27-2-2013

Where the Hebrews Nave

about Creation?:The Myth
of the Solid Dome Heaven

Randall W. Younker, PhD

SDA Theological Seminary
Andrews University

The Hebrews were Nave about

Nature
In a recent book, Brian Bull
and Fritz Guy propose that the
ancient Hebrews had a pre-
scientific view of creation and
that this naivety is illustrated in
Genesis 1the Creation
account

The sky or firmament was a solid

half dome?
One of the nave ideas of
the Hebrews are said to
have had, was the idea that
the skythe firmament
(Hebrew raqia) was an
upside down metal bowl
a vault or domeand if
you went far or high
enough, you would bump
into it!

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Schaiparelli

Owen Charles Whitehouse

Dictionary of the Bible (1908 p 503)
James Hastings, ed.

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A Nave Understanding?

Of course, if the ancient Hebrews had a nave pre-

scientific understanding of creation, then we are not
obligated to believe the creation account in an
historic literal fashion

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No Recent six day creation

And we are not
obligated to belief in a
recent, literal six day
creation (nor a world
wide flood, etc)

Picture by Ebgi

Where Does the idea of Hebrew Naivety

come from?
Herman Gunkel claimed that The
description of the solid vault of
heavens is very widespread among
primitive peoples. (1895; citing
E.B. Tylor)
Gunkel argued that most of ancient
Israels ideas, including their
understanding of creation and the
flood, made their way into Scripture
were derived from Babylon during
the Exile

Die Kosmologie Der Babylonier

Peter Jensen (1890/1974)
Peter Jensens Die
Kosmologie Der Babylonier
(1890) was one of the first
works to suggest that the
Babylonians believed that the
heavens consisted of a
vaulted dome

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Wilfred George Lambert

Lambert (1975: 61-62) on

Jensen

Jensens transliteration of
sammu (heaven)

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Jensen (1909) arbitrarily translated

sammu as Himmelswlbung
(vault of heaven)

No Vault in Mesopotamian
Cosmology
Wayne Horowitz has
attempted to reconstruct a
Mesopotamian cosmology
for various texts, but
whether this really reflects
their views is unknown
A key discovery is that the
heavens were flat, not
vaulted

Why is raqia called firmament?

Jerome, who is said not to

have been good in Hebrew,
translated Greek stereoma to
Latin firmamentumthis went
into English as firmament
Why is stereoma in the LXX?

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Empedocles of Acragas
495-435 BC

At the time the LXX was

written, the common Greek
understanding was that the
earth was a sphere
surrounded by hard celestial
spheresnot to be confused
with a dome on a flat earth!
They thought the world was
round!!!!

Later scholars believed the spheres were NOT solid (comets

and orbits of some bodies)

Christians believed the world

round!
Illustration of the spherical earth in a
medieval manuscript. The figure
shows two men walking around the
spherical earth, one going to the East
and the other to the West, and meeting
on the opposite side.[1]
14th century copy of a 12th century
original

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Raqia is an expansenot solid!

John Gill (1697-1771), English theologian, Baptist and
Calvinist; Biblical linguist
Interpreted raqia as expanse, following a number of
exegetes of the 16th and 17th centuriesbetween these God
ordered a "firmament to be", or an "expanse" (eyqr
"expansio", Montanus. Tigurine version; "extensio",
Munster, Fagius, Vatablus, Aben Ezra; "expansum", Junius,
Tremellius, Piscator, Drusius, Schmidt, sterewma Sept.
"firmamentum", V. L.); something stretched out and spread
like a curtain, tent, or canopy: and to this all those passages
of Scripture refer, which speak of the stretching out of the
heavens, as this firmament or expanse is afterwards called
(in An exposition of the Old Testament, 1757)

Where did flat earth and dome

heaven come from?

1888 Flammarion woodcut

Antoine Augustin Calmet

1672-1757
Published a Dissertation on the World View
of the Jews in 1744 ; this material was
extracted from his earlier On the World
System of the Ancient Hebrews in
Dissertations qui peuvent servir de
prolgomnes l'Ecriture Sainte (Paris,
1720: 450 ff)
Describes world view of the Jewsa flat
earth capped by a tent-like heavenly vault
he used this material in his introduction to
Galileos work
This was an early example of
accommodation

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Voltaire
1694-1778

French philosopher, published

Dictionnaire philosophique portatif
in 1764he is one of the earliest
philosophers to suggest that the
ancients believed in a dome or
vaulted sky that rested upon a flat
earth in his entry under Le Ciel des
anciensunder Heaven in
English editions (1764: 76)
Probably got the idea from Calmet

Jean Antoine Letronne

In 1834, Jean Antoine Letronne, a

French archaeologist (Egyptologist)
of strong anti-religious ideas,
misrepresented the church fathers and
their medieval successors as
believing in a flat earth, in his On the
Cosmographical Ideas of the Church
Fathers.

