What you are looking at
Genesis says God made a firmament on the second day, between waters below and waters above, and called it Heaven (Genesis 1:6–8). It gives the firmament an order and a work. It does not give it a shape or a distance, and readers have pictured it in more than one way.
The six pictures, one after another with Next under the picture, start with the words themselves. Then come the main ways the firmament has been drawn, each with who holds it, in their own words. They run outward, from the sky over a land to the edge of what can be seen; the order is not a ranking. Gold is always the firmament and blue is always the waters above, as each reading places them. One verse stays at the foot of every picture, because every reading here confesses it.
Where each part comes from. The verses are the King James Version: Genesis 1:6–9, 14–20 and 7:11, and Psalm 19:1. The painting, the writers quoted on each card, Sacrobosco's Latin, al-Farghani's distances as Mary Orr gives them, NOAA's heights of the weather layer and NASA's distances are as their sources give them.
We drew the rest: the vault, after Paul Seely's description of the ancient picture; the 3D spheres, their colours sampled from the painting; the drawn sizes of the planets and galaxies; and where each reading's firmament and waters sit in a picture. Two things are our reading, which someone could dispute: which painted band is which element or planet (the Met names the order; matching each band is our count), and the wording of each card.
What this does not settle
The pictures show where readers have put the firmament. They do not decide how to read the days of Genesis, and they do not show which reading is right. Young-earth, old-earth and other Christians who disagree about those things appear here side by side, and each confesses the same Creator.
The last picture uses the distances of standard astronomy: NASA's for the sun, the stars and Andromeda, and the radius of the observable universe worked out from the Planck satellite's 2018 results. Christians who read the days of Genesis as ordinary days dispute the age that standard cosmology gives the universe. This view shows sizes, not ages.
How the pictures are made
The words. The order of the bands is the order of the verses. The bands have no shape on purpose.
The vault. Drawn by us after Seely's survey of Egyptian and Babylonian texts. It shows how many scholars think the first hearers pictured the sky, not a measurement of anything.
The sky of clouds. To scale. The layer where almost all weather happens is 6 km deep at the poles, about 9 km at 50 degrees north or south, and 18 to 20 km at the equator (NOAA). The earth's mean radius is 6,371 km (NASA). On a globe one metre across, that layer would be between half a millimetre and 1.6 mm thick.
The painting. The Met's photograph of the panel. The rings are named from the Met's description, from the centre out: earth, water, air, fire, the seven planets, and the stars.
The spheres. The order of Sacrobosco's On the Sphere (about 1230), the standard astronomy textbook of medieval universities: earth, water, air, fire, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, “the sphere of the fixed stars, which is called the firmament”, and a last heaven that turns them all. Al-Farghani, a ninth-century astronomer, gave the spheres' greatest distances in earth radii; Mary Orr lists them (1913): Moon 64⅙, Mercury 167, Venus 1,120, Sun 1,220, Mars 8,876, Jupiter 14,405, Saturn and the fixed stars 20,110. Twenty thousand one hundred and ten earth radii of 6,371 km is about 128 million km, our arithmetic. Orr reckons al-Farghani's earth a little larger, so his own figure may run about 6 percent higher.
All of space. True distances, on a scale where each step of the slider multiplies the distance. Shapes are drawn: the galaxies are scattered points from a fixed seed, and planets and stars too small to see are marked with dots. The radius of the observable universe, about 46 billion light-years, is our integration of the Planck 2018 parameters (often quoted as 46.5).
Keys
‹The previous picture (or the left arrow key)
›The next picture (or the right arrow key)
1Keys 1 to 6 go straight to a picture
HHide everything but the picture
In the spheres and in all of space, drag the picture to turn it.
Sources
- The King James Version, read at BibleGateway. Public domain.
- Giovanni di Paolo, The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise, 1445, tempera and gold on wood, 46.4 × 52.1 cm. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975.1.31. The Met's page. Open Access image, CC0.
- Brown, Driver and Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon (1906), and Strong's Concordance, entries 7549 and 7554.
- Paul H. Seely, “The Firmament and the Water Above, Part I,” Westminster Theological Journal 53 (1991).
- Randall W. Younker and Richard M. Davidson, “The Myth of the Solid Heavenly Dome,” Andrews University Seminary Studies 49.1 (2011).
- Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, question 68 (on the second day), which reports Augustine, Basil, Bede, Strabo and John of Damascus. New Advent.
- John Calvin, Commentary on Genesis (1554), translated by John King (1847). Christian Classics Ethereal Library.
- Johannes de Sacrobosco, De sphaera, chapter 1, Élie Vinet's edition, Latin Wikisource. Public domain; the translations are ours.
- Mary A. Orr, Dante and the Early Astronomers (1913), pp. 188–190. Public domain.
- Hugh Ross, “What Is the Expanse in Genesis 1:6–8?”, Reasons to Believe, 21 December 2022.
- Simon Turpin, “Did the Enuma Elish Influence Genesis?”; Danny Faulkner, “Some Thoughts on the rāqîaʿ” (2016); and “Did the Pre-Flood World Have a Vapor Canopy?”, which reports Terry Mortenson. Answers in Genesis.
- NOAA JetStream, “Layers of the Atmosphere.” NASA fact sheets for the earth, moon, sun and planets; NASA on the nearest star, the Milky Way and Andromeda. US government works.
- Planck Collaboration, “Planck 2018 results. VI. Cosmological parameters,” Astronomy & Astrophysics 641, A6 (2020).
- three.js 0.170 (MIT licence). Type: GT Sectra and GT Pantheon, the site's own.