Transcript 20250519 Old Testament Cosmology: How Ancient Israelites Viewed the World - The Inquisitive Bible Reader 20250519

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⁴ The ancient scribes who wrote, edited, and compiled the Bible were embedded in a culture whose perspective on the universe was utterly different from ours today. Why does creation in Genesis 1 begin with water? What exactly is the “firmament” that the Bible frequently mentions? Why does God live in heaven above, and what is the point of building temples on earth? Who are the host of heaven? What is Sheol, the biblical netherworld, and why do some Bible passages connect it with the ocean abyss? Some people might prefer to avoid such ³⁸ questions — either because of the potentially awkward clash between faith and modern science, or because biblical cosmology is simply irrelevant to their own religious concerns. Others — like me — are just too curious about the Bible’s view of the universe to ignore it.

⁵⁸ Exploring the mental landscape of ancient societies is like visiting a foreign country, and the more we know about the Bible’s perspective, the more we understand how it shapes our own theological beliefs and assumptions. This video comes with important caveats. The Bible was not written to be a scientific textbook, and not every author viewed the cosmos in exactly the same way.

⁷⁹ Still, the Old Testament is quite consistent in how it describes the cosmos, and comparisons with extra-biblical sources provide some very useful background information. It’s also important to understand that people in the ancient Near East did not have the same conceptual categories as us, and we cannot assume that words like “heaven” and “earth” had the same meaning for them that they do for us.

¹⁰⁰ As Othmar Keel, a prominent expert on Near Eastern iconography, explains in his book The Symbolism of the Biblical World, we must avoid the pitfalls of interpreting words and images too concretely and too abstractly. Keel uses Egyptian depictions of the sky as an example of the complexity of ancient thought: sometimes it is a fixed cover; sometimes it is a pair of wings; sometimes it is a woman; and sometimes it is an ocean.

¹²⁴ Each represents a different aspect of the sky, and the use of one symbol does not exclude the others. Both the Old Testament and the dominant Near Eastern cultures shared the view that the cosmos had at least three layers: Heaven, Earth, and the Netherworld or the Abyss below. Until about the fifth century BCE, nobody suspected that the earth was a sphere.

The Three-Tiered Universe

¹⁵⁷ As far as the ancients could tell, the ground was more or less flat, and it seemed to extend in all directions like an enormous disc. When the ancients looked up at the sky, they saw an unreachable expanse the color of the ocean that curved down toward the edges of the earth like a giant dome.

¹⁷⁷ This inaccessible realm, which contained the sun, moon, stars, and other celestial bodies, was assumed to be where most of the gods dwelt. Due to rainfall and the sky’s blue color, people assumed that there must be an ocean of water above the sky. The presence of wells and springs where water gushed out of the ground implied an endless quantity of water below the earth as well.

¹⁹⁸ Also below the earth was where the spirits of the dead were thought to dwell. This region, the netherworld, was often associated with the cosmic waters beneath the earth. The ancient Israelites and Judeans were not exempt from these universal beliefs. In an article for the Westminster Theological Journal, Paul Seely points out that, on the contrary, various stories in the Bible imply that the Hebrews were more scientifically naive than their neighbors, not less.

²²¹ This tripartite view is seen in the Babylonian creation and flood myth known as Atra-hasis, which says that after the earth was created, the god Anu returned to heaven, and the god Ea returned to the Apsu, the Sumerian ocean of the underworld. This Babylonian boundary stone depicts three layers: heaven inhabited by the gods; the earth filled with people, plants, and animals; and the citadel of the netherworld. The upper and lower oceans are represented as sea serpents.

²⁵⁰ The Old Testament also sometimes alludes to a tripartite cosmos. Exodus 20:4 is an example: You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Note that the NIV, a popular translation among evangelical Christians, mistranslates this verse to hide its cosmological implications from readers.

²⁷⁷ Psalm 135:6 expresses the same division of the cosmos: Whatever YHWH pleases he does, in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps. With this general cosmic structure in mind, let’s dig into some more specific concepts and compare the Hebrew Bible with other Near Eastern sources. Genesis 1.

The Heavenly Vault (Raqia‘)

³⁰⁵ The Bible’s very first verses present the entire cosmos at the start of creation as being in a chaotic watery state described by a rhyming phrase in Hebrew: tohu wa bohu. “Desolate chaos,” is how Ronald Hendel translates it in his Genesis commentary. A few verses later, God creates a vault and separates the water below the vault from the water above the vault.

