And Ezekiel 6:11 and 25:6 both speak of “stomping” one’s feet.
Isaiah 40:19 speaks of an artisan “overlaying” an idol with gold. In 2 Samuel 22:43, David sings, “I crushed them, I stomped (or spread?) them like the mud of the streets.” Psalm 136:6 says that God “spread the earth upon the waters” (similarly, Isaiah 42:5 and 44:24). In Numbers 17:4, Eleazar hammers bronze censers into a covering for the ark. It is used for the manufacture of gold leaf in Exodus 39:3. The verb raqa‘, used eleven times in the Hebrew Bible, means to hammer thin, to stamp, and/or to spread. The better option is to call it an “expanse.” The reason why is to be found in the meaning of the verbal root on which the noun is based. So the notion of “firmament” as the way to translate raqi‘a is the result of bad Greco-Roman science.īut there is a better way to translate raqi‘a. It is perhaps this Greco-Roman belief that influenced the translations of the Septuagint and Vulgate toward the notion of a “firmament.” Yet even by the time of Basil, Christian scholars began to question how solid that object that separates us from space really was. One must travel several centuries after Genesis to the Greeks to find belief in a solid dome over the earth, and even this turns out to be one of several concentric solid spheres. The other approach is to understand the language as poetic and based on appearances, much as even modern scientists may refer to Mother Nature and sunrise.Ĭlaims that the ancient Semitic world believed in such a dome separating the earthly and heavenly domains have been debunked by cuneiform scholars W.G. One is to conclude that that the Biblical narrator and audience were hopelessly prescientific slobs who really believed that the sky was a solid dome. This has led to two different ways to understand the language used here. The use of the Greek stereōma and the Latin firmamentum to translate raqi‘a has led to the persistent claim that what God creates above the earth on the second day of creation is a solid dome. Whether or not this is meant to be the universal heavenly canopy created in Genesis 1 is not entirely clear. In the context of his vision of what almost appear to be spaceships, Ezekiel sees a raqi‘a (without the definite article “the” when it is first mentioned), with a throne above it, someone seated on it, and a voice that comes from there (Ezek 1:22-26, 10:1). In Psalm 150:1, God’s raqi‘a is paired poetically with “his sanctuary.” Daniel 12:3 pairs this same raqi‘a with the domain of the stars.Įzekiel’s use of raqi‘a may or may not refer to the same heavenly part of creation. The raqi‘a is the focal point of the second day of creation: “Let there be a raqi‘a in the midst of the waters” to separate the waters above from the waters below, “and God called the raqi‘a Sky/Heaven.” In Psalm 19:1, the raqi‘a and “the heavens” are equated, paired there as poetic synonyms. It is also used twice in Psalms, five times in Ezekiel, and once in Daniel. The Hebrew word raqi‘a (most often translated “firmament”) is used nine times in Genesis 1.
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