Ancient Cosmology and Genesis

Certainly anyone denying the solidity of the raqia in Genesis 1 bears a heavy burden of proof.¹

The Error is not the alleged medieval belief that the earth was flat, but rather the modern error that such a belief ever prevailed.²

Summary

Does Genesis share the physical world-picture of Israel's neighbours, and does it matter?  The question splits into three that have different answers.  The raqia of Genesis 1:6-8 is a genuine two-sided dispute.  The flat-earth charge is not a dispute at all.  The creation-order problems are real, but they fall on concordism, not on the plain reading.

1. Israel's neighbours pictured a solid, layered sky, and the primary texts say so in stone.  The Assyrian tablet KAR 307³ lists three heavens with floors of luludanitu-stone, saggilmud-stone and jasper, and says Marduk "drew the constellations of the gods" on the jasper.³  Enuma Elish IV 137-140 has Marduk split Tiamat "like a dried fish", set up half of her as the heavens, and stretch "the skin" with a guard posted "not to let her waters escape".⁴  W. G. Lambert,⁴ the editor of the epic, wrote that the "firmament" of Genesis 1 "corresponds to the 'skin' in Enuma Elis IV 139".⁴  The Babylonian Map of the World (BM 92687) draws the earth as a disc ringed by an ocean.³  Anyone who says the ancient Near East had no solid sky is arguing against the tablets.

2. The case that the author of Genesis 1 pictured the raqia as solid is strong.  Paul Seely's two 1991-1992 papers¹ assembled it:  the verb raqa is used of hammering gold into leaf (Exod 39:3);  the raqia is something God "made" (asah) to hold apart two bodies of water;  the sun, moon and stars are set "in" it (Gen 1:17) while birds fly "on the face of" it (1:20);  waters rest above it (1:7, Ps 148:4) and come through its "windows" (Gen 7:11, 8:2);  and in Ezekiel 1:22 a raqia over the cherubim shines like crystal with a throne resting on it.¹  The Septuagint rendered the word stereoma, "solid body", and Jerome firmamentum.⁵  Origen, Ambrose and Augustine called the firmament solid, and the Talmud computes its thickness at a thousand parasangs.¹

3. The case for "expanse" is real, but its best-known advocates overstate it.  The verb raqa is used of spreading out the earth, in parallel with "stretch", in Isaiah 42:5, 44:24 and Psalm 136:6, so it does not by itself mean hammering metal.⁶  The raqia is named shamayim, "sky", the same word used for where birds fly and rain falls.  Isaiah's own images for the sky are a curtain, a tent and a scroll (Isa 40:22, 34:4).  But Randall Younker and Richard Davidson's 2011 paper,⁶ the paper young-earth writers most often cite, states that "there is no evidence that the Mesopotamians ever believed in a solid heavenly vault" and that Wayne Horowitz found "flat planes that were suspended above each other by a number of strong cables".⁶  Horowitz's book says the floors of the heavens were stone, that the stars were "etched directly onto the jasper surface", and it contains no cables.³

4. Job 37:18 does not settle it, and neither does any other single verse.  The verse asks whether Job can spread out the shechaqim, "hard as a cast metal mirror" (ESV).  Shechaqim usually means clouds, the word for "mirror" is a hapax that the Septuagint read as "appearance", and Vern Poythress of Westminster,⁷ no friend of the solid-sky reading, concedes that Robert Newman's cloud rendering "may not be right, but it shows the difficulty of relying on a single poetic verse".⁷  The honest position is that Genesis 1 never states the sky is solid, that its language fits a solid sky better than an atmospheric one, and that the "waters above" are the one element no phenomenological reading has explained well.

5. The flat-earth charge fails verse by verse.  Isaiah 40:22 uses chug, a circle or horizon, the same word Job 26:10 uses for the boundary "between light and darkness" on the waters and Proverbs 8:27 for the circle drawn "on the face of the deep".⁸  Job 26:7 says God "hangs the earth on nothing".  The "four corners" of Isaiah 11:12 and Revelation 7:1 are kanphot, "wings" or "extremities", the word used for the hem of a garment in Numbers 15:38.  The "pillars" of 1 Samuel 2:8 and Job 9:6 stand in poems that also give heaven pillars (Job 26:11).  Daniel 4:10-11 is a dream and Matthew 4:8 a vision.  Nothing here is a cosmology;  it is the same idiom English still uses in "sunrise" and "the ends of the earth".

6. No one in the medieval church taught a flat earth, and the historians who said so were making a point about Darwin.  Jeffrey Burton Russell² traced the story to Washington Irving's 1828 Columbus and Antoine-Jean Letronne, then to William Whewell, John Draper and Andrew Dickson White, who "could find few other examples" beyond Lactantius and Cosmas Indicopleustes.²  Cosmas "had no followers whatever".²  James Hannam⁹ adds that the myth "appears to have originated with Sir Francis Bacon".⁹  Basil¹⁰ said Moses "is silent as to shapes" and it did not matter to him whether the earth was a sphere, a cylinder or a disc;¹⁰  Augustine¹¹ said the biblical "vault" image, "even taken literally, does not hinder those who say sphere".¹¹  White's 1896 Warfare¹² lists Basil as an opponent of sphericity while quoting the very sentence in which Basil declines to take a side.¹²

7. One quotation on the creationist side must be retired.  A hymn attributed to Clement of Alexandria,¹³ "Out of a confused heap who didst create this ordered sphere", circulates as proof that a second-century father taught a round earth.  The Greek (Stählin's edition,¹⁴ p. 340) reads "the whole cosmos out of disorder", holon te kosmon ex akosmias;  there is no sphere in it.  And Stählin's introduction says the poem is not Clement's at all but "composed by a reader of the hymn", possibly the tenth-century Arethas.¹⁴

8. Genesis 2:19 is a translation choice, not a proof text.  The NIV and the current ESV read "had formed", the ESV noting "Or ... formed";  the NRSVUE and NET read "formed", and the NET note calls the pluperfect "unlikely".¹⁵  C. John Collins¹⁶ showed in 1995 that a wayyiqtol can carry pluperfect sense when the surrounding narrative fixes the order, and argued that Genesis 2:4's chiasm ties the two accounts so that the reader "is entitled" to read 2:19 that way, while conceding that in 1995 "the NIV alone of major versions has a pluperfect in this verse" - the ESV has since joined it.¹⁶  Umberto Cassuto,¹⁷ who denied any contradiction, still called the pluperfect rendering of the parallel verb in 2:7 "simply an unsuccessful attempt at harmonization" and solved 2:19 differently:  God formed "particular specimens" of animals already created, to bring them to the man.¹⁷

