"God called the cupola Sky" (Gen 1:8)
Reading through the story of creation
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?
In Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, the Bible scholars use — more on that another time, in another place, but I’ll link to it when it’s written — there is a little superscript footnote a-a pair enclosing the Hebrew words וַֽיְהִי־כֵֽן ‘and it was so’ in v. 7. You remember that the Greek text has the equivalent phrase at the end of v. 6 instead, and that it seems at first glance to fit more naturally there.
The BHS note is this: “ins וירא אלהים כי־טוב cf 4.10.12.18.21.31 et 8 (𝔊).” What it’s telling you is that “God saw that it was good” should really be inserted into the text there, as in vv. 4, 10, 12, 18, 21, and 31 — and as in the Greek text of v. 8 (which you see above in bold).
And now we return to our question about whether we should understand the Septuagint (the LXX, for short) as a better text here than the Masoretic Text (MT), the traditional Hebrew text. Again, much more about these two at the (for now, future) link in the previous paragraph.
Notice that I’m asking whether the LXX is a better text here than the MT. This is not a general question. It needs to be asked and answered in any particular place where the two differ, and as it a general question it must be asked for every book of the Bible separately. The Torah / Pentateuch / Five Books of Moses may have all been translated as a unit, as the Letter of Aristeas2 suggests, but the other books were all individual translations.
In this particular place, the issue is that “and God saw that it was good” is missing in the Hebrew text of Day 2 but (spoiler alert) occurs twice in the Hebrew text of Day 3. Is this is a mistake in the text, or was it a deliberate choice? The BHS editor seems to think the LXX got this particular phrase wrong, too. (And he says nothing about removing either of the two occurrences on Day Three of creation.)
We saw, when we first looked at “and it was so,” that the location of those words seemed to make more sense in the LXX than in the MT. Now we have another piece of evidence to apply to the question of whether (1) the LXX translators were working from a different Hebrew text than the MT, or (2) the LXX was working hard to correct or improve a text that they thought was in error. Whether the MT really does have an error that crept into an earlier, more correct version is a separate question.
None of these questions are answered in the back of the book. (Trust me, I looked.) The scraps of Hebrew that were found in the caves near the Dead Sea contained many, many biblical texts, some of which actually do match the Greek LXX rather than the Hebrew MT. In this case, the surviving Hebrew seems to match our (seemingly difficult) Hebrew.
It is hard to imagine that God “looked” at the cupola and didn’t think it was all that great. At this stage, however, we have only one other example, since the pattern has not yet really emerged after only two days. Right now, what we have is …
• light, which God thought of and it “was”
• the cupola, which God thought of and “made”
It seems reasonable to guess that God would not have to look at something he made and decide that it was good. Why would God make it any other way?
Another possibility is that the cupola, blocking those of us down here in the world “under the sun,” as Ecclesiastes likes to call it (what the medieval philosophers would have called the sub-lunar world), is just none of our business. That is God’s realm and we should, once again as suggested by the letter ב, not ask anything about it, even whether it is good or bad.
Next time, we’ll finish v. 8 and sum up what we’ve learned after the first two days of creation.
There are female authors in the Bible, in my opinion — see here and at much greater length in Chapter 6 of my book The Bible’s Many Voices — but I consider Genesis 1 a priestly voice, which makes it implausible that a woman could have written it.
Read this and much more non-biblical material from the period in the Jewish Publication Society collection Outside the Bible.