Under Heaven (Gen 6:17)

The Flood

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¹⁷ from under the Sky. מִתַּ֖חַת הַשָּׁמָ֑יִם

Last time, we looked at some unusual uses of words we’d seen (in one form or another) before. We also have this exact phrase being used in a different way than we originally saw it:

^{Gen 1:9} God thought, Let the water that is under the sky [מִתַּ֤חַת הַשָּׁמַ֙יִם֙ mi-taḥat ha-shamayim] gather into one place so that the dry land can be seen. And it was so.

Hebrew likes to use מן min ‘from’ — usually attached directly to the next word — as a supplement to other prepositions, without really changing their meaning. As you remember from Genesis 1, there’s water above the Sky and water below the Sky too; they were separated on Day Two of creation. In v. 9, on Day Three, the water below the Sky is being pushed aside so dry land (soon to be called Earth) can appear.

Perhaps I should have taken “from” more seriously in that verse. The water is not merely being gathered אֶל el ‘to’ one place but also from (directly) beneath the cupola that has cleaved it in two. In 7:23, we will learn that all existence is erased מִן־הָאָ֑רֶץ min-ha-aretz ‘from the Earth’. In our verse, though, all flesh is being ruinated מִתַּ֖חַת הַשָּׁמָ֑יִם mi-taḥat ha-shamayim ‘from under the Sky’ — capitalizing Earth and Sky because these are the two characters we met in 1:1 and again in 2:4.

I’m thinking that this phrase “from under the Sky” needs more explanation than I gave it way back when. Let me start by looking at the following interesting verse (in the NJPS translation), taken from the story of the covenant made at Sinai, after the Israelites have received the Ten Commandments and the Covenant Code:

^{Exod 24:10} and they saw the God of Israel: under His feet there was the likeness of a pavement of sapphire, like the very sky for purity.

This sapphire pavement is the blue thing that you see when you look up to the sky on a sunny day. It must be the remnants of the water that was מֵעַ֣ל me’al ‘[from] atop’ the cupola. Unless you think God has gills or wears scuba gear, the water up there must also have “gathered into one place” so that the divine world too could carry on its affairs. How exactly that happened is not described in the Bible, and if you go back to the beginning of this blog and follow the story of the Six-Day Creation, you will notice that we’re simply not told what’s going on up there.

Apparently, it is none of our business. That cupola divides our realm from the higher realm inhabited by God and the sons of the gods. There’s another way to refer to our realm, known to us exclusively from the book of Ecclesiastes, where it is repeated 29 times. Here (in the NRSV translation) is perhaps the most famous of them: