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We shouldn’t interpret Genesis through the filter of modern astrophysics and cosmology because the biblical authors shared the same general cosmology as the rest of their ancient neighbors. Specifically, the Old Testament authors assumed the earth is round, flat, and covered by a sky dome that retained above it a literal cosmic ocean.

When biblical characters use their rational faculties—their reason—we are often met with the formula: “He said in his heart.” We moderns take this as nothing more than a bit of poetic language, but the ancients intended it quite literally. As the Old Testament scholar John Walton has pointed out, the Bible not only attributes the seat of human consciousness to the heart but to the kidneys as well—such as in passages like Psa 16:7, Psa 7:9, Jer 17:10, Prov 23:16, and Jer 11:20 (John Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Downer’s Grove: IVP Academic, 2009), 18-9). If you look these up, you will see that your translation has probably rendered the Hebrew word for kidneys translated by words like “mind,” “conscience,” or “heart,” marking the literal Hebrew in your Bible’s footnotes. According to Psa 7:9, “the righteous God tests the hearts and kidneys” of people. When David prays in Psalm 26, “Examine me, O Lord, and prove me; try my kidneys . . .,” he literally thinks there is a sense in which his inner psyche resides in his kidneys in the same way that his ancient Near Eastern neighbors did (See G. Eknoyan, “The Kidneys in the Bible: What Happened,” Journal of the American Society of Nephrology, 16.12 (Dec 2005), 3464-3471). Kopple agrees that “The kidneys were viewed as the seat of conscience and of ethical feelings and yearnings, and the source of mortality and ethical activity. The kidneys were believed to be associated with the innermost parts of the personality” (J. D. Kopple, “The Biblical View of the Kidney,” American Journal of Nephrology 14 (1994), 279-81).

The Hebrews believed creation exists in a bubble surrounded by cosmic waters. The solid firmament above was a feature common to the Near Eastern world of its authors and anthropologists have found that it is almost universal among premodern cultures. We are first introduced to it in Gen 1.6-8.

A widely ignored passage in the book of Psalms landed this theory a mortal blow when it was continuously pointed out by young-earthers like Russell Humphreys that the “waters above” were still described as loitering over the sky after the Flood. Psa 148:4-6 is quite clear about this, “Praise Him you heavens of the heavens and you waters which are above the heavens! Let them praise the name of Yhwh, for he commanded and they were created. He has established them forever….” (D. Russell Humphreys, Starlight and Time: Solving the Puzzle of Distant Starlight in a Young Universe (Green Forrest: Master Books, 1994), 61).

The author behind Genesis 1 was aware of other ancient creation myths and takes shots at them theologically, but Genesis doesn’t borrow its creation story from anyone. In the Enuma Elish story, Marduk cuts the cosmic dragon Tiamat in half. The bottom half he uses to make the flat, solid earth. With the other half of her corpse, he makes the sky—establishing it like the covering of a tent. We are told that Marduk then uses an apparently watertight skin and stations guardians for the sake of preventing Tiamat’s upper waters from escaping. Later, he establishes a heavenly realm for the gods above this (Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography, 112). It is wrong to assume ancient creation myths were principally concerned with material origins the way modern scientific theories are. Ancient creation stories frequently are not concerned about material origins (See Vern Poythress, “Biblical Studies: Three Modern Myths in Interpreting Genesis 1,” Westminster Theological Journal 76 (2014), 321-350). Enuma Elish genuinely does assume that a very real cosmic ocean is somehow retained by the sky, prevented from flooding the earth. Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography, 262: Explicit statements that the heavens are made of water are found in Babylonian texts. Examples include Ee IV 137-46, where Marduk builds the heavens out of the watery corpse of Tiamat and Inamgisuanki, where the Akkadian name for heaven, šamê, is explained as ša mê ‘of water.’ …In Ee IV 139-40, Marduk stretches out a skin and assigns guards to keep the waters of heaven from draining downward onto lower regions of the universe. These traditions may be compared with Genesis 1, where the primeval waters are divided in two, with the upper waters positioned above the firmament (רקיע(, and Psa 104:3 and 148:4, which speak of waters above the heavens.

