Why Does the Bible Say the Sky Is Solid?

Water in the Bible part 3—Genesis 1:6-7

This is the third installment of our journey through the image of water in the Bible. Over the next months, we’ll be looking at these verses to follow the image of water as it unfolds from Genesis to Revelation. This time we’re looking up… toward all that water above our heads.

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The first chapter of the Bible gives us a snapshot of the ancient Hebrew imagination, a biblical cosmology In that cross-section of the universe as they imagined it, there is an ocean in the sky and an ocean under the sky.

If you put yourself in their shoes, it makes sense why they might think there was a sea above the sky. The ancient Hebrews didn’t know about the water cycle, evaporation, or cloud formation. But they did know that if you dug down far enough you found water down there. They also knew that the sky was blue like water and sometimes rain fell down from it.

But it does beg the question: If there is water above the sky, how do the waters stay up there?

Enter the raquia.

What is a Raquia, Anyway?

The raquia appears early n Genesis 1. The NASB and ESV translate it as “the expanse.” Ye ol’ King James Bible calls it the “firmament.” However, perhaps a better translation is something like “sky dome.”

Here is Genesis 1:6-7:

“Then God said, “Let there be a raquia in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” God made the raquia, and separated the waters that were below the raquia from the waters that were above the raquia; and it was so.”

Remember that in the ancient Hebrew imagination, the uncreated state was not nothing. It was a vast, chaotic sea. First, God made light. Then, he separated the sea vertically by means of the raquia so that some of the water was suspended above it and some was left down below.

Stepbible.com (a wonderful tool for exploring the nooks and crannies of the Bible) defines the word raquia as an “extended surface (solid)” and “the vault of heaven.” It lists two related words:

• to beat (raqa - רָקַע) “to beat, stamp, beat out, spread out, stretch”

• hammered out (riqqua - רִקּוּעַ) “expansion (of plates)”

So the raquia is a solid plane above the sky and the word is related to the words for hammering out metal. Curious.

Where Else Does the Raquia Appear in the Bible?

The word raquia appears 17 times in the Bible: nine times in Genesis, two times in the Psalms, five times in Ezekiel, and one time in Daniel.

There are also allusions to it a few other times, such as Proverbs 8:27-29 (NASB)

“When He established the heavens, I was there;
When He inscribed a circle on the face of the deep,
When He made firm the skies above,
When the springs of the deep became fixed,
When He set a boundary for the sea
So that the water would not violate His command…”

Or this verse in Job 37:18

“Can you, with Him, spread out the skies,
Strong as a cast metal mirror…?”

If we read these verses carefully, we can fill in a few more of the characteristics of the sky dome.

It is Blue

The color of the sky dome is partly common sense. If you walk outside on a clear day and look up, you see blue from horizon to horizon. Besides, the sea is blue too and doesn’t the raquia support an aerial sea above it?

But the raquia is also described as being like “ice,” another hint of blueness. (See the Ezekiel 1:22 quote below.)

It is also compared to lapis lazuli or sapphires, which are blue stones, as in Exodus 24:10:

“Then Moses went up with Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, and they saw the God of Israel; and under His feet there appeared to be a pavement of sapphire, as clear as the sky itself.”

(Again, see the Ezekiel 1:26 quote below and Ezekiel 10:1).

Like All Creation, It Tells a Story of God’s Wisdom and Power

Psalm 19 is a paen to the wonders of God’s creation and his law. It says:

“The heavens tell of the glory of God;
And their expanse declares the work of His hands.
Day-to-day pours forth speech,
And night to night reveals knowledge.” (Psalm 19: 1-2)

There is the raquia hiding behind the “expanse” again. That isn’t the sky, friends. That’s the sky dome.

(By the way, verse 1 and 2 are more good examples of what biblical writers do with repetition.)

There Is More Than Water Above It

In some ways, the raquia is described as a solid surface holding up the “waters above.” After all, when God sends the flood in Genesis 6, the water comes from the “fountains of the deep” (the waters below) and the “floodgates of the heavens.” The word “floodgates” can also be translated as “windows.” Windows in what? In the raquia.

