more on "the cupola" (Gen 1:6-7)

Reading through the story of creation

6 and let it be a separator between water and water.  

‏ וִיהִ֣י מַבְדִּ֔יל בֵּ֥ין מַ֖יִם לָמָֽיִם׃

let it be a separator between water and water וִיהִ֣י מַבְדִּ֔יל בֵּ֥ין מַ֖יִם לָמָֽיִם

The cupola will indeed literally be “in the middle of the water,” somehow completely separating the water into two parts.  This is hard to visualize, but two things are important here.

First, there will be water above the cupola just as there is below it. This may explain why the Hebrew of our “between” phrase here is different from the phrase in Gen 1:4, which literally says “between the light and between the darkness” (בֵּ֥ין הָא֖וֹר וּבֵ֥ין הַחֹֽשֶׁךְ). Our verse literally says “between water to water” (bein mayim la-mayim). The cupola is not keeping two opposites apart, but splitting one thing into two parts.

Much more on this when we get to Gen 7:11, in the Flood story, when the cupola is breached and the water above it begins to inundate the earth. For now, we’ll just remember that תהום tehom of Gen 1:2 seemed to be a hint at the name of Tiamat, whom Marduk split in two in the Enuma Elish, making part of her into the sea and part into the sky. Our cupola is somehow silently performing this same action in a way that completely eliminates any thought of a theogony (a “battle of the gods”).

Second, the “separator” here is a מַבְדִּ֔יל (mavdil), another form of the same word used when God “distinguished” light from darkness, וַיַּבְדֵּ֣ל (va-yavdel). As I said in my comment to v. 4, “making distinctions of this kind is a characteristic theme of the Torah when priestly concerns are mentioned.” It is essential to holiness, and God’s creation of the world seems to be an action that is bringing holiness into a world of tohu-bohu.

And now for the shocker.

7 God made [va-ya’as] the cupola וַיַּ֣עַשׂ אֱלֹהִים֮ אֶת־הָרָקִיעַ֒

When God said, “Let there be light,” there was light – it just somehow came into being.  I imagine my impression as a child must have been that God’s words were a kind of incantation that somehow evoked the magic.  It is just barely more grown-up to decide, as we did in this earlier post on those words, that God thought light into being in some mysterious way.

To our surprise, that is not what happens now.  “Let there be a cupola” sounds as if it is the same kind of invocation that apparently brought light into being.  So we might expect to read something quite similar to what we read on Day One:  “God thought, Let there be a cupola, and there was a cupola.”  Instead, God had to make this cupola. 

We’re not told how, let alone why.  But עשׂה asah ‘make, do’ is a perfectly normal verb, one that human beings do all the time.  This is the first of more than 2600 occurrences of this verb in the Bible.  We can guess at the particular way this cupola was made from the Hebrew word raqia.  As we discussed last time, it generally refers to hammering out a thin sheet of metal.  The puzzle is why it could not simply spring into being the way light did.

Instead, God must “make” it, the first physical action (if Maimonides will excuse the expression) that God has taken.  Up till now, he has spoken/thought, seen/evaluated, separated, and named things.  Now God rolls up his sleeves and hammers out a partition for the mighty waters that, along with darkness, constituted all of existence when the curtain rose on our story.

We have already been told the purpose of this raqia — it’s to split the water in two. But there is a slight mystery involved even in that phrase, which we’ll talk about next time.