9. The creation order contradicts the scientific sequence at four points, and concordist reorderings fail on their own terms.  Genesis has plants (day 3) before the sun (day 4), fruit trees (day 3) before sea creatures (day 5), and birds (day 5) before land animals (day 6).  The conventional record has marine animals from the Cambrian (538.8 Ma), land plants from the Silurian, tetrapods from the Devonian, birds from the Jurassic, and flowering plants from the Cretaceous.¹⁸  Hugh Ross¹⁹ rescues day 5 by reading "sea creatures" as sea mammals and day 6 as three kinds of land mammal, then concedes on the same page that sea mammals "do not predate the first land mammals" and that "when other land mammals arrive on the scene the text does not say".¹⁹  Calvin read the plain text:  "it did not happen fortuitously, that herbs and trees were created before the sun and moon".²⁰

10. Calvin's accommodation and the young-earth answer are closer than either side admits, and both stop at the same place.  Calvin²⁰ on Genesis 1:6:  "nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world.  He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere."²⁰  On 1:16:  "Moses wrote in a popular style things which, without instruction, all ordinary persons, endued with common sense, are able to understand".²⁰  Seely accepts this and adds Warfield:  the writer could "share the ordinary opinions of his day" about the form of the earth without error in what he taught.¹  Danny Faulkner²¹ and Poythress reply that the language is phenomenal, describing appearance, and that "the raqia is closest to what we would call the sky".²¹  Phenomenal language explains sunrise and the tent-like sky.  It does not explain why Day 2 records the making of a thing whose function is to hold up water.  That is the point where the young-earth case must say plainly:  the text describes the sky in the terms of its first readers, and does not teach a physics.

Verdict:  Genesis 1 speaks the sky-language of its world.  The raqia question is genuinely two-sided:  the evidence that the author pictured a solid sky is strong, the evidence that the text asserts one is weak, and Job 37:18 decides nothing.  The flat-earth case against the Bible is not two-sided;  it fails on every verse and on the history of the myth, and the Clement quotation used against it should be dropped too.  Genesis 2:19 and the creation order are real difficulties, but they are difficulties for readings that try to match Genesis to the geological column, not for the reading that takes the days as days and sends the physical question to geology.

Israel's neighbours pictured a solid, layered sky

The claim that "the ancient Near East believed in a solid dome" is often made without a tablet in hand.  The tablets exist, and they say something more specific than a dome.

The clearest text is KAR 307, a Neo-Assyrian religious explanatory tablet from Assur, edited by Wayne Horowitz in Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography (1998).  Lines 30-38 list three heavens and three earths from the top down.  Horowitz's translation of the heavens reads:  "The Upper Heavens are luludanitu-stone.  They belong to Anu.  He settled the 300 Igigi inside."  Then:  "The Middle Heavens are saggilmud-stone.  They belong to the Igigi.  Bel sat on the high dais inside".  Then:  "The Lower Heavens are jasper.  They belong to the stars.  He drew the constellations of the gods on them."³  A second tablet, AO 8196, a late astrological compilation, gives the same three stones.³

Horowitz draws the physical picture.  The heavens could not be three solid blocks, "because this would not allow for movement within the heavens.  Therefore, it must be assumed that the floors of each level of the heavens were composed of a different type of stone, and that there was open space between each stone floor".³  Jasper was chosen because ancient jasper was often translucent and one variety "is like the sky on an autumn morning";  the blue saggilmud floor above it "may be visible as the blue sky".³  On the stars:  "The terminology of KAR 307 33 suggests that the stars and constellations were thought to be etched directly onto the jasper surface of the Lower Heavens."³  His summary chapter repeats it:  "The tradition that the heavens are made of stone is found in KAR 307 and AO 8196, where the floors of the three heavens are made of luludanitu-stone, saggilmud-stone, and jasper".³

The Babylonian creation epic gives the same structure a story.  In W. G. Lambert's 2013 edition, Enuma Elish IV 135-140 reads:

Bel rested, surveying the corpse,
In order to divide the lump by a clever scheme.
He split her into two like a dried fish:
One half of her he set up and stretched out as the heavens.
He stretched the skin and appointed a watch
With the instruction not to let her waters escape.⁴

Lambert, who spent fifty years on these tablets, made the comparison to Genesis himself.  On the division of cosmic waters:  "The first chapter of Genesis provides the closest parallel to the division of cosmic waters.  On the second day of the week of creation, God put a 'firmament' between the upper and the lower waters, which corresponds to the 'skin' in Enuma Elis IV 139."⁴  He also noted that the upper half of Tiamat became "heaven" and that the epic then adds Esharra as "a lower heaven", so that "the conception of heaven as in tiers, which passed into Judaism and Christianity, is nowhere certainly attested before the time of Enuma Elis".⁴  Whether Genesis borrowed any of this is the question of the sibling article Genesis and Ancient Near Eastern Parallels, and this article does not repeat it.  The point here is narrower:  the Babylonian sky was a physical floor with water above it, and the man who edited the text says so.

Horowitz is careful to say the Sumerian evidence is thinner.  The Sumerian separation of heaven and earth implies that "heaven and earth were presumably bonded together in a solid mass", which "may imply that some Sumerians believed that the bottom surface of the heavens, like the upper surface of the earth, was solid".³  He is also careful to say what the Mesopotamian heaven shared with the biblical one:  "In ancient Mesopotamia, as in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the heavens include both visible areas, where the stars, Sun, Moon, and planets are seen, and higher regions above the sky, where gods of heaven dwell."³

The earth under that sky was a disc.  The Babylonian Map of the World, British Museum tablet BM 92687, is "a unique Babylonian bird's-eye view of the earth's surface", drawn on the upper half of a Late Babylonian tablet with Babylon as a large rectangle bisected by the Euphrates.³  Two concentric circles enclose the continent;  the band between them is labelled marratu, "ocean", four times, and "this cosmic ocean circumambulates the central continent".  Beyond the outer ring are triangular nagu, "regions".³  Horowitz dates the map to the late eighth or seventh century BC on the evidence of its place-names.³

Egypt drew the same shape with different figures.  In the Pyramid and Coffin Texts the sky is the goddess Nut arched over the earth-god Geb, held up by the air-god Shu;  Pyramid Text 1156c says "his (Shu's) right arm supports the sky", and Text 1040c names the mountain ranges east and west of the Nile as "the two supports of the sky".¹  Seely's survey collects the same picture from the Rig Veda ("Firm is the sky and firm is the earth", 10.173.4), from Hittite, Chinese and Japanese texts, and from ethnographic reports of the Dayaks, Cherokee, Navaho, Lapps and Yakuts.¹  His conclusion:  "I know of no evidence that any scientifically naive people anywhere on earth believed that the firmament was just empty space or atmosphere.  The only exception to this is the Chinese and that not until AD 200."¹

Two cautions belong here.  First, no Mesopotamian text sets out a single systematic cosmology;  Horowitz assembled his from texts of different periods and genres, and notes disagreement among them, including KAR 307 placing the Igigi in two different heavens in consecutive lines.³  Second, "solid" in these texts means a floor one could stand on, not a hemisphere resting on a flat rim.  KAR 307's heavens are stacked planes with open space between them, and the Map of the World has no dome at all.  The popular textbook diagram of a bowl over a plate is a modern composite.  That is a fair point that Younker and Davidson make, and it is worth keeping when the biblical evidence is weighed.

