Interesting, Thanks for the information, St.Roymond.
I read one of your response which mention Michael Heiser.
So I check his youtube channel. I watch one of his video which I find quite interesting:
Have we Translated Genesis 1 Wrong All this Time?!
I have said it before but as a child I remember looking at the blue sky and thinking it was a solid blue dome. This was before TV (and we didn’t go to the motion pictures) and I really didn’t have any other reference. Sort of like the ancient Hebrews don’t you think? So their thinking of a physical firmament isn’t really that hard to accept is it?
While they might associate rain with clouds as that corresponds with what they would see in a water fall, how to explain snow or hail? With no conception of freezing temperatures overhead it had to come from someplace didn’t it?
I am sure the Hebrews had experience with the sensation of motion when in a boat or riding a animal so when they stood on the flat (in their experience) solid ground it was obvious that it wasn’t moving. And since the ground doesn’t move then it is obvious the sun/moon/stars moved around us.
A metaphor represents something when there is a known something else. If the underling something is unknown then the metaphor should be taken as what was actually known.
They had experience digging mines but they were very shallow so they knew they couldn’t dig down deep enough to reach sheol.
If I may, this is a perfect example of what I’m skeptical about. I don’t think the ancients (Hebrew, Babylonain, Egyptian, Hittite, whatever) are quite as mentally dull as one would need to be to fall for such reasoning…
Whatever they did or didn’t understand about freezing and melting, we would still have to think that they never made the connection that snow or hail only happened to occur when there were clouds overhead (what an amazing coincidence!). They never happened to notice that hail never fell from the sky on bright clear sunny days? That hail only fell when there were clouds in the sky?
I could potentially imagine a modern young person failing to notice such things when they have >8 hours of screen time a day and they might never look out the window at the natural world. But before TV, when people did a lot more looking at the sky and nature than we do today, I simply find it preposterous that the ancients would have never noticed a correlation between clouds and hail, or between clouds and snow, just as they obviously did between clouds and rain.
But what about my other point?
The description of a flat earth that does not move matches what they could observe. So that much isn’t a metaphor.
And just because a metaphor was used later when the reality was actually known doesn’t mean they knew what was under the metaphor originally.
I actually dreamed about this last night. 
They had a different conception of “literally”. For the ancients it was no problem believing that Pharaoh was both boating on the Nile while upholding the universe – so in their worldview your question is based on a false dichotomy, specifically that Pharaoh in his physical self could not be doing something at the same time that he was doing something different in his spirit self, for that matter that Nut could be having a conversation with Ra next to Lake Moeris while still being the sky.
This is one aspect of why I point out every now and then that the worldview of the ancient near east is not just different but alien to ours.
It also matches what I observe and how I live my day to day life. When I drive up or down I-95 I don’t account for the fact that I’m “really” travelling in an arc… I think of Wyoming as rectangle, not as a curved section of a sphere. And I love to watch the sun fall below the horizon, especially at sea.
This is simply what we refer to as “phenomenological” language or perception. They perceived the earth as solid, unmoving, and flat, and in any practical sense it was; they perceived the sun moving around the earth, and in any practical sense (just like our sunrise and sunset times) it did.
Whether these common perceptions became part of a cosmology, though, is different. The major question isn’t whether or not they perceived the earth under them to be flat, solid, and unmoving in their daily experiences, or even whether they talked that way… the question is, did they extrapolate from that daily experience and conclude that to be the nature of ultimate/cosmic reality.
The fact that the ground under my feet is unmoving, solid, and flat from every reaosnable local measurement is simply a (true) observation. If I extrapolate from that and conclude that the entire world is unmoving, solid, and flat, particularly in relation to the cosmos, this becomes erroneous.
So the real question is, did they extrapolate from these observational or phenomenological perceptions and attribute the observed qualities to that of the whole?
And my short answer is that I have no idea. I’m only suggesting that we ought not use their examples of poetic, metaphorical, or phenomenological language and think we can conclude from that a discreet, detailed diagram of exactly how they perceived the cosmos.
Which is why I specifically included the word “physically” also! 
