![]() The caption underneath the engraving (not shown here) translates to "A medieval missionary tells that he has found the point where heaven and Earth meet." The Flammarion engraving (1888) depicts a man crawling under the edge of the sky, depicted as if it were a solid hemisphere, to look at the mysterious Empyrean beyond. Saint Basil rejected the notion that the firmament is made of solid ice, although Bede in Hexaemeron ignores the problem of the motion of celestial bodies (stars) in a solid firmament and declares that the siderum caelum (heaven of the celestial bodies) was made firm ( firmatum) in the midst of the waters so should be interpreted as having the firmness of crystalline stone ( cristallini Iapidis). At issue was the reconciliation of Scripture with Aristotle's cosmology. This matter of the position of the "waters" above the firmament was considered by Augustine in De Genesi ad litteram (perhaps his least studied work): "only God knows how and why are there, but we cannot deny the authority of Holy Scripture which is greater than our understanding".Įarly Christian writers wrote at length about the material nature of the firmament, the problem arising from the barrier said to be created when it divided the waters above and below it. Ībout this Ambrose wrote: "Wise men of the world say that water cannot be over the heavens" the firmament is called such, according to Ambrose, because it held back the waters above it. One medieval writer who rejected such notions was Pietro d'Abano who argued that theologians "assuming a crystalline, or aqueous sphere, and an empyrean, or firey sphere" were relying on revelation more than Scripture. Ĭhristian theologians of note writing between the 5th and mid-12th century were generally in agreement that the waters, sometimes called the "crystalline orb", were located above the firmament and beneath the fiery heaven that was also called empyrean (from Greek ἔμπυρος). Some of these theories identified caelum as the higher, immaterial and spiritual heaven, whereas firmamentum was of corporeal existence. Perhaps beginning with Origen, the different identifiers used for heavens in the Book of Genesis, caelum and firmamentum, sparked some commentary on the significance of the order of creation ( caelum identified as the heaven of the first day, and firmamentum as the heaven of the second day). Gerhard von Rad Models of the Firmament The plurality of heaven The Vulgate translates rāqīaʿ with firmamentum, and that remains the best rendering. The meaning of the verb rqʿ concerns the hammering of the vault of heaven into firmness (Isa. Rāqīaʿ means that which is firmly hammered, stamped (a word of the same root in Phoenecian means "tin dish"!). Rāqīaʿ derives from the root rqʿ ( רָקַע), meaning "to beat or spread out thinly". These words all translate the Biblical Hebrew word rāqīaʿ ( רָקִ֫יעַ), used for example in Genesis 1.6, where it is contrasted with shamayim ( שָׁמַיִם), translated as " heaven(s)" in Genesis 1.1. This in turn is a calque of the Greek στερέωμᾰ ( steréōma), also meaning a solid or firm structure (Greek στερεός = rigid), which appears in the Septuagint, the Greek translation made by Jewish scholars around 200 BCE. The same word is found in French and German Bible translations, all from Latin firmamentum (a firm object), used in the Vulgate (4th century). It later appeared in the King James Bible. In English, the word "firmament" is recorded as early as 1250, in the Middle English Story of Genesis and Exodus. Today it survives as a synonym for "sky" or "heaven". The concept was adopted into the subsequent Classical/Medieval model of heavenly spheres, but was dropped with advances in astronomy in the 16th and 17th centuries. In biblical cosmology, the firmament is the vast solid dome created by God during the Genesis creation narrative to divide the primal sea into upper and lower portions so that the dry land could appear. ![]() The sun, planets and angels and the firmament.
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