The case that the raqia is solid is stronger than most creationist writing admits

Paul Seely was a lay evangelical scholar who published in the Westminster Theological Journal while affirming inerrancy.  His two papers, "The Firmament and the Water Above" Parts I and II (1991, 1992), are the source of nearly every modern statement that Genesis teaches a solid sky.  They deserve to be read rather than summarised, because their argument is cumulative and its pieces are individually checkable.

His first argument is historical.  "The basic historical fact that defines the meaning of raqia in Genesis 1 is simply this:  all peoples in the ancient world thought of the sky as solid.  This concept did not begin with the Greeks."¹  The Hebrews had no reason to be the exception.  Their pre-Solomonic pottery and architecture were, by the archaeologists' judgement, inferior to their neighbours';  their neighbours led the move from bronze to iron;  nothing suggests they were more scientifically advanced than Babylon or Egypt.¹  From this Seely concludes:  "When the original readers of Genesis 1 read the word raqia they thought of a solid sky.  And so did virtually everyone else up to the time of the Renaissance!"¹

His second argument is lexical and contextual, and this is where the weight lies.  Seely lists six features of the text.

• The noun raqia (רָקִיעַ) comes from the verb raqa (רָקַע), "stamp, beat, spread out", "used of hammering metal into thin plates (Exod 39:3)". The ESV of Exodus 39:3 reads "And they hammered out gold leaf".⁸ "If the writer wanted to communicate the idea of a nonsolid divider, his choice of the word raqia was particularly unfortunate".¹
• God "made" (asah) the raqia to divide two bodies of water. Dividing light from darkness required nothing to be made; dividing water from water did. Hebrew had words for "room" (maqom), "space" (revach, Gen 32:16), "wind" (ruach, Exod 14:21) and "breath" (neshamah), any of which could have said "air" or "space" if that were meant.¹
• The lights are set "in the expanse of the heavens" (Gen 1:17, ESV). Stars are not in the atmosphere, and do not look as if they are; "they look like they are embedded in a solid vault".¹
• Birds fly "across the expanse" (1:20, ESV); the Hebrew is al-pene, "on the face of" or "in front of". "Hence birds fly in the heavens, but never in the raqia. Rather, birds fly upon the face or in front of the raqia."¹
• The raqia holds up water. "The purpose and function of the raqia imply its solidity, for it functions as a horizontal dam (cf. 7:11; 8:2; Ps 148:4), holding back a mighty heavenly ocean."¹
• Ezekiel 1:22 describes a raqia "over the heads of the living creatures", "shining like awe-inspiring crystal", with a throne "above the expanse" (1:26, ESV).⁸ "Even conservatives admit the firmament in Ezekiel 1 is solid. Having then this clear definition of a raqia as a solid divider, one is hermeneutically bound to interpret the raqia in Genesis as solid unless there is some clear reason to differentiate the one from the other."¹

His third argument is the history of interpretation.  The Septuagint translators chose stereoma (στερέωμα), "a solid body", for all five occurrences in Genesis 1:6-8;  the Vulgate followed with firmamentum.⁵  Seely cites Origen calling the firmament "without doubt firm and solid", Ambrose that "the specific solidity of this exterior firmament is meant", and Augustine that the word firmament indicates "not that it is motionless but that it is solid".¹  The Latin of Augustine's sentence is on the web:  firmamentum enim non propter stationem, sed propter firmitatem, aut propter intransgressibilem terminum superiorum et inferiorum aquarum, vocatum intellegere licet, "the firmament may be understood to be so called not because it stands still but because of its firmness, or because it is an impassable boundary between the upper and lower waters".¹¹  The rabbis went further.  Genesis Rabbah 4:2 glosses "Let there be a firmament" as "let the firmament harden", and the Babylonian Talmud reports Rava's estimate that "the thickness of the firmament is one thousand parasangs", with Rabbi Yehuda dissenting that it is only one-tenth of the sun's daily course.²²

Seely's conclusion follows:  "The historical-grammatical meaning of raqia in Gen 1:6-8 is very clearly a literally solid firmament."¹  His Part II²³ extends the argument to the "waters above" and ends:  "It means rather a large body of water, a sea, above a solid firmament, which firmament serves as a roof to the universe and under which firmament are the sun, moon, and stars."²³

Seely did not think this made Genesis false.  He quoted B. B. Warfield, the architect of the modern doctrine of inerrancy, to the effect that an inspired writer could "share the ordinary opinions of his day in certain matters lying outside the scope of his teachings, as, for example, with reference to the form of the earth, or its relation to the sun".¹  "Certainly also it is not the purpose of Gen 1:7 to teach us the physical nature of the sky, but to reveal the creator of the sky."¹  Whether that move works is the subject of the accommodation section below.

The case for "expanse" is real, but its best-known defenders overreach

The standard reply is Randall Younker and Richard Davidson, "The Myth of the Solid Heavenly Dome:  Another Look at the Hebrew רָקִיעַ (raqia)," Andrews University Seminary Studies 49 (2011):  125-147.  Both are Seventh-day Adventist scholars at Andrews University, and the paper was written for their church's Faith and Science Committee.⁶  It is the paper Danny Faulkner's Answers in Genesis work leans on, and it is worth separating what it gets right from what it gets wrong.

What it gets right is lexical.  The noun raqia occurs seventeen times in the Hebrew Bible:  nine in Genesis 1, five in Ezekiel, twice in the Psalms (19:2 and 150:1) and once in Daniel (12:3).  "In none of these occurrences does raqia appear in association with any metal."⁶  The verb raqa occurs twelve times, five of them with metal (Exod 39:3;  Num 16:38-39;  Isa 40:19;  Jer 10:9).  But three times it is used of the earth, and there it stands in parallel with "stretch out":  "in Isa 42:5, 44:24, and Ps 136:6, the verbal participle form of raqa appears in the same poetic sentence as shamayim, but, surprisingly, is not used with regard to the 'heavens,' but to the earth."⁶  The ESV of Isaiah 42:5 reads "who created the heavens and stretched them out, who spread out the earth and what comes from it".⁸  Nobody thinks the earth was hammered.  So the verb's core sense is "spread thin" or "expand", by whatever means, and the noun can fairly be rendered "expanse".  Calvin's editor had already said this in 1847:  "Doubtless Calvin is correct in supposing the true meaning of the Hebrew word to be expanse".²⁰

What it gets right, second, is the naming.  "God called the expanse Heaven" (Gen 1:8, ESV).  Shamayim is the ordinary word for where birds fly (Deut 4:17), where rain comes from (Deut 11:11), and where clouds gather (1 Kgs 18:45).  Younker and Davidson quote Kenneth Mathews:  "The 'expanse' describes both the place in which the luminaries were set (vv. 14-15, 17) and the sky where the birds are observed (v. 20).  Thus Genesis' description of the 'expanse' is phenomenological".⁶  Isaiah's own similes for the sky are a curtain and a tent (40:22) and a scroll (34:4), none of them stone.  Seely's answer, that Isaiah says the sky is like a tent while Genesis says God made a raqia, is a real distinction, but it cuts both ways:  a prophet who could call the sky a curtain did not feel bound by a stone-floor picture.

