Myth #6:

God called the firmament “heaven.”

The Myth: And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. (Gen. 1–8)

The Reality: The identification of the firmament as heaven results from an erroneous interpretation by later biblical redactors.

Genesis describes only one event occurring on the second day, the appearance of the firmament. (Later, we will see that the second day included some additional events.) Although the narrative locates it between the waters above and the waters below, equating it with the sky rather than the heaven above the sky, some Hebrew scribe wrote that God called the firmament “Heaven.” The author must not have been familiar with the original Egyptian story in which this firmament represented a primeval mountain that arose out of the waters and separated the waters above from the waters below.

In Creation stories throughout the Near East, in Egypt as well as in Mesopotamia and the Levant, the heavens rested on a vault over the sky. This vault of necessity constituted a transparent but solid platform that kept the heaven from falling down through the sky. In Egypt, the sky between heaven and earth, originally the firmament that emerged out of the waters, came to be associated with the god Shu, son of the Heaven and Earth, and Egyptians depicted him as holding heaven aloft over the earth.

The Hebrew scribes believed that there should be some hard surface up in the sky holding up the heaven, but as monotheists, they could not accept the idea that the sky was a deity separate and apart from the Hebrew God. Therefore, they once again disassociated the Egyptian deity from the phenomena represented by the deity. They transformed the Egyptian sky deity that held up the heavens into the heaven itself.