However, the raquia sometimes seems to be more than just a big levy in the sky. Sometimes it seems to be the boundary of the visible reality, the demarcation between “our space” and “God’s space.” It is almost as if, if you could poke a peephole through it you wouldn’t see into the storehouses of the rain, but into God’s throne room.

Let’s look at the raquia in Ezekiel.

The book of Ezekiel opens with the prophet describing a surreal and apocalyptic vision of wondrous sky creatures covered in wings and eyes and wheels. Above the creatures is our friend the raquia.

“Now over the heads of the living beings there was the likeness of the raquia, like the awesome gleam of crystal, spread out over their heads.” (Ezekiel 1:22 NASB)

[Note: the word translated as “crystal” here can also be translated as “ice.”]

But this time it isn’t water above the raquia but God’s throne room.

Now above the expanse that was over their heads there was something resembling a throne, like lapis lazuli in appearance; and on that which resembled a throne, high up, was a figure with the appearance of a man. (Ezekiel 1:26)

When Ezekiel sees the “man” on the throne, he recognizes the glory of the Lord and falls on his face before God.

This reminds me again of Moses’ vision of God’s throne at Mt. Sinai in Exodus 24:10:

“Then Moses went up with Aaron, Nadab and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, and they saw the God of Israel; and under His feet there appeared to be a pavement of sapphire, as clear as the sky itself.”

And of John’s vision of the throne of God in Revelation 4:6 (NASB)

“…before the throne there was something like a sea of glass, like crystal…”

It is almost as if in John’s vision in Revelation, he has been given a snapshot from a view above the raquia and it looks like a calm sea of glass, the solid floor of God’s throneroom.

The Raquia Is the Boundary Between Heaven and Earth

At this point, the raquia ties into the meanings around the word “heavens” (plural) or shamayim in Hebrew. We often think of “heaven” (singular) as the place you go where you die, but it turns out that concept might not actually come from the Bible.

When you see the word shamayim, it refers to three things: (1) the sky, the heavens of the birds, (2) what we would call outer space, the heavens of the stars, or (3) God’s “space,” the heaven of the invisible dimension where God’s throne is. (Think of the Lord’s prayer and the line “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven?”) In that prayer, heaven is separate from the earth and is distinguished by the fact that God’s will is done there completely.

Are Ezekiel, Moses, and John describing an image of the boundary between God’s space and earthly space? This image could be drawing on other schemas of meaning in the Bible that associate “up-ness” with God’s dwelling place, as in the idea that the peaks of mountains are holy places. Is this yet another example of the subtle presence of biblical cosmology in not only the imagination of the biblical authors but God’s communication with them?

The Veil Between Heaven and Earth Is Torn

There is one last piece of the raquia story.

The temple (and the tabernacle before it) were built to be “models of the universe,” or microcosms of the macrocosmos. The three-part structure of the courtyard, the Holy Place, and the Most Holy Place correspond to two three-tiered things we see in Genesis 1. Both the “heavens-earth-sea” and the “garden-Eden-other lands” geography of Genesis 1 come in “sets of three” and both map onto the structure of the temple and tabernacle.

Just as there is a barrier, the raquia, between the heavens and the earth, there is a barrier between the Holy Place and the Most Holy Place (which, as the place the ark is stored, is also connected to God’s throne). The Most Holy Place was “God’s space” and only the High Priest was allowed to enter and that only on one day each year to perform atonement for the sins of the people. There were specific instructions for the design of the temple curtain. It was blue and purple, like the raquia, and was woven with images of angels, evoking the celestial realm. (2 Chronicles 3:14)

As scholar Peter Leithart wrote,

“The veil separates the most holy place from the rest of the temple (3:14). This corresponds to the firmament of Day 2.”

This gives greater meaning to the moment in the gospels when the veil of the temple is torn in two at the moment of Jesus’ death. (Matthew 27:51) It is as if the barrier that separated God’s space from earthly space was being opened and the kingdom of God could now even more fully invade the earth.

