Biblical Cosmology

The Firmament

Genesis does not open with a planet floating in empty space. It opens with a structure. On the second day God creates a raqia, a firmament, to divide the waters above from the waters below. The Hebrew word raqia comes from riqqua, something beaten or hammered out, the way a craftsman beats metal into a bowl or a mirror.

Job, the oldest book in the Bible, says the same thing plainly:

A molten looking glass is not air. It is not the vacuum of space. It is a physical, solid structure, hard and reflective. Centuries later Ezekiel sees the same thing in his vision:

Scripture consistently places God's throne upon the firmament. Isaiah says it directly:

Robert J. Schadewald, a Hebrew scholar, put the scriptural picture plainly: "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. Elihu asks Job, 'Can you beat out the vault of the skies, as he does, hard as a mirror of cast metal?' This shows that the Hebrews considered the vault of heaven a solid, physical object."

Psalm 19:1 says "The heavens declare the glory of God and the firmament sheweth his handiwork." The firmament is something God made with His hands. Scripture stretches it like a curtain and spreads it like a tent:

testingtheglobe.com by Rob Skiba. One Man's Quest for Truth series.

Genesis is direct about what the firmament contains: "God set them in the firmament of heaven to give light upon the earth" (Genesis 1:17). The sun, moon and stars are placed inside the firmament. Not beyond it. Not in outer space on the other side. Inside it, like lamps hung in a tent.

The Circle of the Earth

Isaiah 40:22 is the verse people most often cite when they say the Bible teaches a spherical earth: "It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth." The Hebrew word for "circle" here is chug. But is chug the word for a sphere? Isaiah himself uses a completely different word when he means a ball:

Chug means circle, compass, or vault. You cannot toss a chug. You can inscribe one. Solomon writes:

A circle inscribed on the face of the deep. A boundary between light and darkness. The same word chug shows up in Job 22:14, where God walks "on the circle of the sky" (HCSB) or "in the circuit of heaven" (KJV). Schadewald wrote: "By extension, chug can mean roundness, as in a rounded dome or vault. In both verses, the use of chug implies a physical object, on which one can sit and walk."

Ancient Hebrew conception of the universe. The circular earth under the dome, with waters above and below.

Ancient Egypt. The goddess Nut depicted as the canopy of heaven stretched over the earth, consistent with cultures across the ancient Near East.

The Fixed Earth

Scripture tells us the earth was established and does not move. This is not a marginal idea tucked into one or two verses. It runs from Job, the oldest book, through the Psalms and the prophets and into Zechariah:

YHWH speaks to Job from the whirlwind and describes the earth's foundation in architectural terms, not orbital ones:

How do you fasten the foundations of a globe spinning at 1,000 miles per hour while orbiting the sun at 67,000? Where do the corner stones and pillars fit in that picture? Rob Skiba put it plainly: "Tossing out all preconceived ideas of a spinning globe, just reading the text by itself, no one would ever think anything different from what it says."

These passages also answer a problem for the globe model: the sun standing still. Scripture records this miracle more than once, and it is the sun that stops, not the earth:

On a globe model, all three accounts require the earth itself to stop rotating, and in Isaiah's case to briefly reverse. In a geocentric model with a stationary earth and a moving sun inside the firmament, they mean exactly what they say: the sun stood still, and the sun went backward.

Sun, Moon and Stars

Genesis is explicit about where the lights go. The word in appears four times in four verses, and each time it refers to the firmament:

The sun, moon and stars are not outside the firmament in a vacuum billions of light years away. On the plain reading, they are inside it, moving within the enclosed structure above the earth. The Psalms describe the sun's movement the same way:

Ecclesiastes says it plainly: "The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose" (Ecclesiastes 1:5). The sun moves. It has a circuit. It has a place it returns to.

At the end of all things, both the prophets and Yeshua Himself say the stars will fall to earth and the heavens will be rolled up like a scroll:

If the stars are suns trillions of miles away, each with solar systems orbiting them, how do they fall to earth like figs from a fig tree? Only in a model where the stars are close, small, and inside the firmament does that language become literally possible instead of purely symbolic.

Scripture also ties stars to angels directly. Job 38:7 describes the morning stars singing together at creation, and the sons of God shouting for joy. Revelation 9:1 describes a star falling from heaven "and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit." In Scripture, stars are often personal, sentient beings.

Waters Above the Firmament

Genesis 1:7 says God divided the waters under the firmament from the waters above it. Those waters above are still there. They did not simply evaporate at the Flood or drop out of the text. Psalm 148 calls them to praise:

Psalm 104 describes God laying the beams of His chambers in those waters: "Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters" (Psalm 104:3). At the Flood, it is not merely rain that falls. The windows of heaven are opened:

Windows. Not clouds. The deep below and the deep above break open at the same time. That fits a sealed structure with vast bodies of water on both sides of the firmament. It does not fit a planet surrounded by the vacuum of space.

Four Corners, Four Winds

From Job to Revelation, Scripture keeps referring to the ends and corners of the earth. These phrases show up again and again. They are hard to dismiss as mere poetry:

Rob Skiba observes: "If we accept that the authors of Scripture were directly inspired by the Holy Spirit of the Creator Himself, don't you think they would have used better terms to describe a spinning globe orbiting the sun if that were indeed the case? A simple reading of the Scriptures absolutely does not paint a picture of a globe. No child, unhindered by the interpretation and indoctrination of a scientist or theologian, would ever get a spinning globe out of any of the above."

What Scripture paints consistently, when you read it on its own terms, is an enclosed, circular, stationary earth under a solid dome. Waters above and below. The sun and moon moving inside the firmament. Foundations and pillars holding the structure in place. And the throne of the Almighty seated above it all.

Go Deeper

What you have read here is a summary of Part 4 of Rob Skiba's series. 2:22 Church built this page to promote his work at testingtheglobe.com. His full research covers the Book of Enoch, angels and stars, the pillars of the earth, and the broader implications of a Biblical cosmology.