All right, let’s jump in and see what happened here. Day one, God separated light from darkness. Day two, God separated heaven from earth. That’s what the expanse is referring to. Day three, as we shall see, God separated water on earth from dry land. So day one, day two, day three, series of separations. Before God can create life He has to separate light from darkness, and create the continuum of light and dark in the 24-hour solar day. He has to separate the heaven from the earth, which He does on day two. Then He has to separate the water that is now completely engulfing on day one and two, He has to separate that from the dry land so there’s a place for the fish in the sea and the land life on dry land. Thus the universe is made ready for life in the first three days…a very reasonable approach…light from dark, heaven from earth, dry land from water.
Let’s look at it then in more particulars. Verse 6, “Then God said,” and again I remind you that creation was simply by the Word of God. He spoke things into existence. As day two began, when the dawning of the day came, the universe was light and dark, the earth was an undifferentiated mass of elements completely engulfed in water. But then God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters and let it separate from the waters from the waters.” This is quite interesting.
On day one the earth was covered all with water. On day two God separated that water in to two places. That’s what it’s saying here. He put an expanse in between and some water was above and some remained on the earth. So you have the water that was still on the earth and now some water that’s separated and taken above. That’s exactly what it is saying. And in between those two elements of water there is an expanse.
Now the word “expanse” is the Hebrew word raqia. It means, interesting word, it means expanse. It means spread out thinness. And looking in the Old Testament to find its usage, in Exodus 39:3 when they were making things for the worship of God in the tabernacle, it says they got gold and they hammered out…they hammered out sheets of gold. They flattened it out and spread it out and hammered it into thinness. They use the same verb as the verb expanse. The picture is of a thin area that God just cuts right through the waters that surround the earth. All the way around the earth is this water and God just cuts as if you would go in there with a knife and just cut all the way through that sphere of the undifferentiated mass of elements of the earth, separating it into two parts. There’s still the part that’s spherical and the water surrounding it, but now there’s water above it, separated by this expanse. Expanse is intended to convey the idea of space…space.
Look at verse 8. God called this expanse what? Heaven. It’s what we understand as heaven. It’s what we understand as the space above us. Heaven is shamayim and it literally means the sky, or the skies. It refers to the universe and the space above us. So there was no heaven, there was no space as we know until the second day and God just cut all the way around that sphere and released some of that water and sent it up, creating between the waters above and water below space.
The Jewish writer Casudo(??) says, “From this we may infer that immediately after its formation the firmament occupied of its own accord the place appointed for it by the will of God which is the sight of the heavens as we know it.” Literally created space. “Thus as soon as the firmament was established in the midst of the layer of water, it began to rise, arching like a vault.” That’s very graphic. God cuts that water and then it just begins to rise and it begins to expand until its going further and further, creating in between space. Casudo says, “In its course…in the course it expands arching like a vault, in the course of its upward expansion it lifted at the same time the upper waters resting on top of it.” It just took them right up. “This marked a considerable advance in the marshalling of the components of the universe. Above now stands the vault of heaven, surrounded by the upper waters. Beneath stretches the expanse of lower waters, that is the waters of the vast sea which still covers all the heavy undifferentiated matter on the earth. The universe..he writes..is beginning to take shape.”
Now that’s a very reasonable account written by Moses. At the, if you go back into ancient literature you read some other legends that developed in the Mesopotamian mythology that are kind of interesting to compare with this. Pagan stories, there’s a lot of them, to try to explain creation, none of them teaches evolution. But, for example, the legends of Mesopotamia say that after the god Marduk, and by the way, you can name him a lot of different names depending on what the nation you belong to or what version you want, but the god Marduk had vanquished Tiamot(?), the goddess of the world ocean, depicted as a great and mighty sea monster, as well as the other monsters and monstrosities that she had created to aid her in her combat. And after he had slain his chief enemy with his weapons, he cut her carcass horizontally and divided her into two halves which lay one on top of the other and out of the upper half he formed a heaven and out of the lower half he made the earth, which included the sea. You can read that whole story in the Babylonian account of creation. And it says actually in the text, translated, he split her like a fish into two parts, the one half of her he set up and laid there with the beams of the heavens. He pulled down a bar and stationed a watch which refers to the earth below.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
