101 Myths of the Bible: how ancient scribes - Conscious Evolution TV

18
yth #6:
God called the firmament “heaven.”
The Myth: And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the
morning were the second day. (Gen. 1–8)
The Reality: The identification of the firmament as heaven results from an erroneous
interpretation by later biblical redactors.
Genesis describes only one event occurring on the second day, the appearance of
the firmament. (Later, we will see that the second day included some additional
events.) Although the narrative locates it between the waters above and the waters
below, equating it with the sky rather than the heaven above the sky, some Hebrew
scribe wrote that God called the firmament“Heaven.”The author must not have been
familiar with the original Egyptian story in which this firmament represented a
primeval mountain that arose out of the waters and separated the waters above from
the waters below.
In Creation stories throughout the Near East, in Egypt as well as in Mesopotamia
and the Levant, the heavens rested on a vault over the sky. This vault of necessity constituted
a transparent but solid platform that kept the heaven from falling down
through the sky. In Egypt, the sky between heaven and earth, originally the firmament
that emerged out of the waters, came to be associated with the god Shu, son of the
Heaven and Earth, and Egyptians depicted him as holding heaven aloft over the earth.
The Hebrew scribes believed that there should be some hard surface up in the sky
holding up the heaven, but as monotheists, they could not accept the idea that the sky
was a deity separate and apart from the Hebrew God. Therefore, they once again disassociated
the Egyptian deity from the phenomena represented by the deity. They
transformed the Egyptian sky deity that held up the heavens into the heaven itself.