According to many Bible scholars, people of the Ancient Near East (ANE) believed that the sky was a fixed solid dome - in which the Sun, moon, and stars were embedded - supported by pillars, or mountains, at the ends of a flat earth. The Israelites are said to have shared this erroneous ANE cosmology, which is allegedly the underlying idea behind the "firmament" or “expanse” (raqia) of Genesis 1.
Were ANE people in general, and the Israelites in
particular, really so dense as to believe in a literal solid dome, as pictured
above?
Ancient man may have lacked modern technology, such as telescopes and
computers, and sophisticated mathematical theories. But he wasn't blind or
stupid.
It was obvious to ancient man, as it is to us, that the Sun
and Moon move across the sky every day, rising in the East and setting in the
West. So the Sun and Moon are clearly not attached to a fixed dome.
What about the stars? At first glance, the stars may seem to
be fixed on a dome. Yet, anyone (try it yourself!) watching the stars for a few
hours sees them moving through the sky, much like the Sun and Moon. So also the
stars are clearly not attached to a stationary dome.
Moreover, the stellar motions clearly have a pronounced
pattern. Here is a photo (a time exposure of a few hours)
showing star-trails as seen in Fayyum, Egypt (latitude 29.3 degrees
North).
The stars near the star Polaris (above the Earth's North
pole) travel in complete circles; stars further away rise in the East and set
in the West, so that different stars are visible at different times of the
night.
In short, the revolving stars seem to be fixed, not to a
stationary dome (a semi-sphere), but to a rotating sphere, called the celestial
sphere. The celestial sphere surrounds the earth and is not supported
by it (see figure).
Although the stars seemed to be fixed to the celestial
sphere, it is easily seen that the Moon moves along this sphere roughly once a
month, and the Sun once a year, marking off months, seasons, and years (Gen.1:15).
The ancients, keener observers of the night sky than modern
ANE scholars, were well aware of such celestial motions. Indeed, the ancient
Egyptians marked the beginning of their year by the first dawn appearance of
Sirius, the brightest star in the sky.
In line with such simple observational considerations, ANE
scholar Margaret Huxley, upon close examination of numerous cuneiform sources,
concludes that ancient Mesopotamians thought the sky to be a rotating sphere
with a polar axis, rather than a stationary vault.[Huxley, Margaret. “The Shape of the Cosmos According to Cuneiform
Sources.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 7, no. 2,
1997, pp. 189–198. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25183348. Accessed
17 June 2021.]
The Myth of the Solid Dome
If the solid dome is so contrary to common sense and has no historical
basis, how did it come to dominate biblical scholarship?
That tale is related by Randall W.
Younker and Richard M. Davidson ["The Myth of The Solid
Heavenly Dome: Another Look at The Hebrew." Andrews
University Seminary Studies (AUSS) 49.1: 125-147 (2011)]. They find
that the idea that the ancient Israelites believed in a solid vault resting on
a flat earth emerged during the early 1800s, primarily through the American
writer Washington Irving (1783-1859). He propagated the myth that most ancient
and medieval people believed in a flat earth, until the time of Columbus. [For
a detailed account of the flat earth myth, see Jeffrey Burton
Russell, Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and the Historians (Westport,
Conn.: Praeger, 1991)].
Younker and Davidson conclude that, in fact, the majority of
early Christian and medieval scholars
“believed in a spherical earth, surrounded by celestial spheres that conveyed the sun, moon, stars, and planets in their orbits around the earth. Moreover, the concept of a heavenly vault does not appear in any ancient Babylonian astronomical documents. Rather, this notion was erroneously introduced into the scholarly literature through a mistranslation (1890) of the Enuma Elish by Peter Jensen."
Conclusion
In sum, there is no basis for the notion that ANE people,
including the Israelites, believed that the sky was a solid dome.
Rather than reading presumed ancient cosmology
into Genesis, we should simply read it on its own terms. Doing so, we see that
the raqia of Genesis 1, called heaven (Gen.1:8), is clearly not solid: birds fly in it (Gen.1:20,
cf. Deut.4:17), and the sun, moon, and stars move through it (Gen.1:14-18).
In fact, the raqia is simply the sky, including the atmosphere and outer space.
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