I don't understand what you think the finding of water vapor by astronomers proves.
“... the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” (NOAB)
What is described here is a primeval ocean,
I've already commented on this but can you explain why you are calling it an ocean when Scripture does not? Scripture very clearly calls these initial waters "the waters" and very clearly calls the formation of the ocean, the seas.
Don't start injecting into your understanding elements that are not present in the original text. Go with what’s there. That is the only way to understand what the author intended. Grabbing factual details from modern astronomy and inserting them into the creation account only distorts the original meaning.
Cycel it sounds to me like you're repeating arguments others are making against different arguments than I'm making. I've never once appealed to modern nomenclature or ANE nomenclature. I don't believe we should inject any ideas onto the text, but rather let the biblical authors define their own terms. The sea is defined on day 3 by God, and the
raqiya' is defined on day 2 as
shamayim - the heavens.
raqiya' =
shamayim and firmament = heaven. There is a one to one correspondence, and fortunately we have hundreds of occurrences of
shamayim in scripture to draw from. If you want to know what
raqiya' means, just learn what heaven means.
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.
Case in point. Here you've arbitrarily defined the expanse as a dome, yet scripture defines the expanse as heaven (Gen. 1:8). I'm curious why you are refusing to let the author define his own terms.
Calminian, you will notice that God simply gave a name to the waters he gathered together, when he expose the land that had been submerged. He did not create them.
Again where is this in the text? I've read this text thousands of times, and it never has once said the land was submerged. It sounds again like your trying to force ANE cosmology into the text, rather that just letting the authors speak and define their own terms. The text itself says the land (
erets) was originally formless and empty, not submerged (v.2). Had the author wanted to say it was a solid formed submerged mass he could have easily done so.
Picture the dome of the sky sitting in the midst of the waters. An ocean exists both above and below it. And given that the dome was placed in the midst of the waters I am imagining there is about as much water above the sky as below. This is key. The dome, which God named the sky, touches the waters above it and below it. ...
But what I'm trying to do is find this description in the Bible. The expanse (
raqiya') is an open space where among other things, the clouds dwell. Stars and the sun and moon are harder to gauge with the naked eye, but clouds obviously move in the expanse called heaven. Do you think the Bible writers thought clouds were embedded in a solid dome?
Again, the entire case for ascribing solid dome ideas to the biblical authors crumbles when you consider God's definition of raqiya' as heaven and the multiple instances in scripture where clouds are said to be in the heavens.
Ironically, skeptics make the same mistake old earth creationists make. Rather than letting scripture speak, they attempt to force a particular cosmology into it. Old earthers read modern scientific ideas into the text, and solid domers read ancient cosmology into it. But the error is essentially the same. Just read the text, and let it say what it says.