![]() ![]() ![]() Birds are said to fly “in the open expanse of the sky” (Gen. Genesis 1:8 states that God called the raqia shemayim, thus equating the raqia with the “sky” or “the heavens.” The term raqia of the shemayim, or “expanse of the sky” or “expanse of the heavens,” occurs four times in the creation narrative: Gen. The context of raqia in the Genesis narrative does not imply any sort of solid structure. The term raqia, here translated as “expanse,” implies something that has been spread out or stretched out it is a cognate of the verb raqa, which means, “to spread out or stretch out.” No specific material substance is inherent in the term raqia, so just what has been spread out must be determined from the context. God called the expanse 'sky.' And there was evening, and there was morning -the second day (Gen. The Hebrew term raqia, the disputed meaning of which is at the heart of our discussion, first appears in Genesis 1:6:Īnd God said, “Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. ![]() Guy and Bull argue that a solid vault is what the original hearers of the Genesis narrative would have understood from the words used, and hence what we should infer as the author's intended meaning. Bull, a pathologist and former dean of the LLU School of Medicine. This interpretation has recently been endorsed in a book titled God, Sky & Land: Genesis One as the Ancient Hebrews Heard It, by two Adventist authors, Fritz Guy, a theologian and former president of La Sierra University, and Dr. Critics of the Genesis narrative have often argued that it describes a cosmology in which the sky is a solid vault, or an inverted metal bowl, to which are affixed the sun, moon and stars. ![]()
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