Anti-Christian sceptics often denounce the Bible as teaching a faulty cosmology. One example is the assertion that the Hebrew word רקיע
raqiya‘, or ‘firmament’ in the KJV, denotes a solid dome over the earth, so that the Bible is guilty of scientific error. Such enemies of the Gospel have an ally in the professing evangelical Paul H. Seely, who maintains that both the social background data and the text of the Bible itself support this conclusion.
Seely’s conclusion is both presumptuous and untenable, and he fails to recognize that the description of the
raqiya‘ is so equivocal and lacking in detail that one can only read a solid sky into the text by assuming that it is there in the first place. One can, however, justifiably understand Genesis to be in harmony with what we presently know about the nature of the heavens.
Introduction
It is common for sceptics to attack the Bible for teaching a primitive cosmology, including a flat earth and geocentrism. They use these arguments to claim that the Bible cannot be the word of God, rightly pointing out that God would not make errors in his Word. Neither would Jesus, if he were truly God in the flesh, endorse erroneous teaching. However, such sceptical arguments against the Bible’s cosmology have been repeatedly refuted by conservative Christians.
1
More recently, the enemies of Christ have acquired an ally in the professing evangelical Paul H. Seely, who has also claimed that the Bible makes scientific errors. In giving ammunition to sceptics and others who want to destroy the Bible, thus feeding into the world system and giving it comfort, in some ways Seely is more dangerous to Christians than atheists. Although his papers are not cited in any Bible commentary I could find at the Reformed Theological Seminary at Orlando, Florida, his views seem to be beloved of Christians who desire to compromise the plain teachings of Scripture with the man-made theories of evolution and billions of years. Therefore this article is justified as pulling out this tree of misinformation by its roots.
A solid dome?
In particular, Seely has published two papers in the
Westminster Theological Journal claiming that the Bible teaches that there is a solid dome above the earth. He announces near the very start of his 1991 article:
‘The basic historical fact that defines the meaning of
raqiya‘—the Hebrew word in Genesis 1 which the King James Bible reads as ‘firmament,’ but many modern translations render ‘expanse’—‘is simply this:
all peoples in the ancient world thought of the sky as solid.’
2
Following this statement is an impressive and informative list of citations that goes on to prove just that point: from American Indians to the neighbors of the Hebrews in the ancient East; from ancient times until the time of the Renaissance, there were almost no recorded dissenters, leading Seely to the resolution, ‘When the original readers of Genesis 1 read the word
raqiya‘ they thought of a solid sky.’
2 Then, after an analysis of relevant Biblical texts, Seely concludes:
‘… (T)he language of Genesis 1 suggests solidity … and no usage of raqiya‘ anywhere states or even implies that it was not a solid object … The historical-grammatical meaning of raqiya‘ in
Gen. 1:6-8 is very clearly a literally solid firmament.’
2
We will have much to say regarding the specific Old Testament citations that Seely uses in defence of his thesis, but for the present, I perceive some rather gaping holes in Seely’s general logic. In terms of the meaning of
raqiya‘ and the composition of Genesis, there are three basic possibilities:
First, it is possible that what Seely says is correct. The terms given in Genesis had only one possible meaning and no other, and Genesis was written, even under inspiration as Seely professes to believe, with this basic error in thought preserved.
Second, it is possible that the Genesis account was written
before any of the erroneous cosmological theories of solid skies that Seely lists. It is not an uncommon suggestion that
Gen. 1–11 was founded in sources prior to Moses — some would say the story derives from Abraham; we may even suppose that it derived from the experiences of Adam. If this is so, and if we can show that the descriptions in
Gen. 1 are compatible with our present-day observations of the natural world, then Seely’s entire argument collapses. All he has shown is that the Hebrews and all of those following misinterpreted the meaning of
raqiya‘ according to their own perceptions and derived from Genesis the idea of a solid sky. We may regard this solution as satisfactory, but a question mark remains in that we have no exact idea of the original composition date of Genesis 1.
Finally, there is a third option. Truly enough, one can indeed read Genesis 1 and say that a solid sky is in mind. But one can also, with as much justification, read Genesis 1 and say rather that it comports exactly with what we know today of the atmosphere and the solar system, with or without adjustments made for phenomenological language, and this is because of the utterly
equivocal nature of the language used in Genesis 1.
Certainly Seely is correct to quote Warfield’s dictum that it was not the purpose of the writer of Genesis
3 to describe the nature of the sky; Seely is also correct (if a bit chauvinistic in tone) to say that ‘
there is no reason to believe the Hebrews were any less scientifically naive than their neighbors.’
4
Where the line must be drawn is before the implication that inerrancy is not compromised by reading a solid sky into Genesis 1, and allowing no other interpretation. It does not do to say that ‘God has sometimes allowed his inspired penman to advert to the scientific concepts of their own day.’
5 Seely confuses
adaptation to human finitude with
accommodation to human error—the former does
not entail the latter.
6
As I know all too well, having spent several years confronting critics of the Bible,
7 such ‘allowances’ as Seely asserts easily open the door to ridicule of the inspired Word, and the critics are correct to see such rationalizations as Seely’s as totally invalid.
It also opens the door to those who claim that the Bible writers’ teaching on morality was also a reflection of ‘the scientific concepts of their own day’. For example, was their teaching against adultery and homosexual acts in ignorance of the modern scientific ‘fact’ that such behaviour is ‘in the genes’, programmed by evolution? This is hardly a caricature, since some liberals already use such arguments,
8 showing that Seely’s attitude is the top of a perilous slippery slope. (Of course, it is fallacious to claim that behaviour is completely controlled by genes,
9 and the ‘gay gene’ finding has been strongly questioned.
10)
Rather than wave the white flag over inerrancy with this compromise over
raqiya‘, it is better served, under this third option, to realize that the inspired author of Genesis was allowed to use the only terms available to him in his language to describe natural phenomena, but was
not allowed to offer anything more than the vaguest, most minimal descriptions of those phenomena, thereby leaving nearly everything unsaid about their exact nature. Genesis 1 was perfectly designed to allow that interpretation which accorded with actual fact, for it ‘says nothing more than that God created the sky or its constituent elements’ while remaining ‘
completely silent’ about what those elements were.
11 It only depended upon where one started: if one starts with the presumption of a solid sky, one will read into the text a solid sky. If one starts with a modern conception, the text, as we shall see, permits that as well.
Put another way: if today we say ‘the sky is blue’ to a person who is a member of a ‘primitive’ society, and they happen to define the ‘sky’ as ‘the solid expanse over our head’, this does not make our original statement, ‘the sky is blue,’ in error. Their thought-concept is indeed in error, but our original statement is not—even if we both happen to use the same word, ‘sky’, to describe different concepts. So it is that God, using an inspired penman under the constraints of human language, did not err in Genesis. The cosmology has been kept so basic and equivocal that one must force certain meanings into the text and analyze what the writer ‘must have been thinking’ (as well as pay no attention to the fact that God, not man, is the ultimate author of the text) in order to find error.