What the paper gets wrong is the history, and the errors are not small.  It states:  "There is no evidence that the Mesopotamians ever believed in a solid heavenly vault."⁶  It attributes the "hard-domed heaven" to "Peter Jensen's mistranslation" of Enuma Elish and says Lambert corrected it.⁶  And in a footnote it reports:  "Wayne Horowitz, a student of Lambert, actually found that the Mesopotamians believed the heavens consisted of a series of flat planes that were suspended above each other by a number of strong cables".⁶  The body text says Horowitz found "six flat heavens, suspended one above the other by cables".⁶

None of that survives a reading of Horowitz.  His KAR 307 has three heavens, not six;  the six levels are three heavens plus three earths.³  Their floors are stone.  The stars are etched on jasper.³  A search of the full text of Mesopotamian Cosmic Geography for the word "cables" returns nothing.³  And Lambert's own 2013 edition, published two years after the Younker-Davidson paper but reflecting his life's reading of the epic, says the Genesis firmament "corresponds to the 'skin'" that Marduk stretched to keep Tiamat's waters up.⁴  The paper is right that the Babylonian sky was not a hemispherical bowl on a flat rim.  It is wrong that it was not solid.  A stone floor with stars drawn on it is the thing Seely meant.

The paper's summary claim is also wrong on the Christian side.  It says the solid-vault idea "appears to have emerged for the first time only during the early nineteenth century when introduced as part of the flat-earth concept introduced by Washington Irving and Antoine-Jean Letronne".⁶  Irving and Letronne invented the medieval flat earth, as the next sections show.  They did not invent the solid firmament;  Origen, Ambrose, Augustine and the rabbis of Genesis Rabbah had said the firmament was solid a millennium and a half earlier, as quoted above.  The paper's authors seem to have conflated two different claims, the flat earth and the solid sky, and refuted the first while thinking they had refuted the second.

The stronger conservative replies are narrower.  Vern Poythress of Westminster Theological Seminary, in "Rain Water versus a Heavenly Sea in Genesis 1:6-8" (WTJ 2015), grants Seely's history and argues instead about genre:  "In my view, Gen 1:6-8 gives us an ordinary description, a phenomenal description, a description of appearances, and does not offer any detailed 'theory' about the expanse ('heaven') or the water above it."⁷  He adds, in a footnote that concedes more than most of his allies would, that Seely's church-history evidence for a heavenly sea is "impressive", that "only in modern times (Calvin onwards) do people tend towards other interpretations", and that "ironically, the same may be true of the ancient church":  Greek astronomy and the words stereoma and firmamentum may have biased the fathers toward a solid sphere just as modern science biases us away from one.⁷  That is the honest form of the argument.  It admits the ancient reader pictured a solid sky and denies only that the text asserts one.

Danny Faulkner, the Answers in Genesis astronomer, takes a similar line on the word.  He notes that the Septuagint's stereoma "probably was an attempt by the Septuagint translators to conform Scripture to the dominant cosmology of the day", that Jerome's firmamentum followed it, and that "the idea that raqia denotes something hard persists among some creationists today".²¹  His own reading:  "These considerations and others suggest that the raqia is closest to what we would call the sky."²¹  James Patrick Holding's 1999 reply to Seely²⁴ in the Journal of Creation argues that "the description of the raqiya' is so equivocal and lacking in detail that one can only read a solid sky into the text by assuming that it is there in the first place".²⁴  Holding's paper opens by calling Seely "more dangerous to Christians than atheists", which is a reason to read Seely rather than a reason to dismiss him;  but the equivocation point is fair, and it is the same point Poythress makes with better manners.

Job 37:18 does not settle it

Both sides treat Job 37:18 as the decisive verse.  The ESV reads:  "Can you, like him, spread out the skies, hard as a cast metal mirror?"  The verb is raqa, the object is shechaqim (שְׁחָקִים), and the comparison is kir'i mutsaq, "like a mirror poured out".²⁵

Three facts weaken it as a proof text for solidity.  Shechaqim is the ordinary word for clouds.  The same noun occurs in the same speech at Job 36:28, where the shechaqim "pour down and drop on mankind abundantly" (ESV), which only clouds do, and in Proverbs 8:28 ("when he made firm the skies above", ESV), where the NIV and NET read "clouds".⁸  The word for "mirror", re'i, occurs nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible;  the Septuagint read it as horasis, "appearance", and with a different vowel the consonants give ro'i, "appearance", which does occur, once in the same speech of Elihu (Job 33:21).⁶  And the context is weather, not creation:  Elihu is describing snow, ice, and the clearing of the sky after wind (37:6-21).  Robert Newman proposed "Can you, with him, spread out the mighty clouds, like an appearance of being poured out?"  Poythress, citing him, writes:  "Newman's proposal may not be right, but it shows the difficulty of relying on a single poetic verse."⁷

Two facts weaken it as a proof text for the expanse.  A bronze sky is a Hebrew idiom for drought (Deut 28:23:  "the heavens over your head shall be bronze"), so "hard as a cast mirror" may simply mean a rainless sky, which says nothing about its composition either way.⁸  And it is the only verse in which raqa is applied to anything in the sky, so a lexicon entry built on it is built on one poetic line.

The right conclusion is Poythress's, applied to both sides.  Job 37:18 is one line of poetry with a hapax in it.  It cannot carry the case.

The waters above and the windows of heaven are the strongest structural argument, and the least answered

Genesis 1:7 separates "the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse".  Psalm 148:4 calls on "you waters above the heavens" to praise God, in a psalm that also says he "established them forever and ever" (v. 6).  Genesis 7:11 opens "the windows of the heavens" (arubbot hashamayim) to begin the Flood, and 8:2 closes them.⁸

Seely's Part II argues that these waters cannot be clouds.  Clouds are below the sun, moon and stars;  Genesis 1:14-17 puts the lights "in" the raqia and the waters "above" it.  The waters are still there when the psalmist writes and were still there after the Flood, since 8:2 shuts the windows rather than reporting that the water is gone.²³  Genesis Rabbah 4:5 pictures it as Seely does:  "The firmament is similar to a pool of water and above the pool is a dome."²²

