cosmology

[00:00:00]Okay, so if you stopped an ancient Israelite on the street and asked them what is up there like past the clouds, they probably wouldn't have said space.

[00:00:08]And they also wouldn't have said the atmosphere either. They'd have told you that there's a roof, a solid one, hammered out the way a blacksmith beats metal into a flat sheet. At least that's the literal word that the Bible uses for it. And sitting on top of that roof is an ocean held back by a physical barrier strong enough to keep it from crashing straight down onto everything underneath it. And underneath that, or underneath the world, are the pillars holding up the Earth. At least those are what the biblical words actually mean. So today, we're going to be doing something a little bit different. We're going to be going to rebuild the actual universe that the biblical authors thought that they were living in. The literal shape of it, what's up, what's down, what's holding the whole thing together. And once that picture is fully assembled, there's a question sitting underneath it that people fight about constantly without addressing the huge elephant in the room. In this video, I'm going to expose that elephant. In fact, I'm going to find where he's hiding, grab him by the trunk, twirl him above my head, and throw him out the window. And that elephant is, of course, was the Bible ever trying to be a science textbook in the first place?

[00:01:20]No, as it turns out. But getting to why, and in order to understand how, means building the picture first. My name is Nels.

[00:01:30]And I'm going to be up front about something. Um, this isn't a video trying to catch the Bible getting the universe or science wrong, but it's also not a video trying to pretend that it's right either. Because I'll explain what I mean by that, but it's an attempt to read Genesis the way that the first audience actually read it instead of the way that a modern reader assumes it has to be read. And if you enjoy deep dives like this, please consider hitting the subscribe button. It really does help out the channel. Honestly, once you see this whole cosmology laid out clearly, you cannot unsee it anywhere else in the Old Testament. But, without any further ado, let's get into it. Oh, and lastly, I have a video soon or coming out soon on Genesis 1 doing a full explanation of how maybe we've been reading Genesis 1 wrong this whole time and are missing the full picture there. I personally cannot wait for it. So, if that sounds exciting to you, subscribe right now.

[00:02:20]But, okay. Now, now without any further ado, let's get into it.

[00:02:25]>> If you want to learn how I approach the Bible and get access to a bunch of helpful resources on Bible study and join a community of like-minded people, click the link in the description or the pinned comment below. Let's start with the roof because everything else depends on it. So, Genesis 1:6 says, "Let there be a raqia in the midst of the waters and let it divide the waters from the waters." Raqia usually gets translated in English to firmament or in newer translations just expands, which makes it kind of sounds like empty air. But, it isn't. The word comes from the verb that literally means to hammer something flat and it's the same exact root used um a few books later for beating actual metal into plating for the tabernacle.

[00:03:05]So, whoever wrote this down meant a physical, solid structure, something that you could in theory knock on and hear it ring. And it's not the only place the text says so. Job actually asks whether a mere human could spread out the skies hard as a cast metal mirror and the same word for casting metal used for the bronze basin in the tabernacle. So, we have two different books, two different authors, centuries apart using the same uh metalworking vocabulary to describe the same thing up there in the sky.

[00:03:33]And that structure has one job, holding back water. There's an ocean sitting directly on top of it and Genesis says so plainly that there's waters above the expanse and then waters below it and the expanse is kind of like wedged in between like a lid on a pot. Psalm 148 even addresses that the upper ocean directly, calling on it to join the praise. Praise him you highest heavens and you waters above the heavens. That's seemingly a specific body of water up there being spoken to as a real thing.

[00:04:03]And if that sounds strange or like a strange detailed to build a cosmology around, well, watch what happens a few chapters later when it actually gets used. Genesis chapter 7 verse 11 with the flood it says the fountains of the great deep burst forth and the windows of the heavens were opened. So two separate sources of water releasing at the same exact moment. One is underground from the deep breaking up from below and the other is the ocean sitting on the roof pouring in through the gaps that just opened up in it. The flood story doesn't work without this exact structure already sitting in the reader's head. Nobody has to stop and explain what the windows of the heavens are. Everyone knows already that there's a ceiling up there and evidently water behind it.

[00:04:46]Proverbs chapter 8 gives you the same picture from a different angle though.

[00:04:49]Through the personified wisdom watching God essentially build the whole thing.

