Hebrew Cosmology

[Greg1234]

Cal wrote:


At least it's good that you see that the very word firmament indicates a solid structure.

Papias

Again, where? Firmament means "expanse". The firmament of heaven as given would be the expanse of heaven. This digresses away from the earth specifically, to that of cosmic balance on a large scale. What is merely being done by your kin is the imbuing of properties which at the very most, seek to portray transcendent points of references. You have not and cannot accurately convey the meaning of "waters" (which were divided) with a purely materialistic perspective as the complexity of the bible reflects delineations on a multi dimensional state of reality, including the source of that force we refer to as God. Gen reads,

"And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so."



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"Waters" here, does not mean the sea in this sphere. And glossing over integral components such as this may only influence its reinstitution for analysis. As a result of that, a firmament in the midst of the waters which would "divide the waters from waters" may be crudely illustrated with small block of text, dimensions equal throughout.

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A firmament in the midst of the waters would be an expanse which would separate the "waters from the waters". You would call this expanse heaven.

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Firmament

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This would "and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament:" Firmament in that sense would not be vault as in arch but vault as in bank vault or container. There is not one firmament but multiple and the waters above the firmament may be seen as encapsulated within a "firmament" or "expanse" or "heaven" above and below.


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This only increases the complexity for interpretation seeing that the depiction of three tiers would coincide with the physical in relation to that about it. There is body/flesh, there is mind and there is spirit. Or there is physical, mental, and the spiritual. The mind, the higher mind and the supreme mind. There was a link provided earlier The Firmament, Third Heaven, and Structure of Things Biblical which explains this, save for omission of the mental plane and extrapolations in recognition of it.

"I knew a man in Christ above fourteen years ago, (whether in the body, I cannot tell; or whether out of the body, I cannot tell: God knoweth; ) such an one caught up to the third heaven."

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The "third heaven" here does not mean third hard dome so I don't see it here either. Caught up or caught away to the third heaven would more likely be pertaining to the relativity of the various modes of existence as given earlier. The lowest heaven or firmament being the physical. The third being the spiritual. As he gave:

"And he said unto them, Ye are from beneath; I am from above: ye are of this world; I am not of this world."
(John 8:23 KJV)

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The next place "hard dome" may be referenced would be the "walls of the vault". This represented by the "waters" (pppp). Water would be portrayed as a sort of permeable membrane and not solid when used in isolated reference to this sphere. But that is when these conditions are conveyed. Alternatively, how you jumped to the purely physical at that stage of the text only you know. "Light" in "let there be light" is not about light from a star but that will be more relevant when you become a how-was-there-light-and-night-and-day-before-the-sun-ignorant-Hebrews-ist.

 

[gluadys]

So, you're going to pass, huh?

Couldn't you just point out one single passage or even reference? Just the one that's most convincing that heaven is a solid structure?

I mean come on. If this is a view you feel passionate about, you'd think at least one passage would come to mind.

Never said I felt passionate about it.

Oy! You've got this painfully backwards.

Example.

I call this building Taj Mahal. Therefore, to find out the structure of the Taj Mahal, we just need to find data on buildings?

Not backwards at all given the grammar and the parallel constructions. Say you mention the Taj Mahal and someone asks "What's that?" Do you reply "It's a lake," or "It's an island"? No. You reply "It's a building."

Similarly Genesis says that day is light, night is darkness, earth is dry land, seas are water and heaven/the sky is a firmament.

Note this may not apply to every meaning of "heaven" just as not all water is sea water. But it probably does apply to heaven in the sense of "sky". We often forget this meaning when we are reading English, but it has to be kept in mind because almost no other language (certainly neither Hebrew or Greek) differentiated "heaven" and "sky" into two different words/concepts. Similarly, in Genesis God calls the dry land "earth"--a meaning we still use. But we also use earth in other senses e.g. the planet Earth--which includes the seas as well as the dry land.

Possibly part of the problem is expecting a word in scripture to always have one meaning. Or expecting every instance of a word to have all its possible meanings. Genesis 1 is referring to the physical structure God created--hence "sky" is the appropriate reference of "firmament/heaven". It is saying the sky is a firmament which holds up the waters above it, dividing them from the waters below. Later it places the sun, moon and stars in this firmament/sky.

 

[juvenissun]

Its called the "Adamic language".
It wasnt Semitic but it was closely related.
According to Gen 11:1 it was a language with 'few words'.
(I suspect it was monosyllabic)
There are many linguistic clues in the text of Gen 1-2
(Many syllables are repeated over and over)
It is worth looking into.

Confusion of tongues - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Origin of language - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Thanks. Somehow I missed your reply for longer than a week.

 

[juvenissun]

Moses wasn't alive during the events of Genesis, so he had to get them from somewhere. What's interesting is, Genesis is actually a compilation of books itself likely from several different authors. For instance we read this in Gen. 5,

Gen. 5:1 This is the book of the genealogy of Adam. In the day that God created man, He made him in the likeness of God.

Perhaps Adam or Able or Seth authored Gen. 1 - 4, someone else Gen. 5 and so on. There's really no way of knowing. But Moses compiled these stories, likely passed down over the years, and preserved on the ark.

Were the original Genesis books written in Hebrew? I tend to believe they were, but this is also impossible to prove. But for Moses to compile them, they had to be in a language he could read, I would think.

Many people use this nature of Genesis (and other Books) to discredit the Bible. But the more I know this, the more I think it is exactly the reason the whole Bible is a magic book. It is similar to put all the atoms together into a DNA.

 

[Papias]

Cal wrote:

It's obvious you believe heaven is a solid dome as described in scripture. So now let's see if you can back that up with scripture, if that is, you want to climb out on this limb.

Sure, you already quoted the verses in Genesis that use the word for "hard dome" for firmament. Remember, it is "Raqiya", which literally means "dome of formed metal". You are familiar with this, right?

But after the rhino limb, something tells me you're going gun shy.

Whatever is telling you that, has no basis. After all, you are the one who couldn't back up the stego thing with anything. Simply counting the features shows that it is closer to a rhino than a stegosaurus. Do you admit that there are at least a half dozen features that fit a rhino and not a stegosaurus, and that the only feature that would suggest a stegosaurus at all is your thinking that those decorative tabs are back plates?

You still haven't answered if the same carving, which shows a stegopython, means that humans lived with stegopythons. So, Cal, Did they?

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Greg wrote:

Again, where? Firmament means "expanse". The firmament of heaven as given would be the expanse of heaven.

Discussed above. The word used for "firmament" is "raqiya", which literally means "bowl/dome of formed metal".

So Greg - we are still waiting for your nested hierarchy of cars.........


Papias