Poythress answers that the Israelites knew rain came from clouds, and lists the verses:  "the clouds dropped water" (Judg 5:4), "thick clouds, a gathering of water" (2 Sam 22:12), "He binds up the waters in his thick clouds" (Job 26:8), "if the clouds are full of rain, they empty themselves on the earth" (Eccl 11:3).⁷  He notes that "windows of heaven" is an idiom used for blessings other than rain (Mal 3:10;  2 Kgs 7:2, 19), and that if the windows were literal sluice gates the result "would produce a river from the sky, not forty days of 'rain'".⁷  His reading of 1:6-8:  "The expression 'waters that were above the expanse' designates water above a cloudy sky, that is, water inside clouds, whose lower side is the sky."⁷  Younker and Davidson agree, citing Proverbs 8:28 where what is "above" the heavens is the shechaqim, clouds.⁶

The rain reading is possible.  But it costs something that the conservative side rarely prices.  If the "waters above" are clouds, then the lights of day 4 are set in a raqia below the clouds, which is not how anyone, ancient or modern, sees the sky.  If instead the raqia of 1:14-17 is the whole visible heaven with clouds inside it, then "above the expanse" in 1:7 has to mean something other than "above" in 1:17, in the same chapter, with the same word.  Every reading of Day 2 has a seam.  The solid-sky reading has the fewest seams and the highest cost;  the cloud reading has the lowest cost and the most seams.  That is what "genuinely two-sided" means, and the article's verdict follows from it.

The flat-earth verses fail one by one

The charge that the Bible teaches a flat earth rests on about a dozen verses.  Each is quoted below from the ESV, with the Hebrew term that carries the weight, and what the verse says when read in its own book.⁸

Three things follow.  First, not one of these verses states the earth's shape.  The nearest is Job 26:7, and it says the earth hangs on nothing.  Second, every verse but the two visions is Hebrew poetry, and Hebrew poetry describes the sky in the same breath as a tent, a scroll, a curtain, a vault and a molten mirror.  A reader who insists on one of those as physics has to explain why not the others.  Third, the idiom is still ours.  Faulkner's The Expanse of Heaven²⁶ makes the plain observation:  "the phrases 'four corners of the earth' and 'ends of the earth' (e.g., Job 37:3;  38:13) have entered the English language as idioms referring to the greatest extent of anything.  We use these phrases today, though very few, if any, of the people using such phrases think that the earth is flat."²⁶  His verdict on the whole list:  "The problem is that most, if not all, of the cited verses come from poetic passages."²⁶

The young-earth side should not claim more than this.  Isaiah 40:22 does not teach a spherical earth;  chug is a circle, and a disc has one.  Job 26:10 is the closest the Old Testament comes to describing something only a globe does, because the line between light and dark on the sea is a circle only if the earth is round, but the verse is describing what a man sees from shore, and a man on shore sees the same arc either way.  The correct claim is negative:  the Bible nowhere asserts a flat earth, and its one statement about support denies any.  That is enough to answer the charge.  It is not evidence of ancient astronomy.

No one in the medieval church taught a flat earth

The historical claim that Christians believed in a flat earth until Columbus is the one part of this subject where the evidence is not two-sided.  Jeffrey Burton Russell, the University of California medievalist, examined it in Inventing the Flat Earth:  Columbus and Modern Historians (1991).  His summary of the state of knowledge in Columbus's day:  "In reality there were no skeptics.  All educated people throughout Europe knew the earth's spherical shape and its approximate circumference.  This fact has been well established by historians for more than half a century."²  He quotes David Lindberg:  "The truth is that the sphericity of the earth was a central feature of theoretical dogma as it came down to the Middle Ages, so central that no amount of contrary theoretical or empirical argumentation could conceivably have dislodged it."²  And the thesis sentence:  "The Error is not the alleged medieval belief that the earth was flat, but rather the modern error that such a belief ever prevailed."²

The exceptions are two, and the same two every time.  Russell found that William Whewell's History of the Inductive Sciences (1837), the standard text for fifty years, "pointed to the culprits Lactantius and Cosmas Indicopleustes as evidence of a medieval belief in a flat earth, and virtually every subsequent historian imitated him;  they could find few other examples".²  Lactantius (c. 245-325), a rhetorician and convert, rejected Greek philosophy on principle and "went on ... to tie the question of roundness to that of the antipodes", asking whether anyone was so silly as to believe in people with their feet above their heads;  his works were later condemned as heretical, and "Lactantius was not widely heeded".²  Cosmas Indicopleustes, a sixth-century writer from Alexandria, wrote a Christian Topography (547-549) "in which he argued that the cosmos was a huge, rectangular, vaulted arch with the earth as a flat floor", modelled on the Tabernacle.²  "But the influence of Cosmas's blundered effort on the Middle Ages was virtually nil."  Three Greek manuscripts survive;  Cosmas was attacked by John Philoponus in his own lifetime, dismissed by Photius in the ninth century, and first translated into Latin in 1706.  "He had absolutely no influence on medieval western thought."²

The fathers whom the flat-earth story most often names said the opposite of what it needs.  Basil of Caesarea, in the ninth homily of the Hexaemeron (c. 370), wrote:  "Those who have written about the nature of the universe have discussed at length the shape of the earth.  If it be spherical or cylindrical, if it resemble a disc and is equally rounded in all parts ... all these conjectures have been suggested by cosmographers, each one upsetting that of his predecessor.  It will not lead me to give less importance to the creation of the universe, that the servant of God, Moses, is silent as to shapes".¹⁰  That is agnosticism about a question he thought Scripture did not answer, from a man who had read the Greek astronomers.  Augustine, in De Genesi ad litteram 2.9 (c. 401-415), asked:  Quid enim ad me pertinet, utrum coelum sicut sphaera undique concludat terram in media mundi mole libratam, an eam ex una parte desuper velut discus operiat?  "What is it to me whether the heaven, like a sphere, encloses the earth on every side, balanced in the middle of the world's mass, or covers it from above on one side like a disc?"¹¹  He then met the objection that Scripture's "vault" contradicts the philosophers' sphere:  illa quidem apud nos camerae similitudo, etiam secundum litteram accepta, non impedit eos qui sphaeram dicunt, "that image of a vault among us, even taken literally, does not hinder those who say sphere".¹¹  His stated reason for caring was that a Christian who spouted bad cosmology would make the faith look foolish to educated pagans.