[00:04:54]When he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he assigned to the sea its limit so that the waters might not transgress his command. So a boundary line drawn around the ocean by hand so it stays where it's told to stay. Not necessarily as a law of physics but just a line that God drew. So then that begs the question, well, what's holding up this whole structure? Well, according to the Bible it's pillars. Job 9 verse 6 says that God can shake the earth out of its place so hard that its pillars tremble. Hannah's prayer in 1 Samuel 2 says it outright. The pillars of the earth are the Lord's and he has set the world on them. Now most scholars read these particularly lines as poetry about stability and God's power rather than an engineering schematic of how he actually did it. And that's probably right. But poetry like this only works if it's drawing on something legitimate underneath it. For example, no one writes the sun rose this morning by accident either. In the same way we say that phrase because it describes exactly what things look like from the ground to us long after everyone involved knows better, i.e. we know the sun doesn't actually rise. So, the pillar language works the same exact way except in this case nobody knew better yet. More or less in the same way we say the sun rose, well, we don't actually mean the sun rose. We mean because we know that we revolve sun and that we're floating in a circle pretty much. But, it's that word pillars that shows up in Job 26:2.

[00:06:16]The pillars of the heaven tremble and are astounded at his rebuke. But, a few verses earlier in that same chapter Job says that God stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth on nothing. So, literally in the same chapter we have two different images of the earth hanging on nothing and then the sky held up by pillars. Most scholars think that pillars of heaven here is doing the same idiomatic work as pillars of the earth does elsewhere.

[00:06:40]Probably rooted in mountains that like look like they're popping out of the sky, you know, from where you're standing at least.

[00:06:46]It's less a scientific contradiction than proof that this was never meant to be read as a scientific book to begin with. Even the biblical authors weren't treating the picture that literally and consistently. They used whatever image did the job in the moment and it's the same way that we say that the sun rises without anyone complaining about it.

[00:07:06]Which, by the way, Job contradicts himself about the actual mechanics of the universe two verses apart and yet that is still like the least confusing thing that happens to him in this book.

[00:07:17]But, I digress. Now, the shape of the thing actually sitting on those pillars is the earth. Isaiah 40:22 says that God sits above the circle of the earth. The Hebrew word is this and scholars generally disagree about what it's picturing. Some read it as a flat disk, a circle that you would draw on a piece of paper. Others think it's gesturing towards something rounder. And you'll find writers on one side claiming that this proves the Bible taught a spherical spherical Earth thousands of years early and then writers on the other side just claiming the exact opposite just as confidently. Both readings of this word, I feel like it's assuming more than what the actual Hebrew word supports.

[00:07:57]The likely answer is that this word is just ambiguous and forcing it to settle a 21st century argument it was never a part of in the first place, I think is making its own kind of mistake. I'll explain more what I mean later. But underneath all of this we have Sheol which is the realm of the dead and beneath that you have Tehom which means the deep, the same waters that break loose in the flood. So it's this three-tiered structure that is not just an Old Testament assumption that just slowly evaporates all throughout history that it just disappears. Exodus 20:4 in the Ten Commandments it says you shall not make an image of anything in heaven or above that is beneath the earth or that that is in the water under the earth. So heaven and earth in the water under the earth is used as a complete scope of every place that an idol could possibly be made to represent. And it doesn't stop in the Old Testament either. Paul uses the identical three-part structure in Philippians 2:10 describing that every knee bowing in heaven and on the earth and under the earth. And not everything set into that dome was just scenery either. The fixed stars stayed fixed night after night but a handful of lights wandered against that backdrop.

[00:09:09]And it was that movement to this audience like a shooting star or something that meant life. Something that moves is animate and alive which is part of the reasons why stars gets used as as a synonym for divine beings and angels throughout the text. For example, Job 38:7 describes God the moment he built all of this as the morning stars saying together and all of the sons of God shouted for joy. So stars and the sons of God sitting right next to each other, meaning roughly the same thing. The lights up there in heaven weren't just lights to the ancient people. Some of them in this picture, at least, were alive.

[00:09:46]And so, you stack all this up, and here's the universe as the text itself describes. A flat or circular Earth sitting on pillars, floating over a subterranean ocean in the land of the dead, capped by a solid dome holding back a second ocean directly overhead, with the sun and the moon and the stars set into that dome or moving across its underside. It's undeniable.

[00:10:09]Or, is it?

[00:10:12]Now, none of this is unique to Israel, and that's the more interesting half of the story. If you go to Babylon a few centuries earlier and open their creation epic, the Enuma Elish, the god Marduk fights the primordial ocean itself, a goddess named Tiamat, kills her, and splits her corpse in half like a fish. And the text says that directly. He split her in two like a dried fish. One half of her he set up and stretched out as the heavens.

[00:10:39]He stretches her skin and puts a guard at the seam so that the waters can't break break through. And the other half of her becomes the Earth underneath.

[00:10:47]Set that next to Genesis 1, and the shared vocabulary is rather hard to miss. A solid barrier holding back the very ocean that it was carved out of with dry land sitting below it.

