoke.
Maybe; the connections that far back are sketchy. It’s been too long to remember if the Sumerians regarded the cosmos as made out of their gods; if they didn’t the two are only superficially similar.
Hard to know unless there have been discoveries recently. The important connection would be the bitter water surrounding the earth, thought the fact that Babylon isn’t set at the center suggests they were trying to match actual geography. This is a bit helpful:
There were probably two, possibly three more triangles indicating islands for a symbolic seven or eight.
It’s stylized and partly symbolic, but it doesn’t show the heavens or underworld; it’s a step toward actual maps, not a cosmological sketch.
More nonsense. You’re butchering the scripture message by trying to force it to satisfy the curiosity of twenty-first century first-world humans.
The “windows of heaven” are where snow and rain come from up in or above the sky; they have nothing to do with geology.
It only speaks to us if we let it be what it is, namely ancient literature with an ancient worldview. It does not speak to us by forcing it to fit bizarre attempts to make it talk science.
Not in ancient Hebrew cosmology.
Not in the scriptures.
Debatable.
Rather than just conjecture and make stuff up, try watching some videos by John Walton and/or Michael Heiser, or Tim Mackie and the Bible Project, and learning something.
Concur - that said, I haven’t seen anything yet that would demonstrably show that the ancients (Israel in particular, but any civilizaiton) actually, literally believed in the cosmology as is regularly attributed to them (e.g., rain coming from “floodgates of heaven”) and that they never managed to notice that rain was correlated with rainclouds.
Hence I remain skeptical that the pictures and diagrams we nicely devise that shows “what they believed” is anything more than just woodenly literalizing their poetic language or figures of speech.
- How many pictures in the Hebrew Old Testament have you ever seen?
- What Scriptures in the Hebrew Old Testament do you rely on for what they actually bellieved?
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Obviously none, though I’m asking and open to anyone sharing any actual diagram from any ancient source that gives any credence to the idea that they literally believed these things.
The most obvious is that Elijah realized that rain was coming when he saw the clouds forming… “a little cloud like a man’s hand is rising from the sea… in a little while the heavens grew black with clouds and wind, and there was a great rain…” But I thought Elijah would have thought that rain came from “floodgates in the dome of the sky”, not from clouds?
There’s also the passing observation that “the clouds dropped water” in Judges, the “thick clouds, a gathering of water” in 2 Samuel, “he binds up the waters in his thick clouds” and “he loads the think cloud with moisture” in Job, “thick clouds dark with water” and “the clouds poured out water” in Psalms, “The clouds that bring the spring rain” in Proverbs; the “clouds are full of rain” in Ecclesiastes, “I command the clouds that they rain” from Isaiah, and Zechariah’s “Ask rain from the Lord, in the season of the spring rain, from the Lord who makes the storm clouds and he will give them showers of rain.”
Most relevant about the language used - in Kings and Isaiah (at least), when it is beyond obvious and explicit that they recognized rain coming from the clouds, they still simultaneously used the figure of speech about the “windows of heaven.”
And Malachi (the latest prophet as far as I recall) still uses the “windows of heaven” language even after the numerous obvious examples that all his preceding Biblical authors understood and recognized that rain came from clouds. And in Malachi’s case it is even more likely it was explicitly metaphorical, since he’s talking about pouring our “blessings” (not rain) from these windows in heaven.
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- Momentarily interesting.
- Great! So you would concede, I suppose, to the assertion that a few Hebrews, at least, believed that rain comes from clouds.
- That would seem odd to me. In the past, when someone has asked me “Where are you from?”, historically I have asked: “When?” because I have lived in quite a few places in my life, and I personally find it appropriate to clarify, the state or country where I lived when I came from one of them.
- Be that as it may, here’s what my e-Sword tells me are the only uses of “floodgates in heaven”:
- (Genesis 7:11) In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on the same day all the fountains of the great deep burst open and the floodgates of the sky were opened.
- (Genesis 8:2) Also the fountains of the deep and the floodgates of the sky were closed, and the rain from the sky was restrained;
- So “flowing water” appears to come from “the great deep” and “the floodgates of the sky”. according to the Hebrew author(s) of those verses.
- I’ve long found it intriguing that the first “rainbow” that ever occurred, was the one Noah saw.
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What translation are you using in your e-sword? The literal word used is simply “windows of heaven” (אֲרֻבֹּ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם), “floodgates” is an interpretation/translation choice. But the very same phrase “windows of heaven” (אֲרֻבֹּ֥ת הַשָּׁמַ֖יִם) is also used in 2 Kings 7:2 & 19, and Malachi 3, and the similar phrase “windows of the ‘heights’” (אֲרֻבּ֤וֹת מִמָּרוֹם֙) is used in Isaiah 24, right at the same time that they without doubt also recognized that rain comes from clouds.