³²⁷ God gives this vault a name: “Heaven” — or “Sky”. It’s the same word in Hebrew. It should be noted that vault — called the “dome of the sky” in verse 14, is not the entirety of heaven but one component of it. What is this vault that separates the waters and creates the open sky? The vault is called raqia‘ in Hebrew.

³⁴⁷ This word is related to metalworking, and it implies that the vault is a solid roof stretching across the sky. As Ellen van Wolde explains: …rāqîaʿ (from the verb rāqaʿ) refers to a goldsmith or silversmith who beats out metal or solid material or to the activity of someone who spreads out a plate or solid material. Based on a metaphorical structuring of this concept, God’s making of the heaven is conceptualized in terms of the beating out or spreading of solid plates of the heavenly vault….

³⁷⁶ The function of this heavenly vault or expanse is to withhold the waters above the vault from falling down on the earth. The Latin Vulgate translates raqia‘ as firmamentum, or “firm thing”, from which we get the King James translation of “firmament.” The belief that the sky is a solid roof, either flat or dome-shaped, was ubiquitous in Mesopotamia and Egypt.

⁴⁰⁰ In the famous Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, the creator Marduk divides the body of the sea monster Tiamat into two halves, and the top half becomes a vault across the sky, holding back the celestial waters. The belief that the dome of heaven extends down to the edges of the earth allows the phrase “ends of heaven” to become a metonym for the most distant parts of the earth [Wright 55], as we see in Deuteronomy 4:32: Ask from one end of heaven to the other: Has anything so great as this ever happened, or has its like ever been heard of?

⁴³¹ In that same vein, Deuteronomy 30:4 says: Even if you are exiled to the ends of heaven, from there YHWH your God will gather you, and from there he will take you back. The equivalence is even more explicit in Isaiah 13:5: They come from a distant land, from the end of the heavens… The creation of the round dome of the sky amidst the primordial waters appears in a creation passage in Proverbs 8.

⁴⁶⁰ Note that the sky is described as “firm”: When he established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above… The circular shape of the sky where it meets the ocean at the edge of the world is described in Job: He has described a circle on the face of the waters, at the boundary between light and darkness.

⁴⁸¹ According to Keel, this boundary is where the gates of morning and evening, where the sun enters and exits the sky, can be found, as described in Psalm 65:8. Those who live at earth’s farthest bounds are awed by your signs; you make the gateways of the morning and the evening shout for joy. Psalm 19 describes a portal in the firmament from which sun — described as an eager bridegroom and an athlete — emerges in order to follow its course from one end of heaven to the other.

Portals and Celestial Bodies

⁵⁰⁷ In the heavens he has set a tent for the sun, which comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy, and like a strong man runs its course with joy. Its rising is from the end of the heavens and its circuit to the end of them… The Jewish Book of Enoch also describes gates in the firmament through which the sun and moon rise and set, showing that this was still a widespread Jewish belief even in the early Hellenistic period.

⁵³² None of these authors understood that the earth orbited the sun. As far as they knew, the sun entered through a portal in the firmament, ran its circuit across the sky, and exited through another portal. The same belief is evident in Joshua 10, a story in which the sun stops moving at midday so a battle can continue, and in 2 Kings 20, where the sun reverses its motion across the sky as a sign to king Hezekiah. See my video on Joshua 10 for more details.

⁵⁵⁶ These stories are only explicable in a flat-earth cosmology. Many of the ancients believed that the gates of the sun were between mountains at the edge of the world. This Akkadian cylinder seal is one of many that show the sun god emerging from an opening between two distant mountains. And in Enuma Elish, Marduk creates gates in the sky for the sun to pass through in the morning and evening.

⁵⁸¹ In addition to holding back the celestial waters, the raqia is where the sun, moon, and stars are placed. In Genesis 1, we read: God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness.

⁶⁰¹ This is illustrated by a fascinating Babylonian depiction of the sun god Shamash in his temple. Below his feet is the celestial ocean and the firmament into which the stars are embedded. There’s a lot going on in this image that we’ll come back to. The exact material of which the biblical raqia is composed varies according to the passage.

