# How the first hearers of the Bible understood the universe?



## Elimelek (Jan 19, 2009)

Dear friends



Some Theologians and Semitists say that the picture of the universe the Bible depicts is one of a three storey building. That is to say, the universe are made up of a flat disc, called earth, waters under the earth also referred to as the flood or the abode of dead (Sheol), and the water dome above the earth, called the heavens.

On the earth, mount Zion, Jerusalem or the temple is seen as the middle (or the navel) of the world. The earth disc is held up by the mountains that reach into the abode of the dead or the waters under the earth. It is these mountains that shake in God’s presence to indicate God’s power over the universe.

The heavens consist out of three parts, the waters above the earth that is the blue sky, the store rooms for hail, rain, snow and mist which is opened when it hails, rains, etc and the third heaven which is God’s throne room and where his presence is announced by the cherubim and/or seraphim. 

Sheol (sometimes translated with ‘pit’) is seen as the abode of the dead, the place where humans become shadows after a life here on earth. Sometimes it is seen as a place where God is not present, sometimes God’s presence in Sheol shows that God cannot be limited, He is omnipresent. It may also be the chaos waters that want to engulf the whole universe and destroy it. It is the place of monsters like the Leviathan. 

What do you think of this cosmology? Do you think it is how the Bible depicts the universe?

How would you understand verses like, Exodus 20:4,


> You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. (ESV)


 Psalm 139:7-10,


> Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there! If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me. … (ESV)


 (I think that the spirit here indicates God’s presence, like in Genesis 1, and doesn’t necessarily refer to the Holy Spirit.)

Jonah prays in Jonah 2:2-9,


> I called out to the LORD, out of my distress, and he answered me; _ out of the belly of Sheol I cried, _ and you heard my voice. 3 For you cast me into the deep,_ into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; _ all your waves and your billows passed over me. 4 Then I said, _ 'I am driven away from your sight; _ Yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.' 5 The waters closed in over me to take my life; the deep surrounded me; weeds were wrapped about my head 6 at _ the roots of the mountains. _ I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet _ you brought up my life from the pit, _ O LORD my God. 7 When my life was fainting away, I remembered the LORD, and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple. 8 Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love. 9 But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the LORD!" (ESV)


 In one of the darkest Psalms in the Bible the Psalmist prays (Psalm 88:2-7, 10-12),


> 2 Let my prayer come before you; incline your ear to my cry! 3 For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol. 4 I am counted among those who go down to the pit; I am a man who has no strength, 5 like one set loose among the dead, like the slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand. 6 You have put me in the depths of the pit, in the regions dark and deep. 7 Your wrath lies heavy upon me, and you overwhelm me with all your waves. … 10 Do you work wonders for the dead? Do the departed rise up to praise you? Selah 11 Is your steadfast love declared in the grave, or your faithfulness in Abaddon? 12 Are your wonders known in the darkness, or your righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? (ESV)


 Reading texts with the above as background may illuminate difficult passages, such as 1 Samuel 28 where a dead Samuel is brought “up” (1 Sam 28:12-15). If may also make a passage such as Revelation 4 more understandable.

What do you think? Is this type of interpretation too way off?

Kind regards
 
[FONT=&quot]Elimelek[/FONT]


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## Contra_Mundum (Jan 19, 2009)

It seems to me the Bible's fundamental "cosmology" is dictated in the first couple chapters of Genesis. Anything else in Scripture is supplemental to the base. Correlative ideas from outside Israel, where they may be found, can only tells us about common terminological currency, not what Israel shared, strictly speaking, as worldview with her neighbors.

Another fact to take into consideration (which pagans denied, and which modern unbelievers dismiss out of hand) is that Israel's God was the whole world's One, True God, before knowledge of him is nearly universally suppressed in unrighteousness. Therefore Adam's creation story (which he would have passed on) found in Genesis IS the foundational story, which must be tweaked and distorted by falsehood to fit with the development of alternate deities. This explanation for "commonalities" between the Bible's and other's cosmogonies is consistent with the Bible's own story about itself.

Some say that there are correlations between Genesis creation and creation accounts from other cultures/religions. And attempts are made to force the biblical account into a presumed ANE general paradigm, something along the lines of "all primitive people in the Ancient Near East believed the same basic mythology about the earth's origin," which naturally relates to its present order.

If you are predisposed to see a common (and false) understanding of the world all through ancient literature, then you will highlight what seem like correlations between the Bible's account and other human accounts. The only thing "true" about the biblical account in this case is that God gave Israel a story so they could be like all the other nations around them.

If you are predisposed to see the Bible as a unique and accurate teaching about the world's origin and subsequent order, and a universal corrective to errors about the world, then the differences in the Bible's version of earth's construction make it stand out from the other proposals.

But, what about the fact that the Israelites did live in a milieu of local descriptions? Might they not use the common currency of the day to describe the world order, even if they poured their own meanings into them? Why not? We say "the sun rose this morning," even though strictly speaking it might be hard to find someone today who believes the sun crosses the sky while the earth stands still.

