- KJV. You used the term “floodgates in the dome of the sky”. If I had known that you wanted the Hebrew words for “floodgate” and “of the sky”, I could have gone to the trouble of getting the Old Testament with Strong’s Numbers database to answer your question differently.
- Quibble, quibble.
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I’m confused where you got “flowing water” came from the “floodgates in the sky” in Genesis… Even though Genesis uses the language of “floodgates of the heavens” (however it is translated) being opened, the immediate result of said floodgates/windows opening was that “rain (גֶּ֖שֶׁם) fell on the earth,” not that “flowing water” came out of said floodgates??
A case can be made that v. 5 is introducing the idea of time, at least as we know it.
That’s an element of both the literary types that constitute the first Creation story, both the temple one and the royal one – they depict YHWH-Elohim as deity and as king, the one systematically building a temple for Himself, the other systematically establishing a kingdom for Himself. Thus while the text means more than that, it does mean at least that much.
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I wish I had a reference for this, but it might interest you that the church father Origen delineated seven different meanings of “the Word of God”, starting with Christ Himself, then statements in the scriptures where it is plainly stated that God is speaking, on down the line to sermons given by presbyters. IIRC there were three different levels in the scriptures, something like “word from God”, “word about God”, and then everything else such as things kings said. Things weren’t binary back then, they allowed for gradations even within scripture – making it so the statements “The scriptures are the word of God” and “the scriptures contain the word of God” both true, just in slightly different senses of the meaning of “word of God”.
There are the images they themselves drew, the Egyptian one being the only complete one (as far as I know, though I think it would have been a pretty big deal if a complete one from Akkad or Babylon had been found!). And when writings say that the sun rides his chariot across the sky in the same kind of context where we would be making cosmological statements it’s pretty clear that that was what they believed.
It has to do with the way they viewed reality; John Walton has a good point that the material from which things are made was not ultimate reality to them (hard as that may be to grasp for us modern materialists), what we call material was to them an expression of personal actions by heavenly powers, i.e. gods and their servants who were not material. Think of it this way: we see nature naked, as the real stuff existence is made of, but they saw nature essentially as clothes for a reality that was spiritual. To a large degree anything material was not just lesser but was baggage for creatures made with it, but even we humans were primarily spirits (an idea that popped up among the Greeks and eventually the Gnostics with various twists to it) trapped in material bodies.
And this makes sense! As someone else here pointed out, those diagrams are summations of how humans actually experience existence: when we look at the horizon from a roughly flat surface, we see a circle; when we look up, we see a dome; when we pay attention to water, it flows downhill eventually to the sea; etc. The only thing not so obvious is the idea that the universe was basically water that had to be pushed aside to provide solid land, but as far as they could tell the sea had no bottom; add to that the fact that the things that stayed above the water floated and it wasn’t too great a leap to conclude that the earth itself floated on water. Toss in that looking at the stars in the sky was like seeing them on smooth water, and it seems that there is water all around except where it has been pushed away. Then note that the sun “rides” across the sky each day and the logical explanation is that it then travels beneath the world in order to resume its journey each morning.
So that diagram we think is strange is actually a good summation of what humans actually experience. Given that we have an intact example of the Egyptian version, and that the way they talked about reality matches how the other ancient nations talked, the obvious conclusion from those two items is that the rest of them viewed the world in the same way.
This is where flat earthers are illustrative: they are going on their experience of the world as viewed with their senses. Unless you live near a body of water large enough for the “sail effect”, it takes some effort to demonstrate that the earth is after all not flat, that not even lakes or canals are. We just grow up so inundated with basic astronomy and other sciences that we fail to see how such “primitive” views are based on actual human experience.
Consider something Dr. Walton uses as an illustration: we see those diagrams and think, “What is that?!” but if you showed an ancient educated person a copy of the image the Apollo astronauts took of the Earth, they would have the same reaction: “What is that?” Then if you said, “That is the world”, they would have laughed at you – or if they were feeling particularly generous they might say, “Surely that is just poetic; it doesn’t show reality”.
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- Now I’m the one who’s confused. I didn’t know you were going to be such a sticker for accurate terminology.
- Rain “falls”, right? Ever seen rain fall up?
