What Is the Firmament in the Bible? The Sky God Called Heaven

When the King James Bible speaks of the firmament, it means the sky, the expanse God made on the second day of creation, when he “divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament.” Then Scripture gives it a name for us: “God called the firmament Heaven” (Genesis 1:7–8).

So the firmament is real: it is the sky over our heads, where the birds fly and where God set the sun, moon and stars. Scripture does not ask us to believe in a solid dome over a flat earth, and none of the historic churches teaches one, though Christians have read the old word in more than one way.

We drew the firmament the six ways it has been pictured: the order Genesis gives, a solid vault, the sky of clouds, a painting of 1445, the medieval sphere of the stars, and all of space. Each comes with who holds it, in their own words.

Whatever we make of the word, the Bible is clear about what the firmament is for. “The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork,” the psalmist sings (Psalm 19:1). Long before anyone studied the sky, it was telling of God, and though it has no words, “there is no speech nor language, where their voice is not heard” (Psalm 19:3). Whatever our language and whatever our century, we look up and are told who made us.

The Hebrew word is raqia (said rah-KEE-ah), and it comes from the verb raqa, which means to beat or hammer out, to spread or stretch. That is the verb used when the craftsmen making the tabernacle “did beat the gold into thin plates” (Exodus 39:3), and it is used of God too, who “stretched out the earth above the waters” (Psalm 136:6). So the noun pictures something spread out wide, the way a smith spreads metal thin under the hammer.

The standard lexicons give both sides of that picture. Strong’s Concordance defines raqia as “an expanse, i.e. the firmament or (apparently) visible arch of the sky.” The Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon of 1906 gives “extended surface, (solid) expanse,” as if beaten out, and adds that in Genesis it is “the vault of heaven, or ‘firmament,’ regarded by Hebrews as solid, and supporting ‘waters’ above it.” That second line is the scholars’ judgment about how ancient Israel pictured the sky, and some Christians accept it while others dispute it.

Our English word reached us through two older translations. The Greek Septuagint rendered raqia as stereoma, a firm or solid thing, and Jerome’s Latin Vulgate followed with firmamentum, “Fiat firmamentum in medio aquarum.” From the Latin came “firmament.” Modern Bibles choose other words. The ESV and NASB say “expanse,” the NIV “vault,” the NRSVue and the Catholic NABRE “dome,” and the NLT “space.” In verse 8 nearly all of them name it the sky, or Heaven. Luther’s German Bible says Feste. The Spanish Reina-Valera 1960 says expansión in Genesis but keeps the old word in Psalm 150:1, “Alabadle en la magnificencia de su firmamento,” praise him in the magnificence of his firmament, where the King James Bible has “praise him in the firmament of his power.”

The King James Bible says “firmament” 17 times, in 15 verses:

Passage	Times	What the firmament does
Genesis 1:6–8	5	Divides the waters; God calls it Heaven
Genesis 1:14–17	3	Holds the sun, moon and stars
Genesis 1:20	1	Is the open sky where birds fly
Psalm 19:1; 150:1	2	Shows God’s handiwork and power
Ezekiel 1:22–26; 10:1	5	Shines like crystal beneath God’s throne
Daniel 12:3	1	Its brightness pictures the glory of the wise

In Genesis the firmament is given its work day by day. On the second day it separates the waters. On the fourth, “God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth,” the greater light and the lesser light and the stars (Genesis 1:16–17), and on the fifth the birds fly “in the open firmament of heaven” (Genesis 1:20). Everything we see when we look up was given its place by God.

In Ezekiel’s vision we are taken higher still. Above the living creatures he saw a firmament “as the colour of the terrible crystal, stretched forth over their heads above,” and over it “the likeness of a throne, as the appearance of a sapphire stone” (Ezekiel 1:22, 26). “Terrible” here means awe-inspiring, as the ESV renders it, and the prophet is reaching for the brightest thing he knows to describe what lies beneath God’s throne. Elihu reaches for a similar picture in Job, when he asks whether Job helped God “spread out the sky, which is strong, and as a molten looking glass” (Job 37:18), and the Hebrew verb there is raqa again.

Genesis says the firmament stands between waters below and waters above, and Scripture goes on speaking of the upper waters. When the flood came, “the windows of heaven were opened” (Genesis 7:11), and long after, the psalmist still calls those waters to worship: “Praise him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that be above the heavens” (Psalm 148:4).

Christians have understood these waters in several ways:

• A sea above the sky. Many scholars think this is how the first readers pictured it, and some Fathers held a form of it. Basil the Great taught that the upper waters might exist “in a solid state, as a mass of ice,” as Thomas Aquinas reports him.
• Clouds and rain. Hugh Ross of Reasons to Believe, an old-earth ministry, reads the verses as water above “(in the troposphere)” and water below “(in the oceans and lakes)”: the clouds and the seas.
• A canopy before the flood. In 1961 John Whitcomb and Henry Morris popularised the idea of a water canopy over the early earth, whose collapse helped bring Noah’s flood. Most young-earth writers have since let it go, and the astronomer Danny Faulkner of Answers in Genesis writes that “the canopy model largely has been abandoned by recent creationists now.”
• Water at the edge of the universe. Some young-earth scholars, among them Terry Mortenson and Faulkner, take the firmament to be outer space, which puts the upper waters at the far boundary of creation.

Augustine, for his part, did not claim to know what they were. As Aquinas quotes him, “whatever these waters are, and whatever their mode of existence, we cannot for a moment doubt that they are there.” He trusted the verse before he understood it, and many of us read Genesis the same way.