[00:10:58]Now, go to Egypt instead, and you get a different set of names doing the exact same thing. Shu, the god of air, holds up his daughter Nut, the sky, pictured as a woman arched over the whole Earth, sometimes as a cow instead. Gosh, what is up with these cows? But, keeping her separated from Geb, the Earth god lying underneath. So, different gods, different story, but the same basic architecture. You have something solid wedged between the ground and the sky that has to be actively held apart from it, or the two would collapse back into one another.

[00:11:31]Now, Genesis wasn't written by people staring up at a blank canvas and inventing physics from scratch. It was written by people standing inside a shared culture that every civilization around them was also using. Babylon, Egypt, and Israel had its own versions of it with Yahweh doing the holding back instead of Marduk or Shu.

[00:11:51]The dome, the waters, the pillars, none of that is uniquely Israelite guess about how the universe works. It's simply what the universe meant to anyone standing on the ground in that part of the world for well over a thousand years, no matter which god they happened to worship. So, this was the universal way on how they viewed the world. So, then the question needs to be raised, were the people who wrote all of this just bad at science? Or more importantly, because the Bible seems to suggest these sorts of things and we know that modern science tells us that the earth is a globe and that there are not in fact pillars holding up the earth, etc., etc., does that mean that the Bible is not true?

[00:12:32]No, it doesn't. And the proof is sitting in the same civilization that we just talked about.

[00:12:39]The Babylonians who wrote a goddess getting split into the sky and earth also produced this, a real astronomical text from around a thousand BC. It's the oldest known comprehensive astronomical compendium from ancient Mesopotamia.

[00:12:54]It's um star catalogs, calendars, stuff, predictions for when each planet would rise and set through the year. They tracked eclipses, they ran calendars accurate enough to organize the entire empire around, believe it or not, which is really fascinating. There's another text also, the Enuma Anu uh Enlil, which records thousands of sky observations that were that were tied to omens.

[00:13:18]So, these people had careful, repeated observations written down by the exact same culture that also said that the sky used to be a goddess's skin.

[00:13:27]Literally, somewhere in Babylon, there's a guy meticulously logging the exact night that Venus is going to rise, and then literally two doors down, there's this guy writing that Marduk skinned the ocean and used it as wallpaper.

[00:13:39]You know, both of these men considered themselves professionals, but they weren't confused. They could absolutely tell the difference between tracking a planet's path across the sky, and then telling a story about where the sky came from. They um just didn't file those two things under one category the way that we do it now. There was no word yet for science back then as something separate from religion or history or poetry. There was an accurate way to track the stars, and then there was a true way to explain what the world meant. And nobody in Babylon or Israel felt the need to make those two things argue with each other because nobody even thought that they were supposed to be the same kind of statement.

[00:14:20]And that's the key to reading Genesis 1 the way that its first audience actually did, which to reiterate, I have a full in-depth video coming out on this exact same idea, you know, but for the entire creation story. But here's something that I want to communicate, and I didn't come up with this idea, but the Bible was written for us, but it was not written to us.

[00:14:41]The theology is for you. It's for anyone who picks up this book in any century in any language, but the language itself, the assumptions the writers used, the actual picture of the universe sitting underneath all the words, all of that belongs entirely to the people it was first written to. It was never swapped out for a modern one because it was never supposed to be. In other words, when the biblical authors were writing Genesis or writing thousands of years ago, they were writing for their audience. Surprise, surprise. And so then they used language that their audience would have understood. And quite frankly, they didn't care about the things that you and I care about in modern 2026. To them, when they wrote about the earth, they were writing in the context that they understood. They couldn't send a satellite into the sky and observe the actual shape of the earth, and that's fine.

[00:15:31]Why? Because what they cared about more is who made earth. God did. It wasn't Marduk, it wasn't the other pagan gods, it was Yahweh, the God of the Bible. And this isn't a new idea invented to get the Bible off the hook, either.

[00:15:48]Theologians have a name for this, it's called divine accommodation. It's the idea that when God communicates with people, he meets them meets them where they're at using the picture of the world that they already have instead of first uploading a science curriculum into their heads so that the conversation can happen and we can be pleased in our modern reading. Even reformers like John Calvin was already making this exact argument 500 years ago, comparing it to the way a nurse lisps baby talk to an infant. Not because the infant's understanding it, you know, is the point, but because that's the only language the infant can actually receive anything in.

[00:16:23]The idea goes back even further than that, into the early church fathers. So, we should not be surprised when the biblical authors use certain phrases and terms that by our worldview, not scientifically or cosmologically accurate, because they were never trying to communicate that in the first place.

[00:16:43]Let me explain this with an analogy that I brought up earlier.

[00:16:47]Think about the way that you already talk about the sun.