The modern story has a traceable pedigree.  Russell dates it:  "The Error, which had existed in seed from the time of Copernicus and had been planted by Irving and Letronne in the nineteenth century ... was now watered by the progressives into lush and tangled undergrowth."²  David Noble's foreword to the book locates its beginning "in the writings of the American Washington Irving and the Frenchman Antoine-Jean Letronne";  Irving's 1828 Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus invented the scene of Columbus defending a round earth before hostile churchmen at Salamanca, and Letronne's 1834 essay on the cosmographical opinions of the fathers supplied the scholarly gloss.²  In Noble's summary it "became widespread conventional wisdom from 1870 to 1920 as a result of 'the war between science and religion'".²  John William Draper's History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) fired "the opening barrage of the war";  Andrew Dickson White, the first president of Cornell, carried "Draper's flag ... deeper into enemy territory" with A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896).²  James Hannam, whose The Genesis of Science (2011) is the standard popular account of medieval science, pushes the root further back:  "The myth that a flat earth was part of Christian doctrine in the Middle Ages appears to have originated with Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who wrongly claimed that geographers had been put on trial for impiety after asserting the contrary.  There were a few authentic flatearthers in late antiquity, but none among the scholars of the Middle Ages proper."⁹  Hannam adds the reason so many historians fell for it:  the T-O mappae mundi, like the Hereford map, look flat because medieval scholars were mapping only the part of the globe they thought habitable.  "Thus, the inhabited region filled much less than one quarter of the earth's surface and could easily be mapped onto a flat projection."⁹

White's book is still quoted, so it is worth showing how it handled Basil.  In the section headed "The Form of the Earth" White writes:  "Basil of Caesarea declared it 'a matter of no interest to us whether the earth is a sphere or a cylinder or a disk, or concave in the middle like a fan.'"¹²  That is White's own paraphrase of the Basil passage quoted above, the one in which Basil declines to choose, and White places it in a paragraph on the fathers who "opposed" the Greek doctrine.  His table of contents then lists "Gregory Nazianzen, Lactantius, Basil, Ambrose, Augustine, Procopius of Gaza, Cosmas, Isidore" as the church's opposition to the antipodes.¹²  Russell notes that White, unlike Draper, "admitted that Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Ambrose, and Augustine knew about the round earth and that Isidore of Seville in the seventh century and Bede in the eighth defended it, but then he made the odd statement that they went against the dominant theology of a flat earth".²  White then goes on to say that "the strictly biblical men of science, such eminent fathers and bishops as Theophilus of Antioch in the second century, and Clement of Alexandria in the third", built from Genesis 1:7 a universe "like a house:  the earth is its ground floor, the firmament its ceiling", with a cistern above "shaped, as one of the authorities says, 'like a bathing-tank'".¹²  The cistern is Cosmas.  The flat floor is Cosmas.  White has attached the one eccentric to a list of fathers who said nothing of the kind, and the list has been copied for 130 years.

Two honest limits on this section.  First, the church did hold a solid firmament, as the raqia sections showed;  Russell's point is about the earth's shape, not the sky's substance, and Younker and Davidson's paper is right that the two get confused.  Second, the flat-earth error was popularised by men making an argument about Darwin, but that does not make the geocentric episode go away.  Educated Christians before Copernicus believed the sun went round the earth, "with a few exceptions", as Russell says on the same page, and the Galileo affair is a real case of a church taking a physical position from Scripture and being wrong.²  That is a different article.  This one only needs to establish that the flat earth is not part of it.

The Clement of Alexandria quotation should be retired

A quotation circulates in creationist and apologetic writing as proof that a second-century father taught a spherical earth.  It is attributed to Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-215) and reads, in the Ante-Nicene Fathers translation:  "Out of a confused heap who didst create / This ordered sphere, and from the shapeless mass / Of matter didst the universe adorn".¹³  The lines are from a poem printed at the end of Clement's Paedagogus in the ANF, headed "To the Paedagogus".¹³

Two things are wrong with the quotation.  The first is the word "sphere".  The Greek, in Otto Stählin's critical edition of 1905 (p. 340), reads holon te kosmon ex akosmias ktisas / hyles amorphou, tode to pan katertisas, "having created the whole ordered world out of disorder, out of shapeless matter, you set this universe in order".¹⁴  Kosmos means "order" or "ordered world";  it does not mean "sphere", and the word sphaira is not in the poem.  The English translator was writing blank verse and needed a noun.

The second is the author.  Stählin's introduction states that the second poem, which the sixteenth-century editor Victorius headed "Hymn to the Paedagogus", "is the parallel poem to the hymn, composed by a reader of this hymn", and that he therefore printed it at the end of the scholia, the marginal notes of the medieval manuscript, rather than with Clement's text.  He adds that whether Arethas, the tenth-century archbishop of Caesarea who annotated the manuscript, is the author "remains doubtful".¹⁴  So the "Clement" quotation is a Byzantine reader's imitation, and its "sphere" is a Victorian translator's.  It proves nothing about the second century.  The site's own research notes carried it;  this article retires it, and the quotation is logged in the article's quarantine file with the route by which it was checked.

There are better witnesses for the same point, and they are the ones cited above:  Basil declining to rule, Augustine ruling the sphere compatible with Scripture, Isidore and Bede defending the globe by White's own admission, and Aquinas, whom White concedes "felt obliged to accept the doctrine of the earth's sphericity".²  None of them needs a doctored hymn.

Genesis 2:19 is a translation choice, not a contradiction, but the pluperfect is not the plain rendering

Genesis 1 makes the animals on days 5 and 6 and the man last.  Genesis 2:19 reads, in the NRSVUE:  "So out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to the man to see what he would call them."  Read in sequence, the animals are formed after the man of 2:7.  The NIV removes the sequence:  "Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the wild animals".  So does the ESV as it now stands:  "Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field", with the footnote "Or And out of the ground the Lord God formed".  Earlier ESV printings read "So out of the ground the LORD God formed".  The NET keeps "formed" and its translator's note calls the past perfect "unlikely", because "the criteria for unmarked temporal overlay are not present here".¹⁵  The Hebrew verb is wayyitser (וַיִּצֶר), a wayyiqtol, the ordinary narrative past that normally moves the story forward.

C. John Collins, then of Covenant Theological Seminary, examined the question in "The Wayyiqtol as 'Pluperfect':  When and Why" (Tyndale Bulletin 1995).  His survey is candid about where the grammarians stand.  S. R. Driver's treatment "has carried the day in discussions of this verse";  John Skinner in the ICC said of the pluperfect reading that "such a sense is excluded by grammar, and misses the point of the passage";  and "in general the translations (e.g., AV, RSV, NRSV, NASB, NKJV) follow Driver's reasoning.  The NIV alone of major versions has a pluperfect in this verse."¹⁶  That was 1995;  the ESV moved to the pluperfect later.  Randall Buth's discourse-linguistic study rejects it too, because 2:19 does not repeat earlier material to signal a flashback, so "the NIV translation of Genesis 2 must be rejected from a discourse syntax perspective".¹⁶

Collins's own argument is that a wayyiqtol may be read as pluperfect when "the logic of the referent described requires" it, and that Genesis 2:4 supplies the logic.  The verse is a chiasm, "the heavens / and the earth / when they were created / when the LORD God made / earth / and heavens", which "is evidence of art, not coincidence" and ties the second account to the first as its elaboration.  "If we take Genesis 1:3-2:3 as conveying the broad-stroke story line ... we are entitled ... to read wayyitser in 2:19 as a pluperfect."¹⁶  His explanation of why the author wrote it that way:  both accounts are anthropocentric, and placing the animals' formation after 2:18 "reinforces this point:  even though physically the animals were made before man, yet conceptually their creation was in anticipation of their subservience to his governance".¹⁶