1. Firnament
2. Raqia is used with reference to metal. According to Amzallag, “It has no other meaning in Biblical Hebrew, except for ‘to stamp with foot’ (ברגל רקע (encountered only in the book of Ezekiel (Ezk 6, 11; 25,6). Even there, it evokes a mild and repetitive beating, so that it should be considered as a figurative derivation of the primary metallurgical meaning” (Nissim Amzallag, “Copper Metallurgy: A Hidden Fundament of the Theology of Ancient Israel?,” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 27.2 (2013), 162). For example, Exod 39:3 says, “They hammered out (raqa), gold sheets.” Num 16:39 says, “They hammered out plating for the altar.” Jer 10:9 uses the term to refer to plated silver. Similarly, in a language close to Hebrew called Phoenician, we find a cognate noun mrqa, which refers to a metal “platter” or “bowl” (Francis Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs (eds.), A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906), 955-6). In the third century BC, the Old Testament was translated by seventy Jewish scholars into a Greek Bible called the Septuagint.

1. They picked the Greek word stereoma, which indisputably emphasizes firmness and solidity (Gary Martin, “Raqi’a: Form and Function of the ‘Firmament’ as a Celestial līmes/līmen in Israelite Cosmology,” graduate seminar paper, Washington University (2013), 18). Addressing his fellow professional Bible translators in the Journal of Translation, the senior linguist John R. Roberts concludes from the linguistic data that “the Hebrew makes it explicit” that the biblical firmament—the raqia “should be conceived of as a solid dome with a surface” ( Roberts, “Biblical Cosmology,” 41). The Israeli scholar Nissim Amzallag, in the department of Bible, Archaeology, and Near Eastern Studies at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, believes the term raqia, “designates the firmament as a piece of metal” (Amzallag, “Copper Metallurgy,” 162). Interestingly, the verbal form of raqia is used in Job 37:18 to refer to the creation of the skies—comparing its creation to the cast bronze plates from which mirrors were hammered out in the ancient world.
2. The verb typically refers specifically to beating out metal and certainly does here where the context is pounding out a bronze plate. An excellent recent study by Almansa-Villatoro in the Journal of Egyptian Archaeology emphasizes that the ancient Egyptians believed the sky was specifically made of iron as a container for the heavenly ocean upon which the sun daily sailed (M. Victoria Almansa-Villatoro, “The Cultural Indexicality of the N41 Sign for bjȝ: The Metal of the Sky and the Sky of Metal,” The Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 105.1 (2019), 73–81).

The Egyptian name for iron (bia n pt) accordingly means “metal of heaven” (Almansa-Villatoro, “The Cultural Indexicality,” 74). A common theme in the Pyramid Texts (PT) speaks of the necessity for the Pharaoh to ascend to the afterlife by first “splitting” through the sky’s “metal” (i.e. PT 257). PT 469 and 584 similarly speak of the king forcefully pushing his way through the “iron door in the starry sky” and other texts liken this necessity for the king to break through the iron firmament to breaking out of an egg (PT 757, 669). This is likely because, since very early in Egyptian thought, the sky goddess was intimately connected to iron— the “metal of heaven” and the great heavenly waters upon which the solar bark sails before its daily consumption and rebirth from the archetypal womb of the goddess (Ibid 77). Amongst the ancient Sumerians along the Tigress and Euphrates rivers, scholars have noticed that multiple terms for iron and tin seem to etymologically contain the term for heaven—AN.

1. Accordingly, the Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer affirmed that for the Sumerians, “The earth was a flat disk surmounted in the shape of a vault. Just what this heavenly solid was thought to be is still uncertain; to judge from the fact that the Sumerian term for tin is ‘metal of heaven,’ it may have been tin” (Samuel Noah Kramer, The Sumerians: Their History, Culture and Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 113). “The idea of a separation of heaven and earth is present in all ancient Near Eastern mythologies” (Gerhard F. Hasel, “The Significance of the Cosmology of Genesis 1 in Relation to Ancient Near Eastern Parallels,” Andrews University Seminary Studies 10 (Andrews University Press, 1972), 7).
2. In Exodus 24, Moses, Aaron, and Israel’s elders ascend Mount Sanai. Verse 10 tells us that upon doing so, “they saw the God of Israel, and under his feet was pavement like lapis lazuli (Peter Kingsley, “Ezekiel by the Grand Canal: Between Jewish and Babylonian Tradition,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 2.3 (1992), 339), like the body of the heavens in clarity” (Michael S. Heiser, “The Divine Council in Late Canonical and Non-Canonical Second Temple Jewish Literature” (PhD diss. University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2004), 2.2). In Ezekiel 1 the raqia is said to be crystalline or ice-like in color. In a vision, Ezekiel sees God seated on his throne above the firmament upheld by cherubim whose four faces represent the cardinal quarters of the Babylonian compass. The message of the vision is that God’s reign extends over the whole of the earth even though the Jews are sitting in exile in Babylon. We know this passage is describing a representation of the sky because, as a noun, the Bible uses this word raqia 17 times across Genesis, the Psalms, Ezekiel and Daniel (Gen 1:6-8, 1:14-15, 1:17, 1:20; Psa 19:1, 150:1; Ezek 1:22-23, 25-26, 10:1; and Dan 12:3).