In general, no disagreement whatsoever… but it simply furthers my basic point. The Hebrews similarly had such nuanced thinking, and understood some things as physical, and some as spiritual realities, no?
There are all kinds of things that the ancients perceived, described, and the like about their cosmos that they were perceiving spiritually, or in some other non-physical manner, whether metaphorical, symbolic, poetic, spiritual, or the like. My earlier discussion about Sheol is a perfect example. I have no doubt that they believed in a “real” sheol… but I am just as certain they didn’t believe it to be a literally physical place, literally physical in the same manner as the ground they were standing on.
Hence when erudite scholars take ancient concepts that are clearly spiritual, symbolic, or metaphorical in nature, , and make these nice fancy diagrams by forcing a woodenly literal, physical interpretation, showing sheol as these nice literally physical caverns under the surface of the earth… I suspect any ancient Israelite that saw that would get quite the belly laugh.
Imagine if a modern scholar showed a woodenly literalistic diagram of the “Ancient Egyptian beliefs about the physical cosmos” and the diagram showed a physical Pharoah holding up a large physical woman… it would be absolutely laughable, no?
But nonetheless all these diagrams are made showing the ancient Hebrew cosmology, where all their similar symbolic, spiritual, metaphorical, or phenomenological language gets woodenly literalized.
“Sitting at the right hand of God” can be shown to be a metaphor from outside of the scriptures or Christianity.
But the point you’re missing is that these diagrams are not ones we devised, they were drawn by the ancients.
They knew they couldn’t dig that deep, and that if they tried and got close to succeeding they would be punished by whoever was in charge of the underworld.
You’re projecting a materialist mindset onto an ancient worldview. The Hebrews may have been a bit less literal about it than some of their neighbors (who buried people with things they would need in the afterlife) but even those neighbors didn’t view it in materialistic terms. It was more that they thought that existence in one realm had different characteristics than existence in another, so though they would say that the dead literally went to Sheol they would also say of course the body/corpse stayed behind because existence in Sheol wasn’t like existence here. And it wasn’t just their bodies; it’s plain from Egyptian writings that they believed that when they buried someone with a spoon, that physical spoon didn’t actually go to the underworld, but the spoon literally did, just in the form appropriate to the underworld.
And even though they “knew” that Sheol was down in the Earth, they also wouldn’t have tried digging for it because they wouldn’t be able to get there anyway because physical bodies are the wrong sort to enter the underworld.
It may be weird to us to conceive of not just humans but spoons and knives and such having what we would call spirit forms, but to them it was natural – indeed for the most part they regarded the spiritual world as more real, in some cases that the “spirit spoon” was the real one and the physical spoon a sort of shadow (this shows up slightly differently in Plato).
I keep asking for these supposed literal (physical) diagrams drawn by the ancients to show me this… so far all I’ve been given on this page is a top-down geo-political map of Babylon, and the admitted “spiritual” (non-physical) depiction of Pharoah holding up the universe.
I would be HAPPY to be corrected if I’m mistaken… but I’ve searched the internet myself and found nothing, and no one here has seemed to show me anything else.
If there are these supposed diagrams from antiquity written by the ancients showing how these ancient civilizations understood the literal, physical cosmos, I am most ready and eager to learn and to be corrected.
But until I see something more than I’ve seen so far, please forgive me if I remain skeptical.
Please forgive me if I am misunderstanding you… but it seems like you are completely conceding that they understood that the bodies that went to sheol were “spiritual” or of some other kind of existence than physical… and that these spiritual bodies do not have any local, physical existence in our physical cosmos…
But you are still insisting that they perceived sheol itself as a literal, physical place, with a local existence within our cosmos, and not of the same kind of spiritual / other-worldly existence as the bodies that inhabited said sheol?
That’s a fantastic example! He goes to great effort to communicate necessary concepts – he does such a good job in this video I wish I’d had a professor who was that clear . . . not that my professors failed, but they approached it differently in more “grammar geek” ways that described structure and didn’t do much illustrating things the way Dr. Heiser does.
