What the pictures show
Genesis says that on the second day God made a firmament between the waters below and the waters above, and called it Heaven (Genesis 1:6–8). It gives the firmament a place in the order of things and a work to do, but it gives no shape and no distance, and readers have pictured it in more than one way.
There are six pictures, and Next under the picture takes you from one to the next. The first shows the words of Genesis themselves. After it come the main ways the firmament has been drawn, and each names who holds that reading and gives it in their own words. The pictures run outward, from the sky over a land to the edge of what can be seen, and their order ranks no reading above another. In every picture gold is the firmament and blue is the waters above, set where that reading places them. One verse stays at the foot of every picture, because every reading here confesses it.
The verses are from the King James Version: Genesis 1:6–9, 1:14–20 and 7:11, and Psalm 19:1. We give 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 just as their sources give them.
Everything else we drew ourselves. We drew the vault after Paul Seely's description of the ancient picture, coloured the 3D spheres with colours sampled from the painting, chose the drawn sizes of the planets and galaxies, and placed each reading's firmament and waters in its picture. Two things are our own reading, and someone could dispute them. The Met names the order of the bands in the painting, but matching each painted band to its element or planet is our count. The wording of each card is ours as well.
What this does not settle
The pictures show where readers have put the firmament. They leave open both how to read the days of Genesis and which reading is right, so young-earth, old-earth and other Christians who disagree about those things stand here side by side, and each of them confesses the same Creator.
The last picture uses the distances of standard astronomy, with NASA's figures 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 picture takes no side in that, because it shows how big things are and gives no ages.
How we made the pictures
In the first picture, the words, the bands come in the same order as the verses, and we left them without a shape on purpose.
We drew the vault after Seely's survey of Egyptian and Babylonian texts. It shows how many scholars think the first hearers pictured the sky, and it is not a measurement of anything.
The sky of clouds is drawn 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), and 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 is the Met's photograph of the panel, and we named its rings from the Met's description, from the centre out: earth, water, air, fire, the seven planets, and the stars.
The spheres follow the order Sacrobosco gives in 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 greatest distance of each sphere in earth radii, and Mary Orr lists his figures (1913): Moon 64⅙, Mercury 167, Venus 1,120, Sun 1,220, Mars 8,876, Jupiter 14,405, and Saturn and the fixed stars 20,110. By our own arithmetic, 20,110 earth radii of 6,371 km come to about 128 million km. Orr reckons al-Farghani's earth a little larger than ours, so his own figure may run about 6 percent higher.
The last picture, all of space, shows true distances, on a scale where each step of the slider multiplies the distance. The shapes are drawn, though: the galaxies are points we scattered at random, the same way every time, and planets and stars too small to see are marked with dots. We worked out the radius of the observable universe, about 46 billion light-years, ourselves by integrating the Planck 2018 parameters; it is often quoted as 46.5.
chiavi
‹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 e Briggs, Lessico ebraico e inglese (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,” Studi del Seminario dell'Università Andrews 49.1 (2011).
- Tommaso d'Aquino, Summa Theologiae I, question 68 (on the second day), which reports Augustine, Basil, Bede, Strabo and John of Damascus. New Advent.
- Giovanni Calvino, Commento alla Genesi (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.