Marduk seated on his lapis lazuli throne over the solid lower heavens of Babylonian cosmology, similarly surrounded by the gleam of amber (See Kingsley’s paper discussing VAT 8917 in the Berlin Vorderasiatisches Museum, Kingsley, “Ezekiel by the Grand Canal,” 339-346).
There are other biblical passages containing related notions. In Genesis 28, Jacob has a dream about ‘stairs’ physically reaching to the sky. These were probably the stairs of a ziggurat. A ziggurat in Sippar, for example, was similarly referred to by the title “The Staircase to Holy Heaven.” H. W. F. Saggs, Civilization Before Greece and Rome (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 57. The Hebrew term “stairs” in this passage is a hapax legomenon but appears cognate with the Akkadian simmiltu. According to Ross, “In the myth of ‘Nergel and Ereshkigal’ communication between the netherworld and heaven takes place via the long stairway of heaven that leads to the gate of Anu, Enlil, and Ea…. The most that can be said is that a word used in ziggurat settings is cognate to the word used here, a word that fits the way of communication between heaven and earth.” Allen P. Ross, “Studies in the Life of Jacob Part 1: Jacob’s Vision: The Founding of Bethel,” Bibliotheca Sacra 142 (1985), 224-37.

1. The Heavenly Waters
2. Israel’s God abides over a heavenly flood in Psa 104:2-3: “He stretches out the heavens like a tent cloth. He lays the beams of his upper chambers in the water”. According to Schwab, “The ‘beams’ in view here are more likely foundation beams needed to secure God’s palace on the celestial ocean.” Mark Futato and George M Schwab, Cornerstone Biblical Commentary: Psalms, Proverbs, ed. Philip W. Comfort (Carol Stream: Tyndale, 2009), 330. Alter makes the same identification. Robert Alter, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2007), 363. Barker agrees, “The imagery portrayed here is that of a celestial palace whose foundation beams are laid in the waters. Presumably, based on the context of ‘light’ (2a), ‘heavens’ (2b), ‘clouds’ (3b), and ‘wind’ (3c), the waters are heavenly waters (cf. Amos 9:6). Jer 10:13 says, “When God’s voice thunders, there is a tumult of waters in the heavens.” As emphasized, Gen 1:7 also mentions these “waters above,” and the psalmist declares, “praise him you waters above the heavens!” When the Bible talks about the throne of God resting above a flood in the sky, it is relating an idea common in the ancient Near East.

