Firmament

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Firmament

The firmament is the structure above the atmosphere, conceived as a vast solid dome.According to the Genesis creation narrative, God created the firmament to separate the "waters above" the earth from the "waters below" the earth.

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[johnocallaghan]

So we are in a snow globe praise the Lord Jesus Christ

[CryptoBates]

they are wrong, the firmament is to divide the waters around teh firmament too. if you look at the real map, we are small in comparison to other plains

[EasternOrthodoxChristian]

Untangling many complex and interwoven knots is not an easy task. When faced with such a challenge, the way forward is to systematically, carefully, and patiently undo one knot at a time. That is what I hope to do in this short article.

Truth is what Christians are all about, and truth about language is no less important than the truth about the Bible, which uses language. It is my uncontroversial claim that “firmament” didn’t always mean “firmament.” Well, that’s obvious enough, since every word now in use didn’t exist before it was coined.If you ask a liberal biblical scholar what the Hebrew word “רקיע” (raqia) in Genesis 1:6 means, they’ll tell you that it means “firmament.” At this point, you will ask what “firmament” means, and your scholar will go on to explain that a “firmament” is the ancient Hebrew idea of the structure of the sky, specifically, the idea that the sky is a solid dome, rising up on all sides from its base (that is, the entire earth itself) with “foundations” or “pillars” under the ground, holding the whole thing up.

When the King James Version translators translated רקיע (raqia) into English, they translated it as “firmament.” Good and well enough, at least in 1611. So why has that led to all this confusion today? The English word “firmament” was not originally a translation of the Hebrew word רקיע, at least not first of all. First of all, the English word “firmament” is a transliteration from the Latin word “firmamentum.” How big is the difference between a translation and a transliteration? Huge. To put it (hopefully) simply, a translation tries to take one word in one language, and understand the basic meaning of that word, and then find whatever word in a new language fits exactly or most closely with the meaning in the original language, and then use that new word in that new language. The fancy term for the language you’re starting with is called the “source language, ” and the term for the language you’re translating into is called the “target language.”