Umberto Cassuto, the Hebrew University's great Genesis commentator and a critic of the documentary hypothesis, took a different route and was blunt about the pluperfect.  On the same verb form in 2:7 he wrote:  "The explanation, given by some commentators, of wayyitser as a pluperfect (Now the Lord God had already formed) is simply an unsuccessful attempt at harmonization."¹⁷  On 2:19 he noticed that verse 20 has the man name three classes, cattle, birds and beasts of the field, while verse 19 forms only the last two.  The cattle were already with the man.  So "we must understand the creation of the beasts and the flying creatures in a similar sense to that of the growing of the trees in v. 9, to wit, that of all the species of beasts and flying creatures that had already been created and had spread over the face of the earth and the firmament of the heavens, the Lord God now formed particular specimens for the purpose of presenting them all before man in the midst of the Garden."¹⁷  Collins reports that Sailhamer and probably Hamilton follow Cassuto here.¹⁶

What should a skeptical reader take from this?  Three things.  The pluperfect is grammatically possible but not the default;  Collins wins the possibility and concedes the default.  Cassuto's reading needs no pluperfect and rests on a detail in the text (the missing cattle in v. 19) that the contradiction reading has to ignore.  And, as Collins notes, the final editor of Genesis put 2:4 where it is and, in Cassuto's words, "must ... have noticed so glaring a contradiction" if it were one.¹⁶  The order of Genesis 2 is a real translation problem.  It is not the knock-down the skeptic wants, and it is not the non-issue the apologist wants.

The creation order contradicts the scientific sequence, and reordering it does not help

Genesis 1 gives the following order:  light (day 1);  the expanse (day 2);  dry land, then "vegetation, plants yielding seed, and fruit trees bearing fruit" (day 3);  sun, moon and stars (day 4);  sea creatures and birds (day 5);  land animals, then man (day 6).  The conventional scientific sequence, on the dates of the International Commission on Stratigraphy's 2023 chart and the first appearances audited in the site's fossil-order and bird-origins articles, runs the other way at four points.¹⁸

The young-earth reading has no problem here, because it denies that the column is a time sequence at all and sends the question to geology.  Whether it can win that argument is the business of Fossil Order and the Flood and its neighbours, and this article does not pretend to settle it.  The problem belongs to the reader who accepts the column and wants Genesis 1 to match it.

Hugh Ross's Navigating Genesis (2014) is the fullest attempt.  His day 3 is not the appearance of land plants but of "vegetation" broadly:  "In fact, land plants likely existed for hundreds of millions of years before the Cambrian event", on the evidence of oxygenation and a 2009 isotope paper.¹⁹  His day 5 "sea creatures" are "sea mammals", and his day 6 animals are three specific kinds of land mammal.  He states the problem himself:  "Because Genesis 1 introduces sea mammals (of day five) before the land mammals (of day six), its accuracy has been called into question by some paleontologists.  A close reading of the original Hebrew, however, removes the apparent problem.  The fifth creation day narrative refers to sea mammals generically, while the sixth day account narrows in on three specialized kinds of land mammals, the kinds most crucial to humanity's needs.  When other land mammals arrive on the scene the text does not say.  Scientific research will need to fill in that information."  The next paragraph concedes the order:  "Although they do not predate the first land mammals, the first sea mammals have been found to date much earlier than paleontologists previously realized", citing whales at 52 to 48 million years.¹⁹

Count what that reading has to do.  "Every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm" (Gen 1:21, ESV) becomes whales and seals.  The birds of day 5, which first appear in the Jurassic on the standard dates, are put on the same day as whales that appear 100 million years later.  The "beasts of the earth" of day 6 become three orders of mammal, chosen because they are "most crucial to humanity's needs", so that the mammals which the fossil record puts before the whales are not the day-6 animals at all.  And the fruit trees of day 3 are silently traded for pre-Cambrian algae.  Each move is available;  taken together they replace the text.  Seely, an inerrantist and no young-earth creationist, said this in Perspectives on Science and Christian Faith in 1997:²⁷  "Concordism achieves a concord between modern science and the Bible only because it has rewritten the Bible to agree with modern science."²⁷

The plants-before-sun problem is older than geology, and the church read it straight.  Calvin on Genesis 1:11:  "Moreover, it did not happen fortuitously, that herbs and trees were created before the sun and moon.  We now see, indeed, that the earth is quickened by the sun to cause it to bring forth its fruits;  nor was God ignorant of this law of nature, which he has since ordained:  but in order that we might learn to refer all things to him, he did not then make use of the sun or moon."²⁰  Calvin knew that plants need the sun.  He read the text as saying they were made first anyway, and he thought that was the point.  A concordist who moves the sun to day 1 and makes day 4 its first visibility is not reading the text more literally than Calvin;  he is reading it less so, for the sake of a harmony Calvin did not want.

Accommodation and phenomenological language are the same answer until Day 2

The old answer to all of this is Calvin's, and it is older than the geology that made it urgent.  Commenting on the waters above the firmament in Genesis 1:6, Calvin wrote in 1554:  "For, to my mind, this is a certain principle, that nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world.  He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere."²⁰  On the "two great lights" of 1:16, which he knew were not the two largest bodies in the sky, he wrote:  "Moses wrote in a popular style things which, without instruction, all ordinary persons, endued with common sense, are able to understand;  but astronomers investigate with great labour whatever the sagacity of the human mind can comprehend."  And:  "he does not call us up into heaven, he only proposes things which lie open before our eyes.  Let the astronomers possess their more exalted knowledge".²⁰

Seely's version is Calvin's with one step added.  Calvin thought Moses described the sky as it looks.  Seely thinks Moses described the sky as everyone then believed it was, which is the same thing for a people who "equated appearance with reality", and that inspiration did not correct the belief because the belief was not the message.¹  His warrant is Warfield's:  a writer might "share the ordinary opinions of his day in certain matters lying outside the scope of his teachings, as, for example, with reference to the form of the earth, or its relation to the sun", and the "form of his language" might "play into the hands of such a presumption".¹  That sentence was written in 1893 by the theologian who defined inerrancy for American conservatives, and it is why Seely could publish in Westminster's journal.

The young-earth answer is phenomenological language, and on most verses it is the same answer under another name.  Faulkner:  "the raqia is closest to what we would call the sky."²¹  Poythress:  "an ordinary description, a phenomenal description, a description of appearances".⁷  Holding:  "one can only read a solid sky into the text by assuming that it is there in the first place".²⁴  Younker and Davidson:  the raqia is "the sky" and Genesis' description of it "is phenomenological".⁶  All four say the text describes what an observer sees.  Calvin said the same.  The difference is what each thinks the observer believed about what he saw, and the text does not tell us that.

