Re: [asa] Re: Slug

In a message dated 6/16/2006 12:38:42 AM Eastern Daylight Time,
dfsiemensjr@juno.com writes:
There have been many attempts to make the Hebrew term refer to the atmosphere
or to space, rather than to connect it to ancient views. But there is water
above it, when it would have to be within it for the water to be in clouds.
Dave,

can you point me to some papers that have dealt with this thoroughly. I find
your arguments unpersuasive but will withhold judgement until I read
something more thorough. They are unpersuasive because it seems you are making an
etymological fallacy -- that a word's meaning is determined by its etymology.
While /raquia^/ apparently does hail from ANE cosmology in which the world is
capped with a hard sphere, it seems to me that the Bible authors did not mean
for its usage to imply that. Remember the ANE cosmologies must have been very
ancient, but Moses was writing at a relatively recent date. It's hard to
imagine that the Hebrews who depended on rain for agriculture (unlike the
mesopotamians) would really believe that clouds were coming through gates in a hard
sphere at such a late date, after they had sojourned in Egypt and become the
cosmopolitan people that they really were! The usage of phrases like "open the
floodgates of heaven" don't make your case because these kinds of phrases are
common in languages like English as holdovers from ancient cosmologies and
cannot tell us what the speaker actually believes.

Every instance I can think of in the Bible shows that they connect the
"waters above" with the physical concept of ordinary clouds and ordinary rain.
Genesis 2 even says this explicitly in verse 6, where God cures the first of the
two problems: the first problem was no rain to make wild plants grow, and the
second problem was no man to make the cultivated plants grow. So God cured the
first problem by causing a mist (cloud) to rise from the Earth and water the
whole surface of the ground, and He cured the second problem by making man.
(This is the correct reading of the text, YEC's notwithstanding.) So they
clearly understood that rain water comes up from the earth to form clouds, not
down through the windows of a hard dome.

I can provide other examples to show that the Hebrews saw rain as coming from
clouds within the atmosphere, and that the phrases about waters above a solid
dome were just sayings common in that day. Ps.104 is a good example, noting
that all 6 days are presented in that Psalm in the same order as Genesis 1.
In the place of Day 2 is a discussion of God riding in the clouds and setting
the pillars of his upper chambers in the waters. This is a reference to the
"waters above" from Genesis Day 2. But then in the place of Day 3 the psalmist
discusses vegetation and how God sends them rain from the "upper chambers"
using the exact same phrase that he used in regard to Day 2, clearly showing that
he understood the "waters above" to be just ordinary rain.

Also, the parallelism betw. Gen 1 and Gen 2 demonstrate this. I know many on
this list will deny the intentional parallelism between those two chapters,
but the best scholarship has successfully demonstrated it -- the "waters above"
in Gen 1 Day 2 and the rain clouds that cause wild vegetation to grow in Gen
2 are talking about the same thing. It would have been a huge omission if the
origin of rain were not mentioned in Gen 1. Rain was attributed by the
Canaanites to Baal, and it would have been a sorry polemic -- a sorry lesson in
theology -- if it failed to mention that Yahweh was the true creator of rain.
But it does tell us that in Genesis Day 2 when God is the one who separates the
waters. This draws from the language of the ANE cosmology, but there is no
reason to think that the physical interpretation of ANE cosmology was a part of
the package.

also, check out Ps 78:23, "Yet He commanded the clouds above, and opened the
doors of heaven." In the parallelism of this poetry, commanding clouds is
identified with the phrase about opening the doors of heaven. At the time the
psalmist wrote, they clearly understood that doors in the raquia was just a
phrase and that the true physics was in the clouds releasing water.

Also, we see that "windows of heaven" had become a general, poetic phrase
used for more than just water,

II Ki 7:2
2 And the royal officer on whose hand the king was leaning answered the man
of God and said, "Behold, if the LORD should make windows in heaven, could this
thing be?" Then he said, "Behold you shall see it with your own eyes, but you
shall not eat of it."
(NAS)

Mal 3:10
10 "Bring the whole tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in
My house, and test Me now in this," says the LORD of hosts, "if I will not open
for you the windows of heaven, and pour out for you a blessing until it
overflows.
(NAS)

Nobody really believed that God would send money or food hurtling down
through doors in the raquia!

Of course there are like this many poetic places that use the ANE phrases,
such as Ps. 148:4 and Proverbs 8:24-31, but we can't tell from poetry what they
actually believed about the physics.

I think the problem in your argument -- why I find it unpersuasive -- is that
it is not nuanced enough to include the difference between common sayings and
the physical concepts attached to those sayings. Just pointing out all the
sayings in the text proves nothing. You have to show whether the people of
that time had a physical concept that agreed with the historical origin of those
sayings. Some of the examples I mention above from the Bible clearly show
that the Hebrews did NOT have a physical concept that agreed with those ANE
sayings. We have to conclude that somewhere along the way, through the many
thousands of years since the time when the earliest Mesopotamians began to create
their cosmology and language until the time that Moses led the Jews out from
Egypt -- somewhere along the way the Jews had watched a rain cloud form in the
sky and noticed that there was no gate opened in the solid dome. It is hard to
believe that they wouldn't have done this, being dependant on rain and thus
tempted to worship Baal, as they were! When you reflect on it, it really is
harder for us to believe that the Jews could, at that relatively recent date,
still hold to the original ANE cosmology in its entirety rather than to believe
that they might have gotten just a wee bit smarter.

You rightly point out the fallacy of those who try to claim that /raquia^/
doesn't mean solid dome, when clearly it does. But those who argue against this
etymology for /raquia^/ are making the same non-nuanced error as I see in
your argument. It seems to me the only right reading is that /raquia^/ really is
a holdover from ANE cosmology meaning solid dome, and is just one element of
the ANE cosmology that can be seen in the text. But it seems to me that the
Jews weren't endorsing that entire cosmology simply by using their language. I
see this as a divine accomodation to the scars of human language, not to
errant science.

By the way, the writer of Genesis 1 could have used on Day 4 the normal word
for sun (which is used 120 times in the OT), or the normal word for moon
(which is used some 20 times), but instead he chose to use a word that is NEVER
applied to those concepts anywhere in the entire remainder of the Bible. The
word he used has many applications in the Bible, most or all of them
phenomenological. He was only discussing the phenomena of distinct lights in the sky, to
fit the parallelism with Day 1, not the ontology of the actual objects in the
sky. Again, I would suggest that the Hebrews were smarter than the credit we
smug moderns give them, and that they might have noticed the curved shadows on
the moon and concluded that it was a solid object, not a disk attached to a
dome. Since he was discussing lights on Days 1 and 4, not solid objects, he
avoided use of the words that he knew referred to the objects, and chose to use
a word that meant phenomena of lights, instead. There is no teaching of
cosmology in this.

As I said, however, I'll withold judgment until I can read a full paper or
two on the topic if you can point me to them.

God's blessings to you!

Phil Metzger

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Received on Fri Jun 16 02:17:15 2006