Oceans firmament2/2/2024 These winds, it repeats, are the pillars of heaven.Īre we allowed to accept that as valid in the absence of any other Hebrew description of pillars? Or does it get rejected because it does’t match the Victorian “vault and ocean” models? If it’s taken as evidence, it’s hard to imagine winds supporting both a solid firmament and a large body of water. It states unequivocally that the heavens are supported on the four winds at the ends of the earth, which also govern the movements of the clouds and heavenly bodies. My skepticism turns out to be largely to my own loss, because if we were to accept the claim about the reliability of second temple literature, then I have found what seems to be the one clear Jewish reference to the nature of the “pillars of heaven”, in 1 Enoch, one of the earlier and more important intertestamental sources (it is, after all, quoted in the NT). The implication was that there is a consistent second temple model agreeing with the “goldfish bowl” ANE cosmology, and i predicted that there wouldn’t be when I checked. Someone above assured us that the second temple Jews could be relied on to know their own cosmology - a claim I dispute firstly because the time-lag is so great, and secondly because the sources give completely disparate pictures influenced by everything including the geocentric spherical earth model of the Greeks. I’m not sure if any ANE scholars, liberal or conservative, would recognise that. Having shown that the OT is well aware of rain clouds and even the distillation of rain, you yourself seem to have developed a novel personal Rube Goldberg model in which clouds are the immediate source of rain, but are fed from trapdoors in a hard firmament by waters above as well as by clouds rising from the earth. And the same is true of the claims about the Intertestamental (see below) and Patristic periods. The oft made claims that “the Babylonians believed…” or “the Egyptians believed…” or “The Canaanites believed” turn out to be at best oversimplified (not to say often flat wrong). And the biblical waters, as well as the nature of the raqia, remain ambiguous (that is, if “his waters wrapped in the clouds” are dismissed as irrelevant). Ugarit has mountains that are matched to Job’s pillars of the heavens, but turn out not to be said to support the sky at all. Egypt is all over the place, but at most has a cosmic river, not an ocean, and a sky supported by the air god. Mesopotamia turrns out to have dry flat heavens supported on string rather than held up on pillars - and open at the edges. To me the thing being demonstrated is that the proverbial “universal ANE cosmology” that is used to fill in the details of Israel’s is so full of holes as to sink in its own tehom without trace. If Mohammad’s ocean had any floodgates in it, the water would wipe out all seven heavens before it even reached the usual rainclouds! Evidently the people were impressed with his theology of transcendence, rather than nodding at his grasp of a cosmology they all shared!īearing in mind that the Hadith compilations postdate the start of Islam by a century or two (so maybe eighth of ninth century AD, several centuries into the Ptolemaic era), and their eclectic nature, there’s plenty of room to speculate on their influences - but a clear line through from the second millennium is notably absent. He starts by getting them to notice the rainclouds, then says the distance between his hearers and the clouds in the sky (the heavens) is 71, or 72, or 73 years, and then starts multiplying heavens. From the total text of the actual saying Mohammad’s purpose was, literally, to put as much distance between mankind and Allah as possible. Good luck with tracing the genealogy of that model - it may have adopted the seven heavens from late Babylonian thought, or from the seven spheres of Greek cosmology, the latter being a little more likely in that the spheres were surrounded by a crystal sphere of aether holding the stars.īut mountain goats above that don’t come from any cosmology I’ve ever seen, and an extra level has been added to whichever scheme they used for Allah.īut that makes the text representative of a cosmology, and that isn’t its purpose at all.
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