William Whewell

In 1837, the English philosopher of

science William Whewell identified, in
his History of the Inductive Sciences,
two minimally significant characters
named Lactantius and Cosmas
Indicopleustes, as evidence of a
medieval belief in a Flat Earth; the
latter argued that the sky was a vault
thus the two ideas went together
Other historians quickly followed him,
even though it was hard to find other
examples.

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William Whewell

Whewell expanded his ideas of the

Jewish view of the cosmos in a chapter
A Theory of the Solar System in a
book with a forward by Edward
HitchcockThe Plurality of Worlds
(1854)
Whewell continues with his belief that
the ancients believed in a flat earth (18)

Washington Irving and

Columbus
There was a meeting at Salamanca
in 1491, but Irving's version of it, to
quote a distinguished modern
historian of Columbus, was "pure
moonshine.

Andrew Dickson White

1832-1918

President of Cornell University,

compared Genesis with Babylonian
account: In both accounts there is
placed over the whole creation a
solid, concave firmament. Later
he characterizes the dome views of
Hilary, Ambrose, and Jerome as a
sacred science based upon the letter
of Scripture and on theology.

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John William Colenso

If it would be wrong for a Christian Missionary of our day, to

enforce the dogmas of the Church in former ages, which we now
know to be absurd, and to mislead a class of native catchiste, by
teaching them that the Earth is flat, and the sky a solid firmament,
above which the stores of rain are treasured, when God has
taught us otherwise, it must be equally wrong and sinful, to
teach them that the Scripture stories of the Creation, the Fall, and
the Deluge, are infallible records of historical fact, if God, by the
discoveries of Science in our day, has taught us to know that these
narratives whatever they may be are certainly not to be
regarded as history(1865: 289).

Lewis Bayles Paton

(1864-1932)

A Professor at Hartford Theological

Seminary; Director of the American
School in Jerusalem in 1903, located in
the Grand New Hotel inside Jaffa Gate
Argued that the Biblical cosmology was
pre-Copernican (1915: 12); he had
accepted the negative assessment of
medieval scholarship regarding
cosmology

Harry Emerson Fosdick

1878-1969

In the Scriptures the flat earth is founded on an underlying sea; it

is stationary; the heavens are like an upturned bowl or canopy
above it; the circumference of this vault rests on pillars; the son,
moon, and stars move within this firmament of special purpose to
illumine man; there is a sea above the sky, the waters which
were above the heavens, and through the windows of heaven
the rain comes down; within the earth is Sheol, where dwell the
shadowy dead; this whole cosmic system is suspended over
vacancy; and it was all made in six days with a morning and an
evening, a short and measurable time before. This is the
worldview of the Bible.

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Popular with neo-Evangelicals

Seely, an evangelical, has

defended the 19th century
conclusions that the ancient
Hebrews believed the
heaven was a solid vault

The Hebrews were Nave about

Nature
In a recent book, Brian Bull
and Fritz Guy propose that the
ancient Hebrews had a pre-
scientific view of creation and
that this naivety is illustrated in
Genesis 1the Creation
account

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Jeffrey Burton Russell

The reason for promoting both the specific lie about the
sphericity of the earth and the general lie that religion and
science are in natural and eternal conflict in Western society, is
to defend Darwinism. The answer is really only slightly more
complicated than that bald statement. The flat-earth lie was
ammunition against the creationists. The argument was simple
and powerful, if not elegant: "Look how stupid these Christians
are. They are always getting in the way of science and progress.
These people who deny evolution today are exactly the same sort
of people as those idiots who for at least a thousand years denied
that the earth was round. How stupid can you get?"

Robert C. Newman

Published a book in 2000 in

which he deals with the
linguistic and exegetical
issues and argues that raqia
never referred to a vault or
dome in Hebrew

Conclusions
The ancient Hebrews neighbors did NOT
believe in a flat earth, vaulted heaven
Raqia does not mean something solid
For nearly 2000 years, Christian Scholars
believed in a spherical earthnot flat
They were uncertain about the celestial
spheresperhaps solid, but later not solid
However, they translated raqia as expanse
not something solid

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Conclusions -2
The idea of the flat earth and vaulted heaven
was introduced into modern scholarship by
Calmet who wanted to save Galileo
Idea was picked up by Historical Critics
And by Evangelicals in the 1830s who did not
know how to deal with geology and biological
evolution that demanded long ages
The flat earth and solid dome were an
invention of 19th century scholarship

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