"a cupola" (Gen 1:6)

Reading through the story of creation

As we saw last time, Day One was about controlling the primordial darkness. Day Two is about controlling the primordial water. God uses something quite unusual to do so — a raqia.

6 God thought, Let there be a cupola in the middle of the water  

‏ וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אֱלֹהִ֔ים יְהִ֥י רָקִ֖יעַ בְּת֣וֹךְ הַמָּ֑יִם וִיהִ֣י מַבְדִּ֔יל בֵּ֥ין מַ֖יִם לָמָֽיִם׃

Let there be a cupola יְהִ֥י רָקִ֖יעַ   Like most English speakers, I had “firmament” of the King James translation in my ears as the translation of raqia.  Then I asked myself, “What is a firmament?” and could not come up with a good answer.  The Oxford English Dictionary more or less tells us that “firmament” refers to this very raqia: “the arch or vault of heaven overhead; the sphere containing the fixed stars.”

The Bible implies the same thing.  Of the 17 times this word occurs in the Bible, nine are here in Genesis 1; five more are in Ezekiel (we’ll talk more about him in a moment); and the three others are in Pss 19:2, 150:1, and Dan 12:3.

Note: Christians and Jews number the verses slightly differently.  So Ps 19:2 in a Jewish Bible is Ps 19:1 in a Christian Bible.  Chris Heard explains:

For example, the verses that constitute Mal 4 in modern English Bibles are numbered as Mal 3:19–24 in Hebrew Bibles. A writer who points readers to Mal 3:19 is therefore relying on a Hebrew Bible rather than a modern translation.¹ Similarly, verse references based on the Hebrew version of the book of Psalms will often be one verse “higher” than the equivalent reference to an English Bible, because many of the psalms have short headings or superscriptions that are numbered as verse 1 in Hebrew Bibles but are skipped when numbering the verses in English Bibles. 

That explanation is from the Society for Biblical Literature’s “Bible Odyssey” website – which I encourage everyone to explore.  I’ll write a longer post on my WordPress site to talk about why and how the chapter-verse numbering differences happened.  In the meantime, those who want to pursue the subject a bit further can find a brief discussion of it on p. 9 of my book The Bible’s Many Voices or by listening to this episode of the Many Voices podcast. 

Now, back to raqia.  Ezekiel, Psalms, and Daniel all use the word to refer to this object that is created on Day Two.  Psalms and Daniel are essentially using it as a synonym for the English words “sky” or “heaven.”  Ezekiel, who uses the word five times (four times in Ezekiel 1 and once more in Ezekiel 10), deserves a few extra words of discussion.

To put things a bit simplistically, later Jewish interpreters understood Genesis 1 (ma’aseh bereshit, “The Creation Episode”) to be the Bible’s description of physics and Ezekiel 1 (ma’aseh merkavah, “The Chariot Episode”) to be the Bible’s description of metaphysics.  It is no wonder that Ezekiel features our raqia in the chapter that enticed Jewish philosophers and mystics alike to ask one of the three questions that tradition says the beginning ב of the Bible wants us not to ask: “What is above?”

Since exploring raqia in the Bible hasn’t helped us understand the nature of this object any better, let’s have a look at רקע r-q-ʿ, the 3-letter Semitic root from which it derives. (That ʿ symbol is the technical way to mark an ayin when you transliterate Semitic languages into our Latin alphabet.)

The verb occurs just 12 times in the Bible, and always in a context where it seems to refer to creating a solid sheet of something hard, by hammering it and spreading it out – for example, the way sheets of gold are hammered out in Exod 39:3 to be sliced into gold threads for the vestments of the high priest or the way an idol is gold-plated in Isa 40:19.  The raqia itself, of course, is not gold but sapphire, as you can tell simply by looking up at it.

One example that’s worth discussing is in Isa 42:5, which seems clearly to be thinking about the story of creation ­– but not necessarily of Genesis 1 as we have it in front us:

Thus said the god [הָאֵ֣ל, not elohim but ha-el] YHWH,

The one who created [בּוֹרֵ֤א, borei] the sky and stretched it out

The one who hammered out [רֹקַ֥ע, roqa] the earth [הָאָ֖רֶץ, ha-aretz] and its offspring

The one who gave breath to a people upon it

And spirit [ר֖וּחַ, ruaḥ] to those who walk on it.

Surprisingly, in Isaiah 42 it is the earth that is connected with our verb.  (The Jewish prayerbook connects them as well, calling God רוקע הארץ על המים ‘the one who hammers out the land upon the water’.)  Isa 44:24 and Ps 136:6 make the same connection.  Only Job 37:18, like Genesis 1, connects רקע with what is above rather than what is below.  Check to see whether the commentators you rely on for Isaiah and Psalms discuss this interesting switch.

The bottom line is this:  We’re looking for an English word for a solid object that can fit over the earth below as the roof of a domed stadium sits over the field.  Some translators do use the English word “dome.”  I’ve chosen a slightly less common architectural term just to convey how unusual this word raqia is.

This is not the first time, and may not be the last, that I’ll take an entire post to discuss a single word. 

1. More correctly, “a Jewish Bible rather than a Christian translation.”