Re: [asa] Re: Slug

Check Paul Seely's articles, notably in /Westminster Theological
Journal/, if I recall the name correctly. The popular version is based on
finding an excuse to make the chapter say something that fits with modern
ideas.
Dave

On Fri, 16 Jun 2006 02:16:14 EDT Philtill@aol.com writes:
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 14:27:29 2006