![]() The firmament was, according to Gesenius’s Lexicon: From the Hebrew word raqia, the word derives from the root raqa (רקע), “to beat or spread out”, in the sense understood to ancient people of hammering out a bowl from a lump of metal. The best example may be the idea of a ‘firmament’ contained in the Old Testament. And, this being the case, many things in the bible make sense only to readers who believe in a flat earth. They believed it was flat, rather than round (Hellenistic astronomy, with its theories of a spherical earth and planets in space, hadn’t taken hold yet). The authors of the Old Testament believed the earth was one-of-a-kind, rather than just one of an incomprehensible number that we know it to be today. Those authors lived before the era of modern science, and understood very little about how the cosmos really is (and even what it really is). ![]() The primitive cosmology in the bible is no indictment of the books or their authors it can only be expected. But the mostly irrelevant creation-evolution debate misses the appeal and simplicity of what the Genesis creation story describes, and declines to learn from it what the authors and readers of Genesis actually believed about the cosmos. Creationists, it turns out, have gotten almost everything wrong, from the age of the earth to the order of creation. The problems with a literal reading of the creation story in the biblical book of Genesis are well-known. You can’t fall off the side, but you may – if you travel far enough in one direction – touch the edge of the sky. The top of that huge, beautiful crystalline dome extends out in all directions and then meets the horizon, where it is propped up by mountains and the rest of the land: all God’s work and His creation, illuminated by the lights He has provided. How some things in the bible only make sense if you understand the cosmology of the writers ![]()
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