We are next informed by Moses that "God of the waters, and let it divide
the waters from the waters;" and that "God made the firmament, and
divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters
which were above the firmament." What did the writer mean by the word
firmament? Theologians now tell us that he meant an "expanse." This will
not do. How could an expanse divide the waters from the waters, so that
the waters above the expanse would not fall into and mingle with the
waters below the expanse? The truth is that Moses regarded the firmament
as a solid affair. It was where God lived, and where water was kept. It
was for this reason that they used to pray for rain. They supposed that
some angel could with a lever raise a gate and let out the quantity of
moisture desired. It was with the water from this firmament that the
world was drowned when the windows of heaven were opened. It was in this
said Let there be a firmament in the midst firmament that the sons of
God lived--the sons who "saw the daughters of men that they were
fair and took them wives of all which they chose." The issue of such
marriages were giants, and "the same became mighty men which were of
old, men of renown."
Nothing is clearer than that Moses regarded the firmament as a vast
material division that separated the waters of the world, and upon
whose floor God lived, surrounded by his sons. In no other way could he
account for rain. Where did the water come from? He knew nothing about
the laws of evaporation. He did not know that the sun wooed with amorous
kisses the waves of the sea, and that they, clad in glorified mist
rising to meet their lover, were, by disappointment, changed to tears
and fell as rain.
The idea that the firmament was the abode of the Deity must have been in
the mind of Moses when he related the dream of Jacob. "And he dreamed,
and behold, a ladder set upon the earth and the top of it reached to
heaven; and behold the angels of God ascending and descending on it; and
behold the Lord stood above it and said, I am the Lord God."
So, when the people were building the tower of Babel "the Lord came down
to see the city, and the tower which the children of men builded. And
the Lord said, Behold the people is one, and they have all one language:
and this they begin to do; and nothing will be restrained from them
which they imagined to do. Go to, let us go down and confound their
language that they may not understand one another's speech."
The man who wrote that absurd account must have believed that God lived
above the earth, in the firmament. The same idea was in the mind of the
Psalmist when he said that God "bowed the heavens and came down."
Of course, God could easily remove any person bodily to heaven, as it
was but a little way above the earth. "Enoch walked with God, and he was
not, for God took him." The accounts in the Bible of the ascension of
Elijah, Christ and St. Paul were born of the belief that the firmament
was the dwelling-place of God. It probably never occurred to these
writers that if the firmament was seven or eight miles away, Enoch and
the rest would have been frozen perfectly stiff long before the journey
could have been completed. Possibly Elijah might have made the voyage,
as he was carried to heaven in a chariot of fire "by a whirlwind."
The truth is, that Moses was mistaken, and upon that mistake the
Christians located their heaven and their hell. The telescope destroyed
the firmament, did away with the heaven of the New Testament, rendered
the ascension of our Lord and the assumption of his Mother infinitely
absurd, crumbled to chaos the gates and palaces of the New Jerusalem,
and in their places gave to man a wilderness of worlds.