- Liquids, such as water and lava, and smoke flow or don’t; when they flow, they flow from one place to another. Depending on the relative positions of the places that they flow from and flow to, the liquids can flow down, sideways, or up. Here I use the word “flow” because it implies more than “a trickle”, The water from “the great deep” flowed up and the water from the sky flowed down, lot’s of water during The Flood.
- “Simply”? LOL! 699. arubbah
*
- Gee, looks like “window, sluice, lattice, and even chimney” are “interpretation choices”.
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The Egyptian one that’s been posted is from a photo of an actual tenth or eleventh century B.C. temple image; here’s another:
It’s papyrus, but there are other versions on stone (painted; I don’t recall any carved ones though it wouldn’t surprise me). I think this is from a stone version:
This one seems to be depicting the Pharaoh in his task of maintaining/supporting ma’at, order in the cosmos.
They had these in the same way we have things like this:
or this:
Two things going on here: first is that they recognized that rain comes from clouds probably at least by the time of entering the Promised Land and the “windows” were thought to be in play when monsoon-like rains came, i.e. when it was “pouring down rain” as we still say today; second is that it’s a common linguistic phenomenon for ideas once considered real to be retained as metaphor later on after those ideas were recognized as not accurate.
Add to that “at some point”. It’s clear that by the time of the prophets they associated clouds with rain; it’s not clear when they figured that out. I would guess that educated Hebrews knew it by the time of the Exodus, and most Israelites by the time of the united kingdom.
I’ve seen it go sideways. 
This brings to mind a waterfall I once rock-climbed up: at the top it flowed, by seven-eighths of the way to the bottom it was like heavy rain. Thus water can flow from something high and fall in drops near the ground.
Yeah, It gets used of chimneys and bird houses as well. Essentially it’s an opening or passage from one place to another. Most commonly it’s a window, but lattice comes in second.
A point about translation: looking up a word and finding a list of ways it’s translated here and there does not tell what it means; to grasp the meaning you need to take all of those translation possibilities and think in a way that combines them. In this case the common element is an opening/passage, specifically an opening that things pass through, generally but not always things that flow. So technically “אֲרֻבָּה” doesn’t actually “mean” “window”, but that’s what it points to in the right context.
A fun exercise on this for a philosophy course was to define “ship” in a way that covered all its uses as a noun including in compound words e.g. “spaceship”.
Thank you! So why doesn’t a volcano qualify in your view?
I would be interested to see if there was any volcanic eruptions in or around Mesopotamia at the time of the flood. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
A geyser at Yellowstone park. Your walking around on a dormant volcano. 
- Good Lord! You too?
- Geyser
- A geyser is a spring characterized by an intermittent discharge of water ejected turbulently and accompanied by steam. As a fairly rare phenomenon, the formation of geysers is due to particular hydrogeological conditions that exist only in a few places on Earth.
- Rain
- Rain is liquid precipitation: water falling from the sky. Raindrops fall to Earth when clouds become saturated, or filled, with water droplets.
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“Whether or when the great floods of Noah and Gilgamesh actually happened may never be known. A remote possibility overlooked in most discussions about these canonical events, however, is that volcanic activity could have played a role.”
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If so, this is beyond obvious to me that this is symbolic or representative or metaphorical, and this is not how they literally perceived the cosmos, no? Or did ma’at / order collapse and fall down every night when Pharoah went to sleep or every time he went to the bathroom?
In your view, what were the literal Egyptian and ANE cosmologies? It seems to me that while some aspects may have been symbolic, mythical, or metaphorical, the essentials of a flat earth under a dome may have been held as representing the real world.
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Just trying to be helpful.
BTW, BDB is one of my regular sources.
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Because a volcano is not in the sky.
And it’s not “my view”, it’s what words mean. It’s also a matter of not demanding that God conform His inspiration to a modern worldview.
“phreatic explosion”
That is such a cool word! Would make a great part of a band name, like “Phreatic Symphony”. There must be a way to have imitation geysers popping off during a concert . . . .
No, that is the way they perceived the cosmos.
LOL – mythology humor. 
No, ma’at was only threatened if Pharaoh skipped participating in the proper temple rituals, or if he did something to anger the gods.