Furthermore, there is a modern tendency to view ancient peoples as rather unsophisticated thinkers. A case of chronological snobbery. It is entirely possible, and in some cases it it most certain, that one or another ancient societies expressed a religious and philosophical "view" of the world that was typological and picturesque, and was only idealistically connected to do the structure of the physical universe in which they lived.

In other words, they didn't assume that if they dug down far enough into the earth, they would come upon a physical "realm of the dead." Who knows what they might find? But the "place of the dead" was not a location one could reach in a bodily quest.

Now, there may have been unsophisticated people who, being taught such a metaphysical layout as the three-tiered (or more) universe, who made crass leaps to thinking of the physical universe in those terms. But I have a hard time believing that biblically literate people made those assumptions, based on a biblically informed (even if only the OT) descriptions.

How old is Job? The setting is patriarchal, anyway. Here are some words:
Job 26:7 He stretches out the north over the void and *hangs the earth on nothing*.

Job 9:9 who made the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades and the *chambers of the south*;
(implies an awareness of a southern region, with its own sweep of constellation star-chambers)

My point is, that even without the accumulated body of observations that describe the workings of the physical universe with the precision of today's measurements, and the mathematical and observational tools we possess, the people of Adam's day--or Noah's or Abraham's or Moses' or David or Daniel--they understood that their God was different, and his Special Revelation to them was different, from the nations that surrounded them. And this knowledge colored their interpretations of what new or old philosophical ideas or observations they came on contact with.

They used the "scientific" philosophical currency of their day, but I don't believe the prophets themselves who wrote our Scripture bought into pagan conceptions


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## Elimelek (Jan 20, 2009)

Dear Contra_Mundum and others

Maybe I’ve been using the wrong English terms. Both the words ‘cosmology, cosmogony’ and ‘worldview’ doesn’t completely fit the issue I am trying to raise. (This I only realised after I looked up the definitions of these words in a dictionary.) What interests me is, how did the universe look through the eyes of a person (more specifically a believer) in Biblical times? What came to mind when certain words were mentioned? What concepts lay behind certain imagery?

What I am clear of, is that the universe with all its components (earth, sea, stars, Sheol, Tehom, etc.) were quite different from how we see and understand it. If we put our modern/ current understanding of the universe aside and just look at the Bible, what will we discover? What is explicitly said and what is implicitly assumed about the universe? Will this have an influence on our faith and if so how?

The reason I am making a lot about Sheol, comes from my own experience and presuppositions of death in South Africa. It is a general known fact with many black people in South Africa that ghosts are always that of white people. This type of belief is not only found in rural areas. (Personally I don’t belief in ghosts.) Yet behind this belief lies a very different understanding of death from what I am used to (and I presume you too). It can clearly be seen when a black person passes away.

The body of the person must be taken to his/her home, where he/she lived before it is taken to the place where the late was born. The movement from the place of death to the home ensures that the person will not haunt the home (after he is buried in his birthplace which is most of the time in another province of South Africa). When the dead person’s body is at home, a minister of religion is expected to pray for the deceased, that his ‘soul’ (or essence) will be peaceful until it goes and rest with the other ancestors in the family graveyard. The body (with the ‘soul’) is removed from the home after the prayer and loaded into a hearse which transports it to the family burial grounds. Should the driver of the hearse (or other car) stop at a garage (or petrol/gas pump) or shop on the way, the driver must first go to the back of the hearse and address the body in the coffin, explaining that the person don’t stay behind, but that he/she should remain in his/her body. The dead person must also be informed that they’ve finished pouring petrol (/gas) and that they will be on their way, least the ‘soul’ stay behind and haunt the place.

Usually there are specific times set when to bury a person’s body in the family graveyard (sometimes to appease the ancestors). The burial ground is also very near the dead person’s parent’s home, usually within the kraal. It is widely believed that he/she will watch over the family’s interests even while they are dead. The ancestors come from the ground and with very traditional Africans influence their everyday life. They need to be appeased. (When a child gets a name he/she is first taken to the family burial ground – the place of the ancestors – where a goat is slaughtered and the ancestors is asked to give a name. After this ceremony, the child is only baptised.)

Interestingly, in Northern Sotho (one of the African languages) God is called ‘Modimo’ (God), but the ancestors are called ‘Badimo’ (gods). When Samuel comes up from the realm of the dead (Sheol) in 1 Samuel 28, there is once or twice referred to him being part of the ‘elohim’ (gods), yet God is also called ‘Elohim’ in Hebrew. If you take the Canaanite practises as depicted in some Ugaritic tablets, you’ll know that the ‘elim’ (a shortened form of ‘elohim’) refers to ‘ancestors’ and not gods. It is as if the African understanding of Biblical passages may sometimes make a passage more understandable.

I am not giving a value judgment on the burial beliefs of so many African Christians, but I just want to illustrate that using certain ‘jargon’ to describe your world, implies a certain understanding of the universe. One way of understanding should not be deemed as backward from another.

To come back to the universe as understood by people in Biblical times or as it is explained in the Bible itself, how does the Bible’s concept of the universe differ from ours today?

Kind regards



Elimelek


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