/lit/ - Literature

>>18848557
>The Vault of Heaven

>The vault of heaven is a crucial concept. The word “firmament” appears in the King James version of the Old Testament 17 times, and in each case it is translated from the Hebrew word raqiya, which meant the visible vault of the sky. The word raqiya comes from riqqua, meaning “beaten out.” In ancient times, brass objects were either cast in the form required or beaten into shape on an anvil. A good craftsman could beat a lump of cast brass into a thin bowl. Thus, Elihu asks Job, “Can you beat out [raqa] the vault of the skies, as he does, hard as a mirror of cast metal (Job 37:18)?”

>Elihu's question shows that the Hebrews considered the vault of heaven a solid, physical object. Such a large dome would be a tremendous feat of engineering. The Hebrews (and supposedly Yahweh Himself) considered it exactly that, and this point is hammered home by five scriptures:

>Job 9:8, “...who by himself spread out the heavens [shamayim]...”
>Psalm 19:1, “The heavens [shamayim] tell out the glory of God, the vault of heaven [raqiya] reveals his handiwork.”
>Psalm 102:25, “...the heavens [shamayim] were thy handiwork.”
>Isaiah 45:12, “I, with my own hands, stretched out the heavens [shamayim] and caused all their host to shine...”
>Isaiah 48:13, “...with my right hand I formed the expanse of the sky [shamayim]...”

>If these verses are about a mere illusion of a vault, they are surely much ado about nothing. Shamayim comes from shameh, a root meaning to be lofty. It literally means the sky. Other passages complete the picture of the sky as a lofty, physical dome. God “sits throned on the vaulted roof of earth [chuwg], whose inhabitants are like grasshoppers. He stretches out the skies [shamayim] like a curtain, he spreads them out like a tent to live in...[Isaiah 40:22].” Chuwg literally means “circle” or “encompassed.” By extension, it can mean roundness, as in a rounded dome or vault. Job 22:14 says God “walks to and fro on the vault of heaven [chuwg].” In both verses, the use of chuwg implies a physical object, on which one can sit and walk. Likewise, the context in both cases requires elevation. In Isaiah, the elevation causes the people below to look small as grasshoppers. In Job, God's eyes must penetrate the clouds to view the doings of humans below. Elevation is also implied by Job 22:12: “Surely God is at the zenith of the heavens [shamayim] and looks down on all the stars, high as they are.”

>>16551977
Leaving out the fact that there have been Christians who thought that genesis was allegorical since the first millennium AD, your point is still questionable. Many Christians believe humans to be a special case (though this seems to me a cope) and others may point to Adam and Eve being actual humans who at some point in the past existed in interaction with God, why might God not have acted through evolution to shape Apemen and THEN endowed the divine spark in two of them?
Christians have little problem with “the firmament of waters” being allegorical, they don’t think that pic related is actually what the world looks like, and haven’t believed that since it was understood what the nature of the earth was, so why can’t they see the rest of genesis as allegory in light of evolution?
>inb4 some zoomer from /x/ says they do believe in the firmament literally
Stay in your containment board, schizo.

I’m glad that you didn’t mention creation of Man/life at least because Darwin himself (though not really a Christian (this was more for reasons of moral theology than interpretations of the scripture literally)) attributed evolution as a law through which God acts on creation, “the Creator” is literally mentioned in the concluding sentence of On The Origin Species. Which is incidentally why this>>16551987 anon is a retard, evolution presents a challenge to biblical literalism but in no way presents challenge to belief in a God of philosophical (rather than religious) conception, in fact evolution is more fitting with an Aristotelian God or Spinozist God (distinct from each other as those are) than it is with Atheism, to which nothing is fitting.

Atheists need to stop pretending that they base their belief on evolution, they seek evolution to justify it, atheists existed long before Darwin, who was himself not an atheist. It’s notable that it’s atheists, not biologists who claim the link, in higher education evolution classes, the first thing taught is that there is no conflict between belief in a higher power and evolution, which is unsurprising considering that this statement can be taken from Darwin and many other evobiologists since.