[For more on this, explore BibleProject’s Heaven and Earth theme.]

Why Would God Lie To Them? Or to Us?

The other day a friend asked me what I was writing and I said, “A post on why the Bible says the sky is solid.” He answered, “That’s easy. It doesn’t.” I read him Genesis 1:6 but instead of the word “expanse” I substituted the word raquia.

He was unconvinced.

I have sympathy with that perspective. After all, we modern people have seen pictures of the earth from space. We have seen the tiny, thumbnail haze of atmosphere around the blue marble of the earth. We can barely imagine the biblical cosmology of the ancient Hebrews, let alone adopt it as our own. We also have the tenets of science and have been taught that they are the bedrock of true knowledge and that the human race is on a journey in which the powers of science continually overturn the archaic paradigms of our ancestors. Sure, the wisdom of the past might have a timeless character but the knowledge of the past quickly becomes outmoded and should be set aside.

Why would God lock his timeless revelation into one ancient culture’s inaccurate view of the universe?

What do we make of the idea that the Bible might teach such an “unscientific view” of the world as to depict a solid sky? Does this mean the Bible isn’t true? Contains errors? What else might be untrustworthy inside its pages? If the Bible really does depict a solid sky, does it also teach that the sky is solid?

These questions brings us right to the heart of a larger question: what is the nature of God’s communication with humanity? To begin to chip away at that enormous question, I’ll offer a lecture for those who want to explore more.

How Did We Get the Bible? (Andy Patton)

These questions deserve to be addressed in greater depth in future posts, but briefly, I would invite you to consider this quote from scholar John Walton’s book The Lost World of Adam and Eve:

“As people who take the Bible seriously, we are obligated to read it for what the human communicator conveys to us about what God was revealing. The human communicator is going to do that in the context of his native cognitive environment. Our procedure, then, is first to set aside our own cultural assumptions as much as we are able and then to try to read the text for what it is saying.”

and he goes on to say

“It takes a degree of discipline as readers who are outsiders not to assume our modern perspectives and impose them on the text, but often we do not even know we are doing it because our own context is so intrinsic to our thinking and the ancient world is an unknown.”

Walton is saying that when he communicated with the authors of the Bible. God operated within the way the original readers and writers of the texts of the Bible conceived of the universe. The things he was communicating made sense to them. He spoke their own language and drew his communication out of the encyclopedia of their imaginations. He chose images that made sense to them and incorporated those meanings into his self-revelation (often subverting, bending, and expanding those meanings along the way).

In other words, he accommodated his communication to something they could understand. In the words of the reformer John Calvin, God “talks baby talk to us.” Why? Because he wants us to understand what he is saying about himself, about humanity, and about reality, so he speaks in ways we can understand just like a good parent does to his or her child.

Is a parent lying to a child when they put complex truths in simple terms? Or gives the child an answer that fits inside the context of what the child already knows? If my son asked why apples fall to the ground and I told him about the intricacies of gravity and spacetime and quantum physics, would I really be answering his question? If God told the ancient Hebrews about the universe in terms of the atmosphere, spherical planets, string theory, and relativity, would it be helpful or alienating? Would it convey the deeper concepts he was trying to convey about himself, his creation, or his relationship to humanity?

So we arrive at the same place we will come to in each of these explorations of the meaning of water in the Bible. As readers of these ancient texts who don’t share a cultural or temporal context with the authors of the texts, we have to take off the lenses of our modern imaginaries and put on (to what degree we are able) the imaginaries of the ancient Hebrews in order to understand what God is communicating.

And in that conception of the universe, the sky was solid, the water above was separated from the waters below, and God’s space was as near as the sky, the temple, and - as the story of the Old Testament unfolds into the New Testament - inside the breast of every believer.

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Catch Up With Other Posts on Water in the Bible

• The List of Passages for the Theme of Water in the Bible

• Before Creation There Was... Water? (Genesis 1:1-2)

Photo by Danist Soh on Unsplash