When you use this color-coded website for Genesis 1, this is what you will find concerning the firmament:Īs you can see in the above graphic, I looked at the corresponding words for the firmament, then used an on-line translator and dictionary to discover the meaning of the Greek word “stereoma,” which the HEBREW scholars chose when they translated their Hebrew text into Greek. You can then dive deeper and use other resources to further define the words for you. This makes it easy for those of us who don’t know Hebrew or Greek to see which words correspond to each other by color. There is a great on-line resource I like to use that shows the Hebrew, Greek and English texts as color-coded verses.

Now, I want to circle back around (pun intended) to the issue of the firmament allegedly just being a gaseous/vacuum filled “expanse,” as many are desperately trying to convince us is the case today. I deal with the issue of the “canopy theory” at about 7:20 in the above video. The Hebrew word used for the firmament in the above verses is preceded by the letter “bet” which means “in.” In fact, it’s the first letter of our Bible, used as a prefix for the word “beginning.” Hence we have: “IN the beginning…” So, in the Hebrew, you cannot get away from the fact that the sun, moon, and stars are all INSIDE this thing we call the firmament, not outside and all around some “ice canopy” suspended above the Earth! Then, on Day 4 of Creation, we are told the sun, moon and stars are placed IN this firmament – not outside and all around as the Kent Hovind/Carl Baugh “canopy theory” would demand.ġ4 And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years:ġ5 And let them be for lights in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth: and it was so.ġ6 And God made two great lights the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also.ġ7 And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,ġ8 And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good.ġ9 And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. Not long after this, we are told the dry land appears within this firmament. Here we are told about a thing called the “firmament” which separates waters above from waters below. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

For instance…Ħ And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.ħ And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.Ĩ And God called the firmament Heaven. If you consider yourself a Christian who believes the Bible, yet holds to a spinning, heliocentric, globular concept of our world in an ever expanding universe, you will have a very hard time getting “around” several serious issues found in the first chapter of Genesis.

To deny this is to prove extreme ignorance of history and the beliefs of numerous ancient cultures. Although the details sometimes varied to one degree or another, we are still left with the impression of essentially a snowglobe model, with an enclosed world inside a dome-like structure: But let’s deal with the first argument before diving deeper into the latter.Īs pointed out in one of my other blogs, the ancients shared very similar views of the cosmos. Sadly, for those who believe the same was as Doug, not only does history itself refute the gas/air/space expanse argument but so also do the Hebrew scholars who translated their Hebrew Scriptures into Greek for the creation of the Septuagint.

Firmament earth