The golden key to understanding the seven days of creation in Genesis is to understand the Babylonian cosmos. Then all the pieces suddenly fall into place! It's an amazing experience.

The cosmology of the ancient Middle East describes a flat earth, often in the shape of a round pancake resting upon the primeval waters of chaos, being suspended as it were over the "deep" or "watery abyss." How was it supported? It was upheld by pillars or else floated like a mat (as given in an Egyptian version). The primeval waters of chaos below and beyond the earth had no creator; they were the starting point--dark, chaotic, and threatening. Ancient Middle Eastern mythology often personified chaos as a sea dragon of god-like power which had to be defeated before creation could begin. The Canaanite god, Baal, defeated Lotan the sea monster--one of many legends where a great sea serpent engaged in primordial warfare with the gods. Creation was the imposition of order upon chaos, not of making everything from scratch.

Covering the pancake-like earth was a vast upside-down bowl or sky-dome which was made of material as tough as metal. Just within the sky-dome traveled the sun in its appointed daily orbit; during the night the moon ruled. The stars, especially those that moved (the planets), were divine beings that might be worshiped. In the Genesis creation account they are reduced to mere glitter set in the sky-dome. As you can see, these heavenly bodies had to be created after the sky-dome which is their support. Above the sky-dome, to an extent not discussed, there was a heavenly ocean. Perhaps, that was why the sky was blue, why rain came down from heaven. Rain could be released by opening little windows in the sky-dome. Some ancient authors speak of a dark region at the ends of the earth, perhaps beyond the point where the sky-dome rested on the earth. Being outside of the sky-dome, such a region might be deprived of the sun's light. Thus, we have the ancient Middle Eastern view of the cosmos in a nutshell, and it comes in many variations.

Why is God portrayed as fighting sea monsters in the Old Testament? Leviathan, that ancient, coiled sea creature is crushed by God in Isaiah 27:1 and appears in Psalm 74:14 and other verses. Leviathan wasn't a mere crocodile (as one verse might suggest) who played a bit part in the Bible. He is none other than a personified echo of the ancient chaos which was a major part of Middle Eastern mythology. However, the Hebrew authors elevated their god far above this personified threat of chaos which is viewed as no threat at all. Indeed, a couple of passages even have God creating Leviathan! Clearly, God was in full control in the Hebrew telling of the story. The cleaned-up creation account of Genesis I (Genesis 1:1 - 2:3) makes no mention of such a battle since all sea creatures are created on day five.

Bible believers often tell us that God creates everything ex nihilo (from nothing) in Genesis 1:1. However, Genesis 1:1 makes a lot more sense as a summary, a kind of ancient introduction. In the beginning, dear children (when there was nothing but dark waters and a formless earth) God created the heavens and the earth, and now I'll tell you how he did it. