The idea of a solid dome over the Earth is not a product of the Dark Ages—it originates from ancient Near Eastern cosmology, which influenced biblical writers. The concept appears in cultures surrounding ancient Israel, including Babylonian, Egyptian, and Sumerian texts, which describe the sky as a solid structure holding back waters above.
Let's see them. You must have seen them. How were they used. Show us, if possible, without a remarkable feat of verbosity even by comparison to me,
The Hebrew word raqia does mean “expanse,” but its root raqa means “to spread out by hammering,” often used to describe metals being beaten into a sheet. In ancient understanding, the sky was perceived as a firm structure separating waters above from waters below. The Greek stereoma and Latin firmamentum reinforced this interpretation. The claim that this idea stems only from the Dark Ages ignores historical linguistic and cultural evidence.
Read it. It doesn't say the idea stems only from the Dark Ages. It's talking about images like the Flammarion engraving which appeared in Bibles and Bible dictionaries of that time. Considering historical, linguistic and cultural evidence doesn't really mean reading somewhere the words that appear throughout and taking them extremely literal. If I say I'm about to kick the bucket it doesn't likely have anything to do with pigs, does it? Literally. It all comes from the same place. We don't call it Jupiter and July for nothing. Literally.
The Bible itself contains verses that align with this view. Job 37:18 speaks of God spreading out the skies as “strong as a molten mirror.” Ezekiel 1:22 describes a firm and dazzling expanse over the heads of the cherubim. These are consistent with the idea of a solid dome.
That's a thoroughly exhaustive examination for you. Over the heads of what? What about birds? Did they fly around in this, this metal dome hammered out laterally? Sorry, literally? When you read something in the Bible that doesn't give you your answer unless you are looking for that answer. Think of it like a doctor. There are various kinds, some good, some bad and some from long ago.
You asked for examples of ancient Near Eastern texts describing the sky as a solid dome. The Babylonian Enuma Elish is one of the clearest sources—it describes the god Marduk splitting the body of the chaos goddess Tiamat in half to form the heavens and the Earth, with her upper half forming a solid barrier holding back the primeval waters above (Tablet IV, lines 135–146). That’s not metaphor—it’s cosmological framework.
In Egyptian cosmology, the sky was often depicted as the goddess Nut, arched over the Earth, supported by the air god Shu, separating the waters above from the land below. Nut wasn’t misty sky; she was shown spanning heaven like a solid vault, her feet and hands touching the Earth.
The Sumerian texts, like those referencing An, the god of the sky, show a division between heaven and Earth as distinct and layered realms, separated by a firm boundary. These aren’t literary idioms or figures of speech. These are cosmological models conveyed in mythological language, and they show continuity with what we find in Genesis and Job.
You rightly noted that Flammarion’s 19th-century engraving is from a much later period. That’s true—it’s an imaginative illustration, not ancient evidence. But I never claimed otherwise. The point is that the concept of the sky as a solid dome predates it by millennia and can be traced through the vocabulary and descriptions used in ancient texts, including the Hebrew Bible.
You mentioned the phrase “kick the bucket” as a caution against reading literally. But idioms are only identifiable as idioms when their usage and context clearly mark them as such. “Kick the bucket” appears in a culture where idioms are defined, listed, and understood not to be literal. Ancient cosmology wasn’t filled with idioms—it was filled with models of how the world was believed to function. When Job 37:18 speaks of the sky being “as hard as a molten mirror,” that is not figurative language in a context of whimsy—it’s part of a broader cosmological picture consistent with other ancient cultures.
The idea that the sky was a solid structure wasn’t a stray metaphor—it was part of a coherent worldview, just like the belief that the Earth was flat and surrounded by a cosmic ocean. Birds in this model didn’t pierce the dome any more than rainwater did—it was the vault below the waters, not the breathable atmosphere.
You’re right: not every verse in the Bible lays out a detailed cosmology. But that’s why we compare verses across the text, and also look outward to the wider ancient world that shaped the writers’ assumptions. The goal isn’t to cherry-pick but to understand the world they believed they lived in—and by every historical and linguistic standard, that included a solid dome overhead.
If we read Job or Genesis or Ezekiel in historical context, rather than retrofitting it to post-Enlightenment cosmology, we find a view of the universe that is strikingly consistent with the ancient Near East—not modern science. That’s not an attack on the text—it’s respect for its cultural roots.
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