Re: Firmament and the Water above was [asa] Re: Slug

In a message dated 6/17/2006 9:20:20 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
glennmorton@entouch.net writes:
Yes, but this is long after Aristotle and they were in the Hellenistic
world. Did the Hellenistic world influence their understanding of
cosmology? Did the Hellenistic world cause them to re-define raqiya in the
1st or 2nd century?
Glenn makes a very important point here. IMO, when Alexander the Great
conquered the near east, that set up the situation we have today in which was are
still arguing about the meaning of Genesis 1. Alexander brought Greek
cosmology, which viewed the sun and moon and many other things differently than ANE
cosmology. Hence, the early church fathers and the Jewish teachers of the 1st
century together misunderstood Moses and didn't know how to interpret him. We
have very little written material from before 330 BC to understand what the
Jews thought of Genesis. More recently, we have re-discovered ANE cosmology,
and there has been IMO an overreaction to read it directly into the text,
instead of a more nuanced approach to see how Moses was **interacting** with the
prevalent ANE cosmology.

God bless,
Phil Metzger

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Received on Sun Jun 18 18:20:52 2006