1. Popular Near-East Cosmology: One hymn speaks of “the Nile in heaven” (Hymn to Aton from the period of Amenhotep IV. Quoted in J. Edward Wright, The Early History of Heaven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 11). A hymn to Ra calls them “the watery abyss of the sky” (Ibid., 12. Originally from a hymn to Ra prefixed to the Book of the Dead). A coffin text calls them “the Celestial waters,” and, “the pool of the firmament” (Ibid., 12-13. Coffin Text §74 and 761). Commenting on a fragment of Egyptian art, Othmar Keel writes, “The heavenly ocean is called kbhw-Hr, the ‘cool’ or ‘upper waters of Horus,’ the sky god. A surrounding wall shown in one associated artifact may represent the ‘firmament’ which contains the upper waters” (Othmar Keel, The Symbolism of the Biblical World: Ancient Near Eastern Iconography and the Book of Psalms. Trans. Timothy J. Hallett (Winona Lake: Eisenbrauns, 1997), 37).
   Other people of the ancient Near East seem to have applied this same logic in order to derive the common conclusion that the heavens retained cosmic waters. Genesis Rabba XIII:10 reads: “Rabbi Joshua said: [The earth drinks] from the upper waters, for it is written, ‘And drinketh water as the rain of heaven cometh down’ (Deut. 11, 11); the clouds, however, mount up to heaven and receive them [the waters] as from the mouth of a bottle, for it is written, ‘They gather up water into its cloud.’” Quoted from H. Freedman and Maurice Simon (eds.), Midrash Rabbah: Complete in Ten Volumes. Translated into English with Notes (New York: Soncino Press, 1983), 105. Horowitz also argues that the etymology of several Sumerian words indicates that the waters above were associated with rainfall. Horowitz, Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography, 262.
2. The Supports of Heaven
3. Most of us have come across the Bible’s language about the “pillars of earth,” but it is significant to recognize that the Bible also alludes to pillars upholding the sky. Job 26:11 tells us “the pillars of heaven quake” at God’s rebuke. 2 Sam 22:8 says the “foundations of heaven shook.” Keel notices that the parallel passage to 2 Sam 22:8 in Ps 18:7 interchanges the phrase “foundations of the heavens” with “foundations of the mountains” because the two are identical (Keel, The Symbolism of the Biblical World, 22). In biblical cosmology, the heavens also have “ends” (i.e. a rim). Isa 13:5 and Psa 19:6 talk about the “ends of the heavens.” Deut 4:32 seeks to encompass the entire earth with the phrase, “from one end of the heavens to the other,” and other passages, like Isa 5:26 and Psa 22:27, similarly refer to the “ends of the earth.” Further, if the earth shakes, then the heavens, which rest on the earth, shake also. Joel 2:10 says God will “shake” heaven and earth. Isa 13:13 says, “I will make the heavens tremble and shake the earth from its place….”

It is also not metaphorical, like some apologists may claim:

Stretching out the Heavens

The Babylonian creation myth uses the language of securing a tent for the heavens. In tablet V.59-62, we are told that the god Marduk twisted the chaos dragon’s tail and “fastened it as the Great Bond.”He then hoisted the skin upwards, securing the “bonds” of heaven and tethering its “lead ropes.” We likewise find tent language describing the heavens frequently in the Old Testament. A dozen times, we read of the heavens being “stretched out.” For example, Psa 104:2 says God, “stretches out the heavens like a tent.” Isa 40:22 says God “spreads them out like a tent to live in.” Biblical scholars recognize that this tent language is intended to convey the idea that the world is God’s tabernacle tent. This connection is implied in Psalms like 78:69. See L Michael Morales, The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus (Leuven: Peeters, 2012), 78-9. In Isa 42:5; 44:24 and Psa 136:6 the verbal form of raqia is used for cosmological ‘spreading out’ of the earth. Isa 44:24 uses it in parallel with the spreading of the sky.

Ancient Interpretation of Biblical Cosmology: Jews

• One apocalyptic text called 3 Baruch (written in the first few centuries after Christ) tells us about the Tower of Babel and how its builders were attempting to ascend to heaven as 3:6-8 reads.

• In a different source, the Babylonian Talmud, the rabbis tell us that the scheming men of Babel said: “Let us build a tower, ascend to heaven, and cleave it with axes, that its waters might gush forth.”

• Another ancient Jewish passage that assumes a solid sky and explicitly alludes to its heavenly ocean can be found in a text called Genesis Rabba, compiled during Judaism’s classical period between AD 300-500 (Parashah 4, Midrash 5).

• Again, we can see from this passage that the Rabbis believed the raqia was a literal retaining vault. Many early Rabbinic texts explicitly interpret the firmament of Genesis 1 as solid (Moshe Simon-Shoshan, “‘The Heavens Proclaim the Glory of God…’: A Study in Rabbinic Cosmology,” Bekhol DeraKhekha Daehu 20 (2008), 73).

• The Rabbis additionally continued to maintain there was a literal ocean above the sky. As there is the earthly ocean, there is a heavenly ocean (Jubilees 2:8).

• Josephus believes in a solid firmament because the Greek model usually held that the stars were “fixed like nails” to a crystalline sphere encompassing the earth (A History of Greek Philosophy: Volume 1, The Earlier Presocratics and the Pythagoreans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 135).

