What Do the First Three Chapters of Genesis Really Mean? — Part 4, the Waters, the Dome and the Dry Land
This will only make sense if you’ve read part 3. If you need the essential background to the series, please see part 1. As a reminder, I’ll be using the following abbreviations: NRSV, OF, OC, OE, R, B, and BEI. These refer to the following sources:
- a modern Bible in English — I’ll be using the New Revised Standard Version, which I personally find the most useful
- d’Olivet’s French rendering of the Hebrew — this will only be needed if it seems to differ from the translations
- d’Olivet’s commentary on the original text — this will obviously be according to Redfield’s translation
- Redfield’s literal English translation of d’Olivet
- Redfield’s personal rendering, what she calls the ‘Correct Translation’. She says that in her literal translation she has “retained his selection of words some of which are now obsolete”, but that in her version she has “set aside some of the quaint words making choice of more modern ones”
- Shabaz Britten Best’s translation
- his Esoteric Interpretation of the text.
Moving on now to Genesis 1 v6–10, NRSV says: “And God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters’. So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day. And God said, ‘Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear’. And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good”.
Even in this version, it seems clear that God is creating a universe with different levels, whatever they might be. Hard though this is to believe, some Christians have nevertheless chosen to interpret this passage literally, as if it referred to planet Earth: “It has become almost a recent-creationist* dogma that ‘the waters which were above the firmament’ of Genesis 1.7 formed a vast canopy of water vapour above the earth’s atmosphere. This, they say, was all precipitated in the days of Noah, thus causing the Flood… The idea was popularized by Whitcome and Morris in their classic, The Genesis Flood. They have so much to say about it that there are about twenty page-references to it in their index. Yet they do not offer a single calculation in support of their idea. If they had, they would soon have discovered that it was insupportable”. (* The more modern term is Young-Earth.)
That comes from a book called Creation and Evolution: the Facts and the Fallacies, by Alan Hayward, himself a Christian, although more sensible than the authors he is referring to¹. He goes on to explain in detail why this hypothesis is scientifically untenable, then continues: “Dr Joseph Dillow, a recent-creationist theologian, has appreciated these difficulties. He spent years trying to produce a detailed scientific explanation of the vapour canopy theory, and recently published his findings in a book of nearly 500 pages”.
Some people just don’t know when to give up! They obviously don’t understand the concept of symbolic language. It doesn’t help of course if they don’t have access to the original meaning of the text. As I pointed out in part 3, all three translators agree that at this stage of the creative process the material universe including the Earth did not exist in reality, but only in potential. The waters mentioned in Genesis must therefore be referring to the intermediate levels between the Ultimate Reality and the material realm, not to what humans understand by water.
It is said that these become separated by a dome (or firmament) into higher and lower ‘waters’. This word presumably symbolises the fluidity, lack of solidity, of these levels relative to the solidity of the material level — water/the ocean is a well-known symbol of the psyche. It is clear, even in NRSV and other English translations, that these intermediate realms become separated into two levels.
The words ‘dome’ and ‘firmament’ nevertheless suggest something solid. Although one meaning of the latter is simply ‘heavens’ or ‘sky’, it has also been interpreted by some Christians as “the arch or vault over the earth and sky that separates the earthly realm from what is beyond”². This is obviously a mistake, because the earthly realm has not yet been created; this only happens at verse 9 when the ‘dry land’ appears, an obvious symbol for material reality, called by R the “terminating and final element”, and by B “the physical elements”. It is not the earth that is being separated off from higher levels; it is these higher levels that are themselves being separated.
Obviously, if the material level at this stage of the process exists merely in potential, then the dome or firmament cannot be something solid. Instead of firmament OE has “a separating cause”, R has “a rarefying force”, and B says that “opposing forces shall separate the Manifest from the Unmanifest”, and that God simply “divided the inferior planes from the rarefied higher realms”. There is no suggestion of anything solid; the text is referring to a cosmic process of manifestation. It is reasonable to assume that what is being referred to are higher spiritual and lower psychic realms.
In the next article I move on to the creation of Adam.
I hope you have enjoyed this article. I have written in the past about other topics, including spirituality, metaphysics, psychology, science, Christianity, politics and astrology. All of those articles are on Medium, but the simplest way to see a guide to them is to visit my website (click here and here). My most recent articles, however, are only on Medium; for those please check out my lists.
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Footnotes:
- Triangle, 1985, revised 1994, p151
2. source