If the Nile floods were sparse, or excessive, in a year, then it was believed that Pharaoh had either not been sincere/devout enough in his temple duties or that he had done something to anger one or more gods. There were actually rituals for each case that had the purpose of finding out where Pharaoh had screwed up. Sometimes Pharaoh would just decide that part of one of the priesthoods had been misbehaving and take the opportunity to purge priests he didn’t like – after all, Pharaoh was rated as a god, and priests were just minions.
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They literally believed that Pharoah walked around, literally, physically, holding up an anthropomorphic deity that was just about 4 times his own height, just as was pictured? Considering I doubt any of the Egyptians ever actually witnessed Pharaoh conducting this responsibility, you wouldn’t consider that said illustration was even a teensy bit symbolic?
Even the Bayeux Tapestry - reflecting medieval sensibilities and which no one doubts records a real, literal, actual history, contains plenty of symbolism and metaphorical images that no one believes the medieval British actually literally believed… but an ancient picture of Pharoah physically holding up a 24 foot deity, his own arms held up by goat-people… this we must interpret woodenly literalistic and we somehow know that this is literally how they perceived reality, with absolutely no metaphor or symbolism involved…??
Remember that they had no border delineating “real world” and “mythical”; every event was both – it wasn’t conceived as possible that there could be actions that did not involve heaven. Also remember that the flat earth surrounded by water and with a dome overhead is just what they observed in daily life.
I don’t claim to know for sure… I’m sure they didn’t view things in the same way we do from our modern scientific perspective, and I suspect they perceived things in a typical anthropocentric, phenomenological manner… probably perceived the earth as being flat (which it was, for all practical purposes of their lives), and the sun revolving around them… but to what extent they actually believed certain things I don’t claim to know… I have to wonder just how much they claimed a complete and total cosmology, or if they simply recognized ignorance on many things. Or, perhaps more likely, these metaphors may well have reflected the basic, mental image that they had in their minds when they thought or spoke about such things, but there’s a difference between a mental image and believing your mental image to reflect the literal physical reality.
As for a dome, they may well have perceived it as such in some form or fashion… (I’m not sure I don’t think of it similarly myself)… I am just skeptical of the enormous detail those diagrams go into in terms of them believing this dome was made of some solid impervious material, held up with literal physical foundations that one could conceivably travel to and touch, with literal, physical doors built in at certain places to let in the rain, etc.
I just remain extremely skeptical that they believed things in the strict wooden categories that we make such neat diagrams about today… I think academic wisdom in these matters would be better demonstrated by remaining a bit agnostic about what they did and didn’t believe about some of these things.
To me it would be as if some erudite scholars put together formal diagrams about “how early Christians perceived the cosmos”, complete with a cosmic throne room floating up in the sky with a large physical throne, and another smaller throne set off to the right of the large one… since Christians proclaimed that Jesus is “sitting at the right hand of God…”
Maybe the early Christians just used metaphorical language for those kinds of things, and for all I know a throne room with two chairs like that are what they perceived in their minds when they thought of it… but that is still a far cry from the idea that they literally believed that to be the literal structure of the cosmos.
Another thought… consider sheol… they believed in sheol, of course, and believed that people when they died went in some form or fashion to sheol… but they obviously perceived this in some kind of spiritual or symbolic or metaphysical manner… they obviously didn’t literally believe that the physical corpse somehow descended through solid earth and went to a physical sheol, as anytime they could go dig up a corpse and see it was still there… so I am extremely dubious that, whatever they thought of sheol, they believed it to be a literal, physical place inside the earth that one could get to if you dig down far enough (if they did, I’d be curious as to why don’t we find great mining networks where the ancients tried to dig down deep enough to go and visit their departed relatives?) Hence I’m extremely skeptical about these nice neat fancy diagrams that show exactly where the ancient Hebrews believed sheol to be.
And again, I wouldn’t have an issue with the real possibility that, when an ancient Hebrew thought about sheol, they had a mental image of some shadowy cavern under the earth (not entirely unlike my mental image of hell)… but this is still categorically different from them literally asserting or believing that sheol was literally, physically down under their feet howmany ever fathoms below, a physical place they could literally physically reach if they simply dug down far enough.