Composition of the Sky

⁶²¹ There’s a fascinating story in Exodus 24 that takes place during the wilderness journey of the Israelites. Moses, Aaron, and the elders of Israel are summoned by Yahweh to climb Mt. Sinai and worship him. So they begin to climb the mountain, and when they get high enough, they are able to see the firmament and God himself enthroned upon it.

⁶⁴¹ Verse 10 says: They saw the God of Israel, and under his feet was an appearance like lapis-lazuli brick as clear as the sky itself. The elders of Israel then eat and drink in God’s presence. William Propp, in his commentary on Exodus, describes this as a “visit to Yahweh’s celestial palace for a feast,” patterned after similar Near Eastern myths about divine banquets.

⁶⁶³ This passage, though brief, unmistakably describes the firmament and Yahweh’s throne room as being composed of lapis-lazuli — a semiprecious mineral that was prized in antiquity for its vivid blue color. Ezekiel similarly describes God’s throne as being made of lapis-lazuli and sitting on top of the firmament, which is described as crystalline in appearance.

⁶⁸⁷ Over the heads of the living creatures there was something like a dome, shining like crystal, spread out above their heads. […] And above the dome over their heads there was something like a throne, in appearance like lapis-lazuli… A close parallel is found in several Babylonian texts that describe the heavens as being composed of three types of stone, including a blue stone like lapis-lazuli.

⁷⁰⁷ Marduk’s heavenly temple is also said to be made of lapis-lazuli stone in one of these texts, and it is built into the lapis-lazuli layer of the heavens. The finding of stone meteorites that fell from the sky might have reinforced the belief that the heavens were made of stone. Job, on the other hand, implies that the sky is made of metal: Can you, like him, spread out the skies, hard as a mirror of cast metal? Descriptions of the sky as being made of bronze also appear in older Greek literature, such as the Iliad. A verb based on the same root as raqia

⁷⁴⁰ also appears in Isaiah 44:24, which describes God as “stretching out the heavens and beating out the earth” in the manner of a metalsmith. This is one of several verses that describe God as a craftsman constructing the sky and earth by hand. John Pairman Brown explains: The cosmology of any society reflects the general state of its technology; the only language available to describe the work of a divine artisan is the language developed to describe the work of human artisans. In the alphabetic societies of the Mediterranean,

⁷⁷² metallurgy has mostly preempted any cosmologies derived from pottery-making or weaving. The ancient Greeks and Egyptians believed that the sky was supported by pillars. In The Odyssey, Atlas is described as “him who knows the depths of the whole sea, and holds up the great pillars which keep earth and sky apart.” Several Egyptian texts also describe heaven as resting on pillars.

⁷⁹⁵ We find support for this idea in Job 26: The pillars of heaven tremble and are astounded at his rebuke. A similar reference to the “foundations” of the heavens, which could be either pillars or mountains, is found in 2 Samuel 22:8: Then the earth reeled and rocked; the foundations of the heavens trembled and reeled because he was angry.

⁸²⁰ However, as we shall see, it was more often the earth that was thought to rest on pillars. In some Babylonian texts, there is a staircase like the one on ziggurat temples that the gods can climb in order to travel between earth and heaven. In Genesis 28, Jacob sees a similar staircase — often mistakenly called a “ladder” — upon which the messengers of God travel to and from heaven.

⁸⁴⁵ Jacob calls it the Gate of Heaven and anoints a sacred stone at that location. Most Near Eastern cosmogonies or creation myths begin with water. It is the same in Genesis 1, where a pre-existing ocean is the primary substance from which God forms the cosmos. This ocean is called Tehom in Hebrew and is often translated as “the Deep” or “the Abyss”.

The Cosmic Ocean and Primeval Waters

⁸⁷⁴ Tehom is derived from a Semitic root word, tiham, which means “sea”. The same word is used in the literature of Ugarit, an ancient nation close to Israel, to describe the deep ocean. It is also the origin of the name Tiamat, the primordial sea serpent slain by Marduk in the Babylonian creation myth. The ancient association between creation and sea serpents is a topic I have explored in a previous video.

⁸⁹⁶ In Egypt, the primeval ocean took the form of a deity named Nun. Nun was the primary substance from which all creation emerged. Nun is even responsible for creating the creator gods themselves, like Atum and Ptah. After these primordial waters are separated (like in the Genesis story), the ocean of the sky becomes the goddess Nut, Nun’s feminine form.

