Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

George:

I see you approaching an argumentum ad absurdum in your defense of the
Documentary Hypothesis. I listed several verses where על פני cannot refer
to “upon the surface” nor “upon the face” in the sense of a physical face
or surface. Seeing as the phrase is used close to 200 times, many of which
do refer to a physical face (“he fell upon his face”) yet there are many
more verses than what I listed where the meaning of the phrase is “before”,
“in the presence of”, “among” and similar readings.

Therefore, your insistance that the use of על פני proves that רקיע must be
a reference to a solid dome, made of metal, doesn’t hold water.

Karl W. Randolph.

On Tue, Sep 4, 2012 at 6:01 AM, George Athas <George.Athas AT moore.edu.au>wrote:

> Rolf,
>
> I think you may have misunderstood me. The רקיע in Genesis 1 is given the
> name שׁמים (sky). We today, however, do not identify the 'sky' as a רקיע
> over our heads. We conceive of the sky as open air. Thus, there is a
> discrepancy between our concept of sky and the concept in Gen 1. We talk
> about birds in the sky and imply that they fly in open air, but in Gen 1.20
> the birds fly across the surface of the רקיע. For the writer of Gen 1 the
> sky is a something that has a surface. It is not open air. What I'm trying
> to guard against is reading our concept of sky back into Gen 1. If we let
> Gen 1 say what it says, we will come to the conclusion that the writer saw
> the sky as something that had a surface and functioned as a roof over the
> everything, such that when birds flew, they flew across the surface of this
> roof. It's a very different way of seeing sky to our concept. If we demand
> that the sky in Gen 1 is open air, then we are, I fear, reading our
> cosmology back into the text, rather than letting the text say what it says.
>
>
> GEORGE ATHAS
> Dean of Research,
> Moore Theological College (moore.edu.au)
> Sydney, Australia
>
>