Tool Alpha
Genesis, the Beginning
What the first eleven chapters say, what they do not say, and where the real arguments are.
The firmament
Day two makes a raqia to separate the waters above from the waters below. Firmament, expanse, vault or dome: each translation carries a different picture of the sky.
Genesis 1:6-8, in every translation this tool compares.
The real question: when Genesis says God made a firmament to separate the waters, what did the first readers picture? Look up inside a domed stadium. The dome is the hard shell overhead. The space under it is where the lights hang and the game is played. The word raqia could name the shell or the space under it, and firmament, vault, dome and expanse each lean one way.
Day two has God make a raqia that divides waters above from waters below and names it sky or heaven. The sun, moon and stars are later set in it. What was it, and does the answer matter for how the chapter is read?
The word is raqia. The NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, edited by Walton, notes that the King James "firmament" was understood as the solid sky, that "expanse" came into favour more recently as an attempt to bridge science and Scripture, and that some translations have returned to "vault" and "dome." The same note says the Israelites unquestionably understood the sky to be a solid dome, but that it is uncertain whether raqia is the Hebrew word for that dome, since stronger candidates exist. It also points out that the sun, moon and stars are said to be in the raqia.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
Lennox mentions the firmament only in passing, through Leon Kass, as one of the acts of separation that structure the chapter: the firmament or vault of heaven divides the waters above from those below. He does not take a position on what it physically is. His concern on day two is the order and separation the text describes.
Walton uses the firmament as a test case. Israel thought of the sky as material, solid enough to hold back waters and support the dwelling of God, and God did not revise that picture any more than he revised the idea that people think with their hearts. If Genesis 1 were a material account, a reader would have to find something solid up there, not change the meaning of the word as concordists tend to do. On his functional reading, day two addresses weather, described in terms the Israelites understood.
The MacArthur Study Bible reads the expanse as the atmospheric and stellar heaven, the waters under it as subterranean reservoirs, and the waters above as possibly a canopy of water vapour that made the early earth like a hothouse and filtered out ultraviolet rays.
Material readings have to say what the raqia is and how the stars can be in it, whether by redefining it as atmosphere or proposing a canopy. Walton's reading has to carry the uncertainty his own study Bible admits, that raqia may not be the word for the solid dome, which weakens his cleanest example. The vapour canopy is a scientific proposal; the text itself does not describe one.
Not a mistranslation dispute. Firmament, expanse, vault and dome can each be defended. They differ on what the translator thinks the first readers pictured.
- NIV Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible, ed. John H. Walton and Craig S. Keener, notes on Genesis 1:6 and the word note on raqia
- Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One (2009), propositions 1 and 10
- Lennox, Seven Days that Divide the World (2021), ch. 3, with Leon Kass, The Beginning of Wisdom (University of Chicago Press, 2006), as quoted there
- The MacArthur Study Bible (ESV), notes on Genesis 1:6-7