⁹¹⁹ In Mesopotamia, the Chaldean Cosmogony from Sippar declares that before creation, “all the lands were sea.” In the Babylonian Enuma Elish, Tiamat and Apsu are cosmic water deities who produce the other gods and are ultimately defeated by Marduk in order to create the sky and the earth. In other Akkadian creation stories, the Apsu is all that exists prior to creation.

⁹⁴⁴ The Apsu, by the way, was the cosmic ocean believed to exist below the earth in Mesopotamian mythology. In Hebrew, Tehom is treated as a proper name and lacks the definite article. This suggests, according to Rosanna Lu, that it originated as a deified sea much like its Babylonian, Ugaritic, and Egyptian counterparts.

⁹⁶⁷ In Genesis, both Yahweh and Tehom seem to exist from the beginning as primordial entities. The existence of the sea before the earth is confirmed by Psalm 24. For YHWH has founded the earth on the seas and established it on the rivers. In the cosmogonies of Egypt, Babylon, and Israel, creation takes place through the separation of the original cosmic sea into two seas, one above the firmament and one below the earth.

⁹⁹¹ This is explicit in a wide range of Near Eastern texts as well as in Genesis 1. Psalm 104 describes YHWH as rebuking Tehom so that it recedes to its appointed boundaries, revealing the dry ground. In the Bible, the belief that an ocean exists above the sky is seen in passages like Psalm 148:4: Praise him, you highest heavens and you waters above the heavens! The Hebrew name for the sky, shamayim, is related to similar Akkadian words that may have meant “place of water.” In the Genesis flood story, the huge

¹⁰¹⁶ amounts of water needed to cover the mountains are described as coming from two sources: from the ocean above by means of holes in the firmament described as the “windows of heaven”, and from the ocean below the world.

¹⁰³¹ The windows of heaven were believed to be where rain came from, and they are mentioned again in Isaiah 24:18 and Malachi 3:10. In Near Eastern religions, the gods are often said to dwell in or near the cosmic waters. In Ugaritic texts, the high god El is said to dwell at the convergence of the two Deeps.

¹⁰⁵² In Psalm 29:10, YHWH sits enthroned above the mabbul, a word often translated “flood” that actually describes the celestial waters above the firmament. Psalm 104 says that YHWH’s chambers are established “on the waters”, another reference to the heavenly ocean. Similarly, the Egyptians referred to the waters of the sky as the Great Flood.

¹⁰⁷¹ One fascinating point of similarity between the temples of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Israel is the inclusion of sacred pools to represent the connection between the gods and the cosmic sea. Every Egyptian temple had a sacred lake that represented Nun’s primordial waters. These lakes were fed by the Nile River, which was believed to originate in the abyss below the earth.

Sacred Waters and Temple Symbolism

¹⁰⁹³ Each morning, the pharaoh would baptize himself in a temple lake to re-enact the creation of the world. Mesopotamian temples also had a ritual water basin called an apsu, and it was believed that temples were connected directly with the cosmic Apsu or abyss. The basin in the temple to Marduk was called taamtu, a word related to both Tehom and Tiamat.

¹¹¹⁴ Similarly, Solomon’s temple in the Bible had an enormous water basin called the Bronze Sea that was used for purification rituals by the priests. This almost certainly represented the cosmic Deep and its purifying powers, which are well known from Egyptian purification rituals. The Bronze Sea may also have connected the Jerusalem temple to the netherworld and to the mythical rivers of Eden.

¹¹³⁵ As an interesting side note, the sacred lakes of Egyptian temples were adorned with lotus flowers, which symbolized regeneration, and the Bronze Sea of Solomon was also shaped like a lotus flower. Whether the Babylonian Apsu was thought to be connected to the sea at the earth’s surface is not completely clear.

¹¹⁵⁶ According to Wayne Horowitz, some texts call the entire sea the Apsu, while others refer to just the deepest parts of the sea as the Apsu. In the Bible, Tehom is often considered to be the deeper part of the sea. In Jonah for example, the titular prophet describes himself as being surrounded by Tehom while he is underwater. The Bible describes the disc of the earth as “spread out over the water”, a reference to the Tehom.

