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Firmament

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The sun, planets and angels and the firmament. Woodcut dated 1475.

In Biblical cosmology, the firmament is the structure above the atmosphere, conceived as a vast
solid dome. According to theGenesis creation narrative, God created the firmament to separate the
"waters above" the earth from the "waters below" the earth. The word is anglicized from
Latin firmamentum, which appears in the Vulgate, a late fourth-century Latin translation of the Bible.
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Contents
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1Biblical use

2Etymology

3History

4Scientific development

5See also

6References

7External links

Biblical use[edit]
Main article: Biblical cosmology
The firmament is described in Genesis 1:6-8 in the Genesis creation narrative:

Then God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from
the waters. Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament
from the waters which were above the firmament; and it was so. And God called the firmament
Heaven. So the evening and the morning were the second day.
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Etymology[edit]
The word "firmament" is first recorded in a Middle English narrative based on scripture dated 1250.
It later appeared in the King James Bible. The word is anglicised from Latin firmamentum, used in
the Vulgate (4th century). This in turn is derived from the Latin root firmus, a cognate with "firm".
The word is a Latinization of the Greekstereoma, which appears in the Septuagint (c. 200 BC).
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History[edit]
Main article: Hebrew astronomy Biblical cosmology

The Flammarion engraving (1888) depicts a traveler who arrives at the edge of a flat Earth and sticks his head through the firmament.

The word "firmament" is used to translate raqia, or raqiya` ( ), a word used in Biblical Hebrew. It
is derived from the root raqa (), meaning "to beat or spread out", e.g., the process of making a
dish by hammering thin a lump of metal.
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Like most ancient peoples, the Hebrews believed the sky was a solid dome with
the Sun, Moon and stars embedded in it. According to The Jewish Encyclopedia:
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The Hebrews regarded the earth as a plain or a hill figured like a hemisphere, swimming on water.
Over this is arched the solid vault of heaven. To this vault are fastened the lights, the stars. So slight
is this elevation that birds may rise to it and fly along its expanse.
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Augustine wrote that too much learning had been expended on the nature of the firmament. "We
may understand this name as given to indicate not it is motionless but that it is solid." he wrote.
Saint Basil argued for a fluid firmament. According to St.Thomas Aquinas, the firmament had a
"solid nature" and stood above a "region of fire, wherein all vapor must be consumed."
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The Copernican Revolution of the 16th century led to reconsideration of these matters. In
1554, John Calvin proposed that "firmament" be interpreted as clouds. "He who would learn
astronomy and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere," wrote Calvin. "As it became a
theologian, [Moses] had to respect us rather than the stars," Calvin wrote. Calvin's "doctrine of
accommodation" allowed Protestants to accept the findings of science without rejecting the authority
of scripture.
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Scientific development[edit]
Main article: Celestial spheres

The Greeks and Stoics adopted a model of celestial spheres after the discovery of the spherical
Earth in the 4th to 3rd centuries BC. The Medieval Scholastics adopted a cosmology that fused the
ideas of the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Ptolemy. This cosmology involved celestial orbs,
nested concentrically inside one another, with the earth at the center. The outermost orb contained
the stars and the term firmament was then transferred to this orb. (There were seven inner orbs for
the seven wanderersof the sky, and their ordering is preserved in the naming of the days of the
week.)
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Even Copernicus' heliocentric model included an outer sphere that held the stars (and by having the
earth rotate daily on its axis it allowed the firmament to be completely stationary). Tycho Brahe's
studies of the nova of 1572 and the comet of 1577 were the first major challenges to the idea that
orbs existed as solid, incorruptible, material objects.
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In 1584, Giordano Bruno proposed a cosmology without firmament: an infinite universe in which the
stars are actually suns with their own planetary systems. After Galileobegan using a telescope to
examine the sky, it became harder to argue that the heavens were perfect, as Aristotelian philosophy
required. By 1630, the concept of solid orbs was no longer dominant.
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