Firmament

The firmament is the sky, conceived as a solid dome. According to Genesis, God created the firmament to separate the "waters above" the earth (the source of rain) from those below (in the underworld). The word is anglicised from Latin firmamentum, which appears in the Vulgate.
==Etymology==
The word "firmament" is first recorded in a Middle English narrative based on scripture dated 1250."firmament", Oxford English Dictionary (1989). "ðo god bad ben ðe firmament". From The story of Genesis and Exodus (1250). It later appeared in the King James Bible. The word is anglicised from Latin firmamentum, used in the Vulgate (4th century). This in turn is derived from the Latin root firmus, a cognate with "firm". The word is a Latinization of the Greek stereoma, which appears in the Septuagint (c. 200 BCE).
==Translation==
The word "firmament" is used to translate raqia, or raqiya` (רקיע), a word used in Biblical Hebrew. The connotation of firmness conveyed by the Vulgate's firmamentum is consistent with that of stereoma, the Greek word used in the Septuagint, an earlier translation. The notion of solidity is advanced explicitly in several biblical passages.See, for example, .
The original word raqia is derived from the root raqa (רקע), meaning "to beat or spread out", e.g., the process of making a dish by hammering thin a lump of metal. Raqa adopted the meaning "to make firm or solid" in Syriac, a major dialect of Aramaic (the vernacular of Jesus) and close cognate of Hebrew.
Conservatives and fundamentalists tend to favor translations that allow scripture to be harmonized with scientific knowledge, for example "expanse". This translation is used by the New International Version and by the English Standard Version. The New Revised Standard Version uses "dome", as in the Celestial dome.
==Biblical use==
The word is used in the Genesis creation narrative:
An extremely literalistic interpretation of the Bible and non-canonical related texts present a cosmology that is incompatible with modern scientific knowledge.The Scriptural Basis for a Geocentric Cosmology The firmament was a great tent-like ceiling made of solid crystalline-like material, and which, according to the pseudepedigraphic 2nd or 3rd century book of 3 Baruch, might be pierced by tower and gimlet. It had many windows, some of which opened and closed for the sun and moon to travel through or to let water, which was held above, fall through as rain. On top there were also warehouses of snow and hail. Stars were small objects that were attached tenuosly to its surface., , , , , , and , .
The Jewish Encyclopedia describes the firmament as follows:
==Christian views==
Augustine wrote that too much learning had been expended on the nature of the firmament.Grant, Edward, Planets, stars, and orbs: the medieval cosmos, 1200-1687. p. 335. "We may understand this name as given to indicate not it is motionless but that it is solid." he wrote. Saint Basil argued for a fluid firmament. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, the firmament had a "solid nature" and stood above a "region of fire, wherein all vapor must be consumed."Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, "Whether there are waters above the firmament?"
The Copernican Revolution of the 16th century led to reconsideration of these matters. In 1554, John Calvin proposed that "firmament" be interpreted as clouds.Luigi Piccardi, W. Bruce Masse, Myth and geology, p. 40 "He who would learn astronomy and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere," wrote Calvin. Genesis had to conform to popular prejudice regarding cosmology, or it would not have been accepted. "As it became a theologian, [Moses] had to respect us rather than the stars," Calvin wrote. Calvin's "doctrine of accommodation" allowed Protestants to accept the findings of science without rejecting the authority of scripture. According to some Catholics, the Bible simply reflects the cosmological ideas that were prevalent at the time it was written.Firmament, Catholic Encyclopedia.
==Scientific development==
The Greeks and Stoics adopted a model of celestial spheres after the discovery of the sphericity of the Earth in the 4th to 3rd centuries BCE. The Medieval Scholastics adopted a cosmology that fused the ideas of the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Ptolemy.Grant, p. 308. This cosmology involved celestial orbs, nested concentrically inside one another, with the earth at the centre. The outermost orb contained the stars and the term firmament was then transferred to this orb. (There were seven inner orbs for the seven wanderers of the sky, and their ordering is preserved in the naming of the days of the week.)
Even Copernicus' heliocentric model included an outer sphere that held the stars (and by having the earth rotate daily on its axis it allowed the firmament to be completely stationary). Tycho Brahe's studies of the nova of 1572 and the comet of 1577 were the first major challenges to the idea that orbs existed as solid, incorruptible, material objects.Grant, p. 348.
In 1584, Bruno proposed a cosmology without firmament: an infinite universe in which the stars are actually suns with their own planetary systems.Giordano Bruno, De l'infinito universo e mondi (On the Infinite Universe and Worlds), 1584. After Galileo began using a telescope to examine the sky, it became harder to argue that the heavens were perfect, as Aristotelian philosophy required. By 1630, the concept of solid orbs was no longer dominant.Grant, p. 349.
==Different cultures==
The notion of the sky as a solid object (rather than just an atmospheric expanse) was widespread among both ancient civilisations and primitive cultures, including ancient Greece, Egypt, China, India, Native Americans, Australian aborigines, and also early Christians.
The sky is depicted as a solid dome arched over the earth in both Mesopotamian and Indo-European mythologies (e.g., creation myths) and poetry. The Sumerian sky-god An ruled these firmament-like "heavens", which the wind-god had separated from the flat disc of the earth below, and there were primordial seas above the firmament. Ancient Indians also believed in a solid sky: "Firm is the sky and firm is the earth," says the Rig Veda. This approach to cosmology is probably universal, and is also encountered in mythologies of the New World.
==See also==
*Shamayim
==References==
==External links==
*The Vault of Heaven.
*Denver Radio / YouTube Debate on the Firmament between well-known creationist and atheist opponents.
*Banks, Robyn. Biblical Conception of the Universe. University of the Pacific.
Category:Mythological cosmologies
Category:Christian cosmology
Category:Vulgate Latin words and phrases
Category:Christian mythology