Where the two answers part is Day 2, and this is the point the young-earth side should state without flinching.  "Sunrise" is phenomenal language:  it names an appearance and asserts nothing about mechanism.  "God made the expanse and separated the waters that were under the expanse from the waters that were above the expanse" is not a report of an appearance.  It is a report of an act, with a made object and a stated function.  Poythress's rain reading has to make "the waters above" mean the water in clouds and "the expanse" mean the underside of a cloudy sky, and then has to make the same expanse hold the sun and stars two verses later.  Seely's reading has to make the text carry a picture of the world the writer did not know was wrong.  Neither is free.

The site's position is the one this evidence supports.  Genesis 1 describes the sky in the words and pictures of its first readers, who probably took the sky to be solid, as everyone around them did.  The text asserts that God made the sky and set the lights in it and holds the waters above it;  it asserts nothing about jasper, tin or bronze, and it uses of the same sky the words tent, curtain and scroll.  A reader who wants the Bible to teach that the sky is a stone floor has to import the floor;  a reader who wants it to teach that the sky is a gas has to import the gas.  What the text teaches is who made it.  That is Calvin's answer, Warfield's answer and Seely's answer, and on this question the young-earth reader should be content to share it.

Two things this does not license.  It does not license the day-age reader to say that because the sky-language is accommodated, the days are too;  the days are numbered, bounded by evening and morning, and used as the pattern for a work week in Exodus 20:11, and the sibling article on genre and grammar owns that question.  And it does not license the young-earth reader to build cosmological models on the raqia.  The creationist literature has identified it with the atmosphere (Morris), with interstellar space (Humphreys), with the solar system (Hartnett) and with the earth's crust (Brown);  Faulkner surveyed these and observed that "many of the teachings on the raqia in the creation literature appear to have been developed after little interaction with the Hebrew scholarship".²¹  A word whose ancient readers pictured a jasper floor is a poor foundation for a white-hole cosmology.

Common Objections

Objection 1: "The Bible says the sky is a solid dome, so it is wrong, so it is not from God."

The first clause is the strongest part of the objection and the article has granted most of it:  the writer of Genesis 1 very probably pictured a solid sky, the Septuagint translators certainly did, and the fathers and rabbis said so in words.  The second clause does not follow from the first.  The text nowhere says "solid";  it says God made the expanse and named it sky.  A description in the visual vocabulary of its readers is not a false assertion unless it asserts the vocabulary.  Calvin saw this in 1554 about the "two great lights", which are not the two largest lights, and nobody calls Genesis 1:16 an error.  The third clause is a theological claim about what inspiration must produce, and Warfield, who defined inerrancy for the tradition this site stands in, denied it in 1893.¹

Objection 2: "Job 37:18 says the sky is hard as a cast mirror. That is a plain statement of a metal sky."

It is one line of Hebrew poetry in a speech about weather, its noun usually means clouds, its word for mirror occurs nowhere else and was read as "appearance" by the Septuagint, and "bronze heavens" is the Hebrew idiom for drought (Deut 28:23).  Poythress's judgement stands:  "it shows the difficulty of relying on a single poetic verse".⁷  The objection is strongest as one item in Seely's cumulative case and weakest on its own, which is how the skeptic usually deploys it.

Objection 3: "Younker and Davidson showed the Mesopotamians never believed in a solid sky, so Seely's whole historical argument collapses."

They asserted it;  they did not show it, and the source they cite says the reverse.  Horowitz's KAR 307 gives the three heavens stone floors and has the constellations drawn on the jasper;  Lambert's edition of Enuma Elish has Marduk stretch Tiamat's skin as the heavens and post a guard to keep her waters up, and Lambert himself calls the Genesis firmament the counterpart of that skin.³  The paper's "six flat heavens suspended by cables" is not in Horowitz.⁶  What Younker and Davidson do show is that the Mesopotamian sky was stacked planes rather than a bowl, and that is worth keeping.  Creationist writers who repeat the stronger claim should stop.

Objection 4: "Isaiah 40:22 says 'circle', not 'sphere'. Hebrew had a word for ball (dur, Isa 22:18). So the Bible's earth is a flat disc."

Chug is a circle, and the verse does not say sphere.  But the objection proves too little.  A circle is what the horizon is, from anywhere, on a globe;  Job 26:10 uses the same word for the terminator on the sea, and Proverbs 8:27 for the circle on the deep.  A poet describing what the eye sees is not choosing between disc and ball.  The argument from the unused word dur would prove that the Bible thinks the sky is a flat sheet, since dur is not used of the sky either.  And the one verse that speaks to support, Job 26:7, hangs the earth on nothing.

Objection 5: "The church taught a flat earth until Columbus. Washington Irving was writing history."

Irving was writing a romance, and the historians who followed him were writing polemic against Darwin.  The medieval record has two flat-earthers, Lactantius and Cosmas, one condemned and the other unread;  the men who set the medieval curriculum, Isidore, Bede, Albert, Aquinas, held the globe, and White admitted as much in the book that spread the story.²  Basil and Augustine said the shape was not Scripture's subject.  Anyone who still wants to press this should also drop the Clement "ordered sphere" hymn from the other side of the ledger;  it is a Byzantine imitation with an English word in it that the Greek does not have.

Objection 6: "Genesis 2 has the animals made after the man. Genesis 1 has them before. That is a contradiction, and 'had formed' is a fudge."

"Had formed" is grammatically possible, favoured by the NIV and now by the ESV, and argued for by Collins on discourse grounds;  it is not the default, and the article says so.  But the contradiction reading has its own cost:  it has to treat 2:4 as an accident and to ignore that 2:19 forms only two of the three classes the man names in 2:20.  Cassuto, who did not believe in the pluperfect, read 2:19 as the forming of specimens for naming.  A reader who wants a contradiction has to want it.

Objection 7: "Genesis has plants before the sun and birds before land animals. Science has the reverse. Genesis is wrong."

The order is what the article's table says it is, and no reordering of the text fixes it;  Ross's attempt has day-5 whales appearing after day-6 mammals by his own admission.¹⁹  The young-earth reading does not reorder the text.  It denies that the fossil column records the order in which things were made, and stakes that denial on geology.  That is a real bet, and it can lose, and the articles on fossil order and dating the earth are where it is tested.  What the objection cannot do is claim both that Genesis must be read plainly and that it must match the column;  those are the concordist's two commitments, not the young-earth reader's.

Objection 8: "If you concede accommodation for the sky, you have conceded it for the days and the Flood. You cannot stop halfway."

The stopping point is not arbitrary.  Sky-language in Genesis 1 is descriptive vocabulary, shared with the Psalms and Isaiah, that the text never defines and uses in incompatible images.  The days are counted, bounded and made the pattern for a commandment.  The Flood is dated to the day and month, given a duration, and followed by a covenant.  A text can use its readers' word for sky without teaching their physics, in the same way that a modern geologist can say "sunset" in a field report.  It cannot count to seven without meaning seven.  Whether that reading is true is a different question from whether it is intended, and the sibling article on genre and grammar makes exactly that separation.

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