Foundations and Pillars of the Earth

¹¹⁸⁸ But if the earth sits atop a cosmic ocean, then what keeps it from sinking? This was a serious question that led to several explanations. The Egyptians believed in a cosmic entity called ka that held up the earth. One Babylonian story says that the earth sits on a floating reed mat created by Marduk. The Bible’s authors believed that the earth had pillars or foundations of some kind, as numerous passages attest.

¹²⁰³ When the earth totters, with all its inhabitants, it is I who keep its pillars steady. The pillars of the earth are YHWH’s, and on them he has set the world. He shakes the earth out of its place, and its pillars tremble. You set the earth on its foundations, so that it shall never be shaken.

¹²²³ The earth is set firmly in place, it shall never be moved. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? The inhabited earth was thought to be surrounded by a ring of water, sometimes called the River. This is the original meaning of the Greek word Okeanos.

¹²⁴² On the Babylonian Map of the World, this water is called the Bitter River, and other sources equate it with the apsu. The “river” or “rivers” often appear in the Psalms in a parallelism with the sea, indicating that the waters surrounding and below the earth are related. The River is also equated with the edge of the world in the poetic doublet in Psalm 72:8: May he have dominion from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth! The sky formed a firm seal at the edge of the world that prevented the cosmic sea, the mabbul or flood, from pouring over the earth. In Job 38, God says that during creation, he “shut

¹²⁷⁶ in the sea with doors…and prescribed bounds for it, and set bars and doors, and said ‘thus far shall you come and no farther, and here shall your proud waves be stopped’.” Job 26:10 says that God inscribed a “circle” or “limit” upon the water.

¹²⁹⁵ In his book on Hebrew cosmology, Stadelmann remarks: The modern concept of an infinite or open-ended universe was not known in the OT; on the contrary, heaven and earth were thought to be sealed together at the rim of the horizon to prevent the influx of the cosmic waters. Some religious groups and organizations teach that every word of the Bible is true and accurate in its most literal sense.

¹³¹⁸ This perspective is closely linked to the creationist movement, which claims that the earth was created around the year 4,000 BC exactly as described in Genesis 1, despite all scientific knowledge to the contrary. However, since very few of these people are flat-earthers, the Near Eastern cosmology found in the Old Testament can pose a problem.

¹³⁴⁰ A common tactic used by creationists for interpreting the Bible is to ignore the forest of passages that imply a flat earth. Instead, they lean heavily one or two verses that can be construed as describing a spherical earth in space — particularly Job 26:7, which is translated in the KJV as follows: He stretcheth out the north over the empty place, and hangeth the earth upon nothing.

¹³⁶³ Gosh, that sounds a lot like the earth floating in space, doesn’t it? Well, not so fast. Here’s a more literal translation: He stretches out Zaphon over tohu, he hangs Earth on belimah. That tohu is the same word for chaos we encountered in Genesis, and it very likely refers to the watery abyss that precedes the creation of the earth.

¹³⁸⁴ In this doublet, tohu is paired with belimah or emptiness. These words do not describe a vacuum in the scientific sense, but something that lacks form and structure, just like the Tehom of Genesis 1. Earth is paired with Zaphon, YHWH’s sacred mountain and the centerpiece of creation.

¹⁴⁰² The rest of the chapter goes on to describe the creation of the pillars of heaven, the stilling of the chaotic sea, and God’s defeat of the sea monster Rahab. Overall, this chapter describes creation according to the same cosmological pattern we see in the rest of the Bible, with a particular emphasis on storm god imagery and the sea serpent myth.

¹⁴³⁰ This is not a scientific text! The ancient Mesopotamians and Israelites generally did not believe in a celestial afterlife. The destination of all mortals was the netherworld, a shadowy domain far beneath the earth where the dead enjoy a sleepy repose. The Babylonians sometimes called it Kigallu or Irkalla. The Egyptians called it Duat. In the Bible, this realm is called Sheol or the Pit.

Sheol and the Netherworld

¹⁴⁵⁵ The 115th Psalm describes it as a silent realm: The heavens are YHWH’s heavens, but the earth he has given to human beings. The dead do not praise YHWH, nor do any who go down into silence. Ecclesiastes affirms Sheol as the destiny of all mortals: Whatever your hand finds to do, do with your might, for there is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom in Sheol, to which you are going.

¹⁴⁷⁷ It is a place of darkness, as expressed in Psalm 143: For the enemy has pursued me, crushing my life to the ground, making me sit in darkness like those long dead. Sheol has gates and bars to ensure the dead can never leave. Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness? They loathed any kind of food, and they drew near to the gates of death.