I “knew” everything he said here about the opening of Genesis before I watched this some time back, but I didn’t really get my head around the idea (BTW, loved his “Yes I can, I have a PhD in Hebrew…”) until I dug in after watching this and understood that a noun can function as a verb when it gets a temporal prefix.
But back to Dr. Mike . . . this is a fantastic video:
Given they had no other sources of information why would they not simply accept that “daily experience” as reality. A reality that would apply to the whole.
“phenomenological language” is usually invoked to try to save some version of inerrancy. To me the fact they got some things in a less than scientific correct manner isn’t an error. It is just what they knew at the time and the Holy Spirit wasn’t going to correct them. And as Raymond pointed out over time they did come to a better grasp of reality but retained the language as everyone would know what was meant. And a detailed diagram based on a collection of their writings on cosmology makes sense, to me at least. Especially when you consider the words used to describe that cosmology.
Here is a paper that argues for the three tiered cosmos based on the Hebrew used.
Here are a couple of similar papers by the same author, John R. Roberts, which I was able to view in browser without logging in and downloading.
Some biblical expositors, such as Harris (1999 [1980]), suggest that
mayim mittaḥat lā-ʾāreṣ in Exo20.4 and Deu4.18 refers to the ordinary seas and lakes rather
than to any subterranean waters. However, this exegesis misrepresents the Hebrew syntax.
According to BDB, taḥat means ‘underneath, below’ and in Exo 20.4, Deu 4.18 this word
functions as a preposition. As a preposition taḥat has an object which is lā-ʾāreṣ ‘the earth.’
So, mayim mittaḥat lā-ʾāreṣ means‘ waters underneath/below the earth.’
This paper in part seems to agree with my diagram (second post) suggesting that the great deep is below the earth and is the same as the waters below the heavens.
On Day 1, the radiant light from the great deep (earths core) was shrouded with darkness (dividing the light from darkness) at the surface of the deep (earths surface) as the earth cooled, 4.5 billion years ago.
was - 1961 to fall out, come to pass, become, be
The Spirit of God works at the surface of the deep, working from the inside out. The great deep existed before the waters above the heavens arrived to Earth via the “late heavy bombardment” from roughly 4 to 3.8 billion years ago. Those waters were divided on Day 2. The land was completely covered with water (waters above the heaven) from roughly 4 to 2.5 billion years ago.
The dry land appears above the waters on Day 3, and the Sun appears in (on) the dry land on Day 4. The sun and stars were created before Day 1 and the moon on Day 1 but they were not complete in their purpose for signs seasons, days, years until they could shine on the earth (dry land).
I know, right? Obviously it goes high overhead and comes all the way down at the sides!
Bingo.
Double bingo.
What else could they believe? To you it’s extrapolation, but it was all they had: even if they’d had the scientific method, all the evidence pointed to what they perceived as being the actual reality.
On what basis could they conclude it was erroneous? You have to have reason to think there’s another possibility to even think of such an idea. Everywhere they went in their entire world was the same – flat and unmoving. That was their cosmos, along with the evident dome overhead and the logically surmised underworld that had to exist in order for the sun to get back to the other side of the world to make morning happen again.
The thing is, we have no reason at all to suppose otherwise. That “snow globe” universe was just good science for the time.
No – nothing to the Egyptians at any rate was merely physical. Merely spiritual? Not really; as far as they were concerned spiritual and physical were the appropriate manifestations of the same reality in whichever realm something happened to be. Gods normally lived in the spiritual realm, but when they came to this realm they were physical because that’s what this realm’s nature is.
That understanding of things persisted for millennia. It’s why Jesus’ statement in John 4 is somewhat radical: “God is spirit” suggested that the two realms view had to be modified, that there were entities that didn’t change their form according to which realm they were in but kept their “form” appropriate to the realm they normally dwell in.
On what grounds? We have no evidence at all to support such a view. Significantly, neither did they: the logic was inescapable that the underworld was a real place because the sun on his/its barque or chariot had to pass under the world in order to get back to the other side and make morning happen again. Similarly, being buried in a grave or tomb puts one in the realm of darkness, and since the underworld has neither moon nor stars and if the dead go somewhere it is obviously the underworld.
