![]() There is good evidence that as early as the sixth century BC, the ancient Greeks suggested that the heavens might consist of a series of “hard spheres.” However, this idea should not be confused with the solid-vault or solid-dome theory that was suggested by later biblical critics. There is no evidence that the Mesopotamians ever believed in a solid heavenly vault. When it came to interpreting the stars and the heavens, the Mesopotamians were more interested in astrology (i.e., what the gods were doing and what it meant for humanity) than they were in cosmology. Horowitz’s study suggests that the Mesopotamians believed in six flat heavens, suspended one above the other by cables. ![]() Lambert’s student, Wayne Horowitz, attempted to piece together a Mesopotamian cosmology from a number of ancient documents, but it is quite different from anything found in the Hebrew Bible. Lambert could find no evidence that the Mesopotamians believed in a hard-domed heaven rather, he traces this idea to Peter Jensen’s mistranslation of the term for “heavens” in his translation of the Enuma Elish. However, even this idea had to be scuttled when more recent work by Wilfred G. Still, there have been some who continue to suggest that the ancient Hebrews borrowed cosmological concepts, including the idea of a solid-domed heaven, from the Mesopotamians. Closer comparative analysis between Babylonian and Hebrew thought has, however, found so many significant differences between the two that the idea of direct borrowing has been virtually abandoned by subsequent scholarship. The idea that the Hebrews borrowed from the Babylonians was especially common during the pan-Babylonian craze that gripped biblical scholarship for a brief period during the early twentieth century. The following section seeks to provide a succinct history of interpretation concerning the location and shape of the heavens.ĭuring the latter part of the nineteenth century, critical scholars commonly suggested that the ancient Hebrews borrowed many of their ideas, including the notion that heaven was a solid hemisphere, from the Babylonians, probably while the former people were exiled there. We will conclude with a look at the Hebrew words and passages used by these scholars to reconstruct the so-called Hebrew cosmology. We will then look at how nineteenth and twentieth-century scholars viewed the cosmologies of these earlier periods. In this chapter, we will examine these two arguments, looking first at the history of the cosmological views of the ancient world, the early church, and the Middle Ages. It was not, reconstructionists argue, until the rise of modern science that it was finally recognized that the biblical view of cosmology was naive and untenable. This understanding continued to be accepted throughout the early history of the Christian church and the Middle Ages. Second, this view was common to other peoples of the ancient Near East, especially in Mesopotamia, which was considered the probable source of Hebrew cosmology. The first is textual and linguistic: the context and meaning of certain words such as rāqîa ʿ support this reconstruction. ![]() In support of this reconstruction of Hebrew cosmology, supporters bring two lines of argument to bear. This understanding of Hebrew cosmology is so common that pictures of it are frequently found in Bible dictionaries and commentaries. On the surface of the flat earth were terrestrial oceans (“waters below the firmament”) and dry land below the earth were subterranean waters (“fountains of the deep”) and the netherworld of the dead ( šĕ ʾ ôl). The dome also possessed windows or gates through which celestial waters (“waters above the firmament”) could, upon occasion, pass. Attached to the dome and visible to observers below were the stars, sun, and moon. Above this solid dome was a celestial ocean (“waters above the firmament”). This understanding is built around the idea that the Hebrew word rāqîa ʿ, which appears in Genesis 1 and is usually translated “firmament” in English Bibles, was actually understood by the ancient Hebrews to be a solid, hemispherical dome or vault that rested upon mountains or pillars that stood along the outermost perimeter of a circular, flat disk-the earth. This article was originally published as a chapter in the book “ The Genesis Creation Account and Its Reverberations in the Old Testament."Īnyone who wishes to study ancient Hebrew cosmology will quickly discover that the common understanding among most modern biblical scholars is that the Hebrews had a prescientific, even naive, view of the universe.
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