¹⁵⁰¹ This is not mere metaphor. Various Babylonian texts make it clear that the underworld gates were identical in structure to city gates on the earth’s surface, with doors, frames, bolts, locks, and keys. Psalm 88 confirms that Sheol is beyond the bounds of YHWH’s activity, and describes those in Sheol as being forgotten by Yahweh.

¹⁵²² This was the standard view in Mesopotamia. Gilgamesh sounds very much like the preacher from Ecclesiastes when he says to Enkidu, “Who can go up to heaven, my friend? Only the gods dwell with Shamash forever. Mankind can number his days. Whatever he may achieve, it is only wind.” As J.

¹⁵⁴³ Edward Wright observes in his highly regarded book on Near Eastern cosmology: [In Israel], as elsewhere in the ancient Near East, there is nothing beyond the grave. While people may be said to “live” in the grave, this “life” is only in the dust and gloom of the netherworld. Israelite attitudes toward death and the afterlife parallel those of their neighbors… In fact, Isaiah condemns the king of Babylon for his wicked desire to ascend to Heaven after death like a god. Sorry, says Isaiah, you’re going down to Sheol just like everyone else.

¹⁵⁷⁰ Sheol below was excited to greet your arrival; rousing the shades of all the princes of the earth; raising from their thrones all the kings of the nations. All say to you, “even you are afflicted like us; you have become like us. Your pride has been brought down to Sheol, to the throng of your victims.

¹⁵⁸⁹ The belief that spirits continue to maintain some kind of existence in Sheol is seen in 1 Samuel 28 when Samuel’s ghost is summoned up from beneath the earth by a necromancer. The teraphim idols occasionally mentioned in the Bible were probably linked to the spirits of dead ancestors, and excavations of graves in Judah frequently contain grave goods intended to aid the departed in Sheol.

¹⁶¹⁰ Although the Old Testament avoids specifics about Sheol, the archaeological evidence shows little or no difference from the beliefs of Israel’s neighbors. The relationship between the watery Abyss and the Netherworld is not always clear. [Keel 38] In some Near Eastern texts, the Apsu is treated as the netherworld itself, but other texts distinguish between them.

The Abyss, Waters, and the Netherworld

¹⁶³¹ The Erra Epic, for example, describes the Anunnaki gods as inhabiting the Apsu, while the gallu-demons inhabit the Netherworld. Horowitz explains the problem: It is logical to place both the Apsu and the underworld directly beneath the earth's surface.

¹⁶⁴⁸ When one digs a well, one reaches the waters of Apsu without passing through the underworld, but graves of the dead are located above the groundwaters. One solution was to imagine a subterranean river that had to be crossed by the dead, called Hubur in Akkadian. Other texts suggest that the netherworld itself is filled with water. We see the association of Sheol with water in Jonah, where the prophet describes being “in the belly of Sheol” as he sinks into the Tehom.

¹⁶⁷⁶ According to Alan Jon Hauser, the poem in chapter 2 describes Jonah as descending through the Deep until he reaches Sheol, which he is about to enter when the fish plucks him away. The fish, in fact, is YHWH’s means of rescuing Jonah, evident from the fact that Jonah gives thanks for his deliverance while still inside the fish. Psalm 18 also describes Sheol as the “torrents of perdition” and “mighty waters”, suggesting at least a figurative link between Sheol and water, and Psalm 69 also links the deep sea with the netherworld.

¹⁷⁰⁵ But others thought of the netherworld as a dry and dusty place. It was sometimes called the House of Dust in Mesopotamia, and Job seems to agree: Will [my hope] go down to the bars of Sheol? Shall we descend together into the dust? Several of the psalms also associate the netherworld with dust: What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the Pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness? I’ve mentioned the sacred lakes at temples already, but the very need for temples in the first place is deeply entwined with ancient cosmology.

Temples, Heavenly Palaces, and the Divine Host

¹⁷⁴² Because most state societies in the ancient Near East were ruled by a king who lived in a palace with his councillors and courtiers, it was assumed that the gods likewise inhabited palaces in heaven. In the Bible, the Hebrew word for palace, hekal, is used for YHWH’s residence in heaven. Since heaven was inaccessible to people, an earthly facsimile of the deity’s palace was required for ceremonial purposes.

