The shamayim is where the stars are (Gen. 11:17, e.g.), a lack of rain results when the shamayim gets stopped up. (If you’re counting along, it seems like we now have eleven instances, not ten, but only because one of them appears in two lists - in connection with raki’a and in connection with birds.)Įlsewhere in the Bible (Deut.
In one case, the shamayim is the place under which the water of the ocean is gathered - again, “sky” in English.Īnd that leaves Genesis 1:1, where God creates the shamayim. The raki’a is the ancient conception of the sky, which is why the Hebrew raki’a is God’s name for the shamayim, in one place, just like “day” is God’s name for “light.” The final four times the word is where birds are, which is obviously the “sky” in English, not “heaven” or “heavens.”įour times the word appears in connection with the Hebrew raki’a, which is usually translated into English as “firmament” - though, again, that’s a word whose use is almost entirely confined to translations of Genesis the NRSV’s “dome” isn’t a bad alternative. We see the Hebrew word, shamayim, ten times in the first chapter of Genesis. People don’t talk about “cloudy heavens” when it’s overcast. Heaven, by contrast, is, depending on one’s theology, either where good people go when they die or where all people go when they die.Ī translation variation, “heavens,” is a little better, but only to the extent that that Biblish word has entered the mainstream. The problem is that the Hebrew for the first word here means “sky,” not “heaven.” In English, the birds, clouds, rain, etc. The usual answer is as obvious as it is wrong: “heaven and earth.” What did God Really Create in the Beginning?
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