[00:16:49]You say it came up this morning and it'll go down tonight. Your weather app tells you that the sun rises at 6:42 a.m., and every one of those phrases describes a flat, stationary you with a sun traveling across the sky above you, and every single one of them is astronomically false. The sun doesn't rise. You're the one moving, spinning east at 1,000 miles an hour on a floating ball in space. But nobody hears you say, "Beautiful sunset," and then and that you failed fourth grade science because describing the sky the way it looks while you're standing on the ground was never a claim that you made about the orbit of the earth. It's just how people who live under a sky talk about the sky. And the biblical writers lived under the same sky and they described it from the place that you do, the ground.

[00:17:36]Genesis is doing the same kind of thing.

[00:17:38]A psalmist writing that God set the earth on its foundation so that it should never be moved is making a claim that would survive 5 minutes in a geology class. He's making a claim about who's actually holding everything together using the only physical picture he and anyone else he'd ever meet would have access to. And God didn't need to rewire the ancient audience's understanding of modern astronomical science before he could tell them something true about themselves.

[00:18:07]It's the same move that you make every single morning when you wake up and then you say the sun came up. To the ancient mind, the foundations were never the point. Who laid them was.

[00:18:17]Which means that the whole Genesis fight, whether is Genesis compatible with science, does it get the order of creation right, can you actually see the dome and the waters with an actual telescope, is built in a mistake, in my opinion, on what understanding what the Bible actually is. The people arguing Genesis got the universe wrong and the people trying to prove it secretly got everything right all along are both treating it like it was trying to answer a question that it never asked.

[00:18:43]And that particular fight is not as old as what you'd think. The idea that the Bible and science have always been locked in a war with each other.

[00:18:51]Historians call this the conflict thesis and it traces back to two specific writers in the 1800s, John William Draper and Andrew Dickson White. It's a modern invention, this idea, not an ancient one and historians of science have spent decades taking it apart piece by piece. Until very recently, it It never religion versus science.

[00:19:14]The word scientist itself is barely 200 years old. And that tends to catch people off guard because before 1833, no one held that job title because the English language didn't have a word for it yet. People doing this kind of work were called the natural philosophers and were in categories that sat right next to theology and philosophy instead of apart from them. And then a man named William uh uh Whewell coined scientist as a new, separate label. And Whewell himself was a Church of England priest as well as one of the leading intellectuals of his day. Go back even further, Copernicus, the guy who argued that um and discovered that maybe the sun is the center of our solar system and not the Earth, was a Catholic.

[00:19:56]Johannes Kepler described his own astronomy as thinking God's thoughts after him. Gregor Mendel worked out the basics of genetics in a monastery garden. For most of history, the people tracking the stars and the people writing theology weren't rivals standing on opposite sides of a battlefield. They were often the same person in the same room looking at all this and seeing no contradiction at all. And even used their wonder for how God made the world work as their fuel to go out and discover science. So, with all that being said, let's go back to the roof.

[00:20:29]The dome, the pillars, the ocean sitting overhead, the waters underneath and the dead underneath everything.

[00:20:35]None of that needs to be defended. And none of it needs to be debunked, either, because the Bible was never making the kind of claim that either side of the modern argument assumes it was making. The people who wrote this down described the universe the only way that anyone in their world could have described it using the same solid sky, cosmic ocean architecture that their neighbors, Babylon and Egypt, were already using.

[00:20:59]And then they used that picture to say something that has nothing to do with plate tectonics or how the Earth orbits.

[00:21:06]They said that God was the one who made it. And seeing that clearly does not mean admitting the Bible got something wrong, and it secretly isn't proving it got something right, either. It's reading the book the way the people who actually wrote it meant for it to be read. Written for us, sure, but never quite to us. And once you know the difference, it's hard to unknow it. I know that this is a very touchy subject for some people, and believe me, I get it. But ultimately, what I find so fascinating about this is we have to understand, and it sounds rather obvious, that the Bible was not written in 2026 Western America. Like, the context that produced the Bible is the context that we need to understand in order to understand what they were actually writing about and the things that they cared about. They were in a pre-scientific world, and they weren't and they weren't asking the same kind of questions that we ask today. So, it actually takes work like this, going back and understanding the Hebrew, how they use it, the culture that they lived in, the Greek and Roman culture if you're in the New Testament world. But this is why studying the Bible can be so fun is because there is no shortage of little things like this that you can pick up and understand once you understand the ancient Near Eastern context of the Bible, which is the context that produced the Bible. Thank you guys so much for watching. If you want more of these deep dives like this into the Bible, please consider subscribing. It really does help out the channel. And stay tuned for my Genesis 1 video.

[00:22:38]And with that being said, I'll see you in the next one.