21st Century Bible Hebrew -- raqia

Genesis 1:6

ו וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי רָקִיעַ בְּתוֹךְ הַמָּיִם וִיהִי מַבְדִּיל בֵּין מַיִם לָמָיִם:

 

Translation:     Gd said Let there be a raqia in the midst of the water so as to let it be setting a division between water and water.

 

Notice that I didn’t translate raqia. The usual translation is “firmament” which is wrong. Raqia has the root resh qof ayin and the verb with the same root is in Exodus 39:3 which describes hammering pure gold very thin and then cutting thin strips from it, which are woven with colored thread to make the efod. In Numbers 17:4; Elazar hammers flat the copper censers that were not consumed with their owners, and uses the plates as a covering for the ark.

 

“Firmament” comes from the Septuagint which uses the Greek stereoma for raqia. Stereoma means a hard body. It suits the Aristotelian concept that above earth is a tightly fitted hollow ball which is the sphere of the moon, the sphere of the sun being outside of that, and then five more spheres for the ancient visible planets.

 

The raqia is discussed in Babylonian Talmud, Passover 94a, as being 1000 parasangs thick (1277 kilometers), and below that Passover 94b says earth is 182,500 parasangs or 233 thousand kilometers below it. What’s more, Chagigah 13a (also in Babylonian Talmud) says that there are seven raqias, all the same thickness (1000 parasangs) and there is a distance of 1000 parasangs between each raqia. The raqia is a relatively thin covering over whatever is beneath it.  What is in that 1000 parasangs of distance between each raqia, nobody discusses.

 

That is probably related to Mishnah Chagigah 2:1 (Babylonian Talmud Chagigah 11b) which says “There are four things that if a man thinks about them, it would be better if he had never been born: what is above; what is below; what is before; and what is after.” Look: Judaism has 613 commandments. It’s hard to obey them all. If you haven’t done that, it doesn’t matter what you think about esoteric things like the seven raqiot, or what holds the world up (pre-Newton), how the universe began (pre-Einstein), or how it will end.

 

And if you do spend time on those things, you always get to a point where you run out of answers. Then you either stop talking, or you start making things up. You’re not Gd. Only Gd knows the truth about those things. People will either ignore you because they know you don’t know, or they’ll believe you. If they believe you, you become “somebody putting a stumbling block before the blind”. And that right there violates one of the 613 commandments.

 

That’s not anti-science. Science admits it doesn’t know everything. That’s why scientists still have work to do. Judaism is not anti-science. It says that to be a Jew you have to fulfill the 613 commandments. You can do that and still be a scientist. But if you’re not a scientist and you don’t study science so that you know where science ends and the unknown begins, you should be going and fulfilling commandments.

 

Why didn’t Septuagint use a better word? I don’t know. I’ve done some research among experts who wrote about the Greek of the Septuagint (see the Fact-Checking bibliography for Deissman, for example) and the conclusion I’m reaching is that the Septuagint was done, not by religious Jews for their own purposes, but by political hacks so that the first two Ptolemies would have the Jews on their side if they were attacked by Seleucus, who got control of Syria after Alexander died. And when that attack did come, the Jews did support Egypt while the Samaritans, whom the Ptolemies ignored, helped Seleucus.

 

Commentators down through the ages have said what a bad translation Septuagint was. They include ben Sirach, a century later; Jerome, six centuries later; the Geneva translators and King James I of England, twelve centuries after Jerome; and most recently, the American council of classical Bishops whose newly authorized translation changes Isaiah 7:14 so that it no longer reflects what Septuagint says.

There are other words in Torah that I think should not be translated so as to emphasize that they mean what they mean and have been mis-translated, and I discuss them in Narrating the Torah which is still in preparation.

Next week: howgrammar and narrative structure work together.

 

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