In Genesis 1 it is the visible heaven: God names the firmament “Heaven” on the second day, and it is the sky of birds and stars. But the Bible’s word “heaven” reaches further than the firmament, and Paul speaks of a man “caught up to the third heaven” (2 Corinthians 12:2). Aquinas, sorting out the Bible’s language, says that “Scripture speaks of heaven in a threefold sense”: first the bodies on high themselves, then whatever shares their height and brightness, such as the air, and last the metaphorical uses, as when the name is given to “the Blessed Trinity, Who is the Light and the Most High Spirit.”

Because God made the firmament, it cannot hold him, and Solomon said so at the dedication of the temple: “the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain thee” (1 Kings 8:27). The sky is the work of his hands, and he is greater than all of it. There is more on that question in where heaven is and how far it is from earth.

A solid vault: the scholars’ reading

Many Old Testament scholars hold that the first hearers of Genesis imagined the sky as a solid vault. In a 1991 study in the Westminster Theological Journal, Paul Seely gathered the evidence from Egypt and Babylon and concluded that “all peoples in the ancient world thought of the sky as solid.” In the Babylonian epic Enuma Elish, the god Marduk splits the body of the sea goddess Tiamat and from one half “formed the sky as a roof.” Seely believes in biblical inerrancy, and his conclusion was that it is “not the purpose of Gen 1:7 to teach us the physical nature of the sky, but to reveal the creator of the sky.” Other scholars dispute that the ancients believed in a solid dome at all, and Randall Younker and Richard Davidson of Andrews University made that case in 2011 in “The Myth of the Solid Heavenly Dome.”

In the Babylonian story the sky is cut from a slain goddess. Genesis has no battle at all: God speaks, and there is a firmament.

The Fathers and Augustine’s caution

The early Christian writers read Greek and Latin Bibles that called it a firm thing, and they argued over what it was made of and how the waters stood above it. Augustine, writing The Literal Meaning of Genesis between about 401 and 415, refused to let the faith hang on those details. The question he had in mind was the shape of the heavens rather than of the earth: was the sky a sphere enclosing the earth, or a disk spread above it on one side? Such questions, he said, are of no profit to those who seek blessedness. Pope Leo XIII quoted his answer in the encyclical Providentissimus Deus (1893): the Holy Spirit, who spoke through the sacred writers, “did not intend to teach men these things (that is to say, the essential nature of the things of the visible universe), things in no way profitable unto salvation” (book 2, chapter 9).

Augustine also left Christians a warning. When unbelievers know something about the earth and the heavens “from reason and experience,” he wrote, “it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics” (book 1, chapter 19). His worry was for souls: if they catch us wrong about the stars, why would they believe us about “the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven”?

Eight centuries later Thomas Aquinas drew two rules from Augustine for reading the firmament: “to hold the truth of Scripture without wavering,” and to hold any one explanation of it loosely, “ready to abandon it, if it be proved with certainty to be false.” John Calvin, commenting on the second day, said that “nothing is here treated of but the visible form of the world,” and on the sun and moon, that “Moses wrote in a popular style things which without instruction, all ordinary persons, endued with common sense, are able to understand.”

Young-earth readings

Young-earth creationists read the days of Genesis 1 as six ordinary days, with about 4,000 years from creation to Christ, as the statement of faith of Answers in Genesis puts it. They do not read the firmament as a dome. Simon Turpin of Answers in Genesis writes that “Genesis 1 does not depict the ‘expanse’ … as a solid dome over the earth,” and that “it is probably best to see it as space (or sky).” Faulkner proposes that the second day’s work refers to the “astronomical heaven,” the whole of space where the stars were set on the fourth day.

Old-earth readings

Old-earth Christians read the days as long ages and hold, in the words of Reasons to Believe, that “the Bible and nature both point to an ancient earth and universe.” They too read raqia as the open sky. Hugh Ross holds that Genesis 1:6–8 describes the clouds above and the oceans below, and he points to Job 37–38, with their rain, snow and ice, as a fuller account of the second day. Young-earth and old-earth Christians argue hard over the age of the world, but they confess the same Creator.

The Bible does not teach it, though some flat-earth writers today say the firmament is a dome over a flat world. None of the historic churches teaches it, and it was never the faith of the Church. In the thirteenth century Aquinas used the shape of the earth as a plain example of something astronomers can prove: “the earth, for instance, is round.” Faulkner of Answers in Genesis puts it plainly: “for the two millennia of the Christian age, the church did not teach that the earth is flat.” One early Latin writer, Lactantius, did scoff at a round earth with people on its far side, “men whose footsteps are higher than their heads” (Divine Institutes 3.24), but his opinion never became the Church’s teaching.

Scripture itself uses many pictures for the sky, and the same God who made a firmament “stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in” (Isaiah 40:22). A curtain, a tent, a molten mirror, a sheet of crystal: these are the words of people praising God for what they see above them. The verses people bring to the question are gathered in is the earth flat according to the Bible?

The churches have long said that Scripture and true knowledge of the world cannot contradict each other, because one God gave both. In the same encyclical, Pope Leo XIII went on to say that the sacred writers “did not seek to penetrate the secrets of nature, but rather described and dealt with things in more or less figurative language, or in terms which were commonly used at the time.” The Second Vatican Council taught in 1965 that the books of Scripture teach “solidly, faithfully and without error that truth which God wanted put into sacred writings for the sake of salvation.” And the Catechism of the Catholic Church says that “methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God” (paragraph 159).

Calvin, as we saw, said much the same in his own way. So whatever our view of the days of Genesis, we can look at a satellite photograph of the earth, and at the sky over our own street, and see the same handiwork in both.

In Daniel the firmament comes once more, at the end of history, and there it is a promise: “And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever” (Daniel 12:3).

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