8 God called the cupola Sky.
וַיִּקְרָ֧א אֱלֹהִ֛ים לָֽרָקִ֖יעַ שָׁמָ֑יִם
Our story was introduced, as you remember, by telling us what things were like “when God began to create the sky and the earth.” Now the sky has indeed been “created.” It happened even without our noticing, because the Bible never says ויברא אלהים את השמים va-yivra elohim et-ha-shamayim ‘and God created the sky’. Instead, God made a cupola, which he has now named “Sky.”
Let’s work through this logically.
• As we saw in our earlier discussion, only God can “create” (ברא) anything.
• V. 1 told us that God would create the sky.
• V. 7 told us that God made a cupola – a verb that anyone can do.
• Now, v. 8 tells us that the cupola is the sky. That is the name God gave it.
We can even guess at how God made it. The name raqia suggests that God hammered it out (of sapphire, as we learn elsewhere in the Bible), as we might hammer metal into a thin sheet. As far as I’m aware, we haven’t figured out a way to hammer sapphire into a thin sheet, but this process at least is easy to visualize, and (unlike the creation of light) we can imagine doing it. It is certainly not creation ex nihilo, out of nothing. So what is the special divine element that makes this an instance of ברא?
I don’t have an answer to this question. As I wrote earlier in this series, reading the Bible with this kind of careful intensity is intended to pay the biblical author (capitalize Author if you prefer) the respect of trying our best to understand what he1 intended to communicate. That does not preclude making meaning for ourselves out of the Bible, but at least to my way of thinking it should precede it. We’ll have more opportunities to think about this special divine creation word ברא as the series continues.
And God saw that it was good. καὶ εἶδεν ὁ θεὸς ὅτι καλόν.
Wait, what?
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