1. • Aristotle popularized this view in his work On the Heavens (II.8), and this Aristotelian cosmology was maintained by the Roman Stoics who were the dominant intellectual school during the New Testament period (Jonathan T. Pennington, Cosmology and New Testament Theology (New York: T&T Clark, 2008), 16-18).
   • Babylonian Talmud states that the sun travels beneath the sky by day and above the sky by night, with a firmanent (Pesahim 94b).
   • The Palestinian Talmud, Rosh Hashanah 58a, as well as the text Exodus Rabba (15:22) even postulate a system of 365 windows in the perimeter of the sky dome that the sun travels through to make its ambulation behind the heavenly vault possible (Yerushalmi Rosh Hashana 3.58a, Exodus Rabbah 15.22).
   • Genesis Rabba 6:8 believe the moon/sun set behind the solid dome with a flat cosmology.
   • Bava Batra 25a-b in the Talmud also believes in a firmament and flat cosmology, same with Eccl. 1:6.
   • 2 Enoch 3:3 states that there’s some sort of heavenly ocean in the heavens (Testament of Levi 1:8-10. See Charles’ footnote. R. H. Charles (ed.), The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, Volume Two. Biblical Apocrypha Series (Berkeley: Apocryphile Press, 2004), 304).
   • It’s the same in Genesis Rabba 4:1, 2 (Simon-Shoshan, “The Heavens Proclaim,” 72-3).
2. Ancient Interpretation of Biblical Cosmology: Christians

• John Chrysostom states held a cosmology [that] was simple: a flat earth covered by a single heaven in the form of a vault. Heaven is immobile; it is the stars that move, and their movement serves to determine time (Nicolaidis, Science and Eastern Orthodoxy, 25).

• Flat earth cosmology is the same for Mar Aba the Great, the head Bishop of the Assyrian Church of the East,94 Narsai, the head of the school of Nisibis and foremost writer in the Assyrian Church of the East,95 Diodorus, the fourth century Bishop of Tarsus (John Louis Emil Dreyer, History of the Planetary Systems from Thales to Kepler (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), 212), Theodore of Mopsuesta, the Turkish teacher of Nestorius, Severian, the Bishop of Gabala in Syria, who published six sermons against a spherical cosmology (”J. L. E. Dreyer, “Medieval Cosmology” in Milton K. Munitz (ed.), Theories of the Universe: From Babylonian Myth to Modern Science (New York: The Free Press, 1957), 119) or Cosmas Indicopleustes, a Syrian trained Christian who published his infamous work Christian Typography vehemently arguing for a flat earth cosmology from Scripture (See Nicolaidis, Science and Eastern Orthodoxy, 24-40).

• Origen believed in a flat earth and solid firmament (Origin, Homilies on Genesis and Exodus. trans. Ronald E. Heine, Fathers of the Church 71 (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 49).

Theophilus also believes in a flat-earth & solid firmament (Theophilus to Autolycus, 2.13).

• Augustine also believes in a flat-earth & solid firmament (Augustine, Genesi Ad Litteram, II.10).

• Quoting Genesis 1:7, Ambrose also believes in a flat-earth & solid firmament (Ambrose, Hexaemeron, IV.15 in J.J. Savage).

• Cyril also believes in a flat-earth & solid firmament (Catechesis 9:5, Philip Schaff and Henry Wallace (eds.), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Second Series, Volume VII Cyril of Jerusalem, Gregory Nazianzen. Trans. Edward Hamilton Gifford (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), 52).

• Saint Basil the Great recognized that the scientific opinion of his day contradicted the idea that there was a heavenly ocean over the physical heavens, so he found himself forced to defend Genesis 1 by proposing the idea that the firmament is concave with a flat outer surface upon which the heavenly waters must rest (See Adam David Rasmussen, “How St. Basil and Origen Interpret Genesis 1 in the Light of Philosophical Cosmology” (PhD diss., The Catholic University of America, 2013), 141).

• Thomas Aquinas struggled with ancient Jewish cosmology. He tried to reocncile by saying that Moses condescended to his audience (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I.68.1-3).

• Maimonides was also aware that a literal reading of the “waters above” was scientifically problematic in his day so he tried to reconcile that it is metaphorical (Greenwood, Scripture and Cosmology, 153).

• Martin Luther didn’t make sense of it either (Pelikan, Luther’s Works, 42-43).