Again, on what grounds? The only way anyone can tell that such things are “spiritual, symbolic, or metaphorical in nature” in our civilization is because there is distinct literature where things are talked about as things that aren’t spiritual, symbolic, or metaphorical, but there is no ancient literature that doesn’t talk about these things as being real – no such distinction is ever made. So those “Erudite scholars” are just reading the ancient literature as it was written/
But they don’t – the “fancy diagrams” come from the people back then.
There’s no evidence for doing anything else.
The trouble here is that you are drenched with a worldview that sees “spiritual”, “symbolic”, and “metaphorical” as completely different from “physical”, and you’re not making the leap to a worldview where that isn’t true.
One example: a symbol back then wasn’t something that merely stood for something else, it was connected to the something else in a very real way, to the point that a symbol was something that conveyed what it portrayed – e.g., when Paul writes that in baptism we are buried with Christ, he isn’t just talking sentimental imagery, he’s saying that this “symbol” we call baptism actually conveys to us, or perhaps conveys us to, the burial of Christ so that when we are baptized we really are buried with Christ. Paul would snort at you in derision if you suggested it was just a metaphorical connection because in the worldview of the time that would have made no sense, it would have been a declaration that baptism was nothing more than getting wet and maybe thinking about Jesus being buried. Being buried with Christ in baptism was a statement of reality, which can be seen when Paul connects it to the Resurrection: if baptism was merely “spiritual”, it wouldn’t be a guarantee of our resurrections at all!
No – and laughing would have been considered blasphemy; indeed the very suggestion that Pharaoh wasn’t doing that even while he was sitting there having a cup of wine would be a very serious accusation. The investigation of such an allegation would be to check if Pharaoh had been fulfilling his temple duties and his ritual pubic duties and making sure that laws were followed, and if it was found that he had been doing those things it showed that the accusation was false, because his doing those things in the realm we can see showed that he was holding up ma’at exactly as the diagram portrayed.
They don’t “get literalized” because they are meant literally. There is no indication that they could even think of them as non-literal.
I’m still patiently waiting for someone to actually show me one of these supposedly real diagrams actually drawn by those people back then… until then I maintain all my aforementioned skepticism.
All while there is every indication that they regularly thought and wrote of these things in metaphorical and poetic terms?
The book of Job (often recognized as one of the earliest writings of the OT), in the same chapter that references the “foundation of the earth” (that gets included and illustrated in those erudite diagrams attached above), also references the morning stars singing, the sea being shut out from the land by doors and bars to keep it from going further up onto the land (I’m sure they saw those literal physical doors and bars every time they went to the beach), and referenced the sea being born from a womb, with the clouds being a literal garment for the sea, and darkness being its literal diaper…
All of this of course they understood absolutely literally, of course… the sea wore darkness as a literal diaper. absolutely no poetic or metaphorical language to see here… “there is no indictation that they could even think of this as non-literal”, right?..
Not to mention that while snow and hail has a storehouse, ice is actually born from a uterus, and there are literal physical chains floating up in the sky that bind certain constellations… And that rain doesn’t just come from “floodgates” in the heavens, but from literal waterskins that float up in the sky also… no indication that they could think of this as non-literal…
No, of course not. Every single description in that chapter is obviously poetic and metaphorical of course… EXCEPT THAT PART ABOUT THE EARTH HAVING LITERAL FOUNDATIONS… THAT IS OF COURSE WHAT THEY LITERALLY BELIEVED ABOUT THE COSMOS…"
(Since that is included in those diagrams of what they literally believed, so they obviously must have literally believed that part?)
Forgive me if I maintain my skepticism.
Of course, just reading literally the ancient literature exactly as it was written.
So the ancient Israelites then must have believed not only in a literal, physical sheol, but that sheol had a literal, phyiscal mouth, a literal physical stomach, and a literal appetite, literally gets excited to meet new arrivals, that it had literal ropes to bind people and drag them down, that Sheol could enter into literal legally-binding agreements and covenants, it had literal gates and literal bars, and that Sheol is a literal, physical uterus?
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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