¹⁷⁶⁸ Temples were thus designed like palaces, with an inner sanctuary and a throne where an image of the god would be seated. If the temple was properly constructed, the god would simultaneously inhabit both the earthly temple and his heavenly palace. It was the same for the Israelites and YHWH’s temple in Jerusalem. That relief of Shamash’s temple includes the king approaching the sun god.

¹⁷⁸⁹ Although he is understood to be visiting the temple on earth, it is as though he has entered the god’s celestial palace. God wasn’t alone in heaven, however. The Israelites, like their neighbors, looked at the sky and imagined that the sun, moon, and stars were divine beings. In the Bible, these are referred to as the Host of Heaven, and the epithet “YHWH Sabaoth” or “YWHW of hosts” identifies YHWH as their king and military commander.

¹⁸¹⁴ …my eyes have seen the king, YHWH of hosts! Job 38:7 says that when God created the world, “the morning stars sang together and all the children of God shouted for joy.” As Wright notes, the parallelism indicates that the children of God, sometimes translated “heavenly beings”, are celestial bodies.

¹⁸³⁴ In Judges 5:20, we are told that the stars actually fought from heaven during Deborah’s battle against Sisera. Psalm 148:3 exhorts the sun, moon and stars to praise God. Psalm 68:17 describes YHWH as leading 20,000 celestial soldiers in chariots as he ascends to his mountain abode. In 1 Kings 22:19, the prophet Micaiah has a vision of YHWH on his throne with the host of heaven standing to his right and left.

¹⁸⁵⁹ Psalm 103:21 declares a blessing on YHWH and his heavenly ministers. Although the Bible does regard worship of the stars as idolatrous, it does not deny their divine nature. It was only later in the Hellenistic period that the Host of Heaven would be reinterpreted as angels. The Host of Heaven is similar if not identical to the Divine Council.

¹⁸⁸⁰ It was believed in the Near East that the gods would assemble on a mountain, often to pass judgments. We see this council convene in Job 1 as the heavenly beings and the Accuser present themselves before YHWH. In Psalm 82, the Divine Council meets so that Elohim can pass judgment on the other gods. I say, “You are gods, children of Elyon all of you; nevertheless, you shall die like mortals and fall like any prince.

¹⁹⁰⁵ ” Regarding this psalm, Wright observes: “the imagery is not far removed from a polytheistic context.” To summarize: the Old Testament describes a typical pre-scientific model of the cosmos – one with a flat earth, a celestial ocean, a solid sky, a subterranean sea, and a subterranean realm of the dead.

Conclusion and Modern Perspectives

¹⁹³³ Creation took place with the division of a pre-existing ocean to create dry land and the sky. Earthly temples were needed in order to gain access to gods who resided in heaven, a physical realm that was inaccessible to mortals. Although the Bible does not furnish every detail of this model, texts from Israel’s neighbors help us fill in some of the gaps. The advent of Greek astronomy and the dominance of Greek culture after Alexander’s conquest changed everything and set the stage for an entirely new understanding of the universe — but that’s a story for another video. In the 20th century, a movement emerged in ¹⁹⁶⁴ Christianity to interpret certain aspects of Genesis hyper-literally in defiance of modern scientific discoveries. In particular, this movement focused on the six-day creation narrative, the story of Adam and Eve, and the tale of Noah’s flood as non-negotiable events that put strict boundaries on permissible interpretations of history and science.

¹⁹⁸⁵ The irony of biblical inerrancy and doctrines like young-earth creationism is that they demand ignorance of what the Bible actually says about the cosmos. Occasionally, they will attempt a scientific rationale, such as pointing to aquifers or the recent discovery of water in earth’s mantle as explanations of the biblical deep.

²⁰⁰⁶ Such explanations, however, are not convincing to scholars; the Tehom as described by the Bible is clearly below the earth, not inside it. Aquifers are water-saturated layers of porous rock or sand, and the water in the hot mantle consists mainly of hydroxyl groups bound to various minerals.

²⁰²⁴ Neither of these is a liquid ocean, and they are a poor fit for the cosmic ocean of the underworld that the people of the Near East believed in. For inquisitive people like me who want to know what the authors of the Bible really believed, honesty, an open mind, and an understanding of the ancient cultural context is a better approach that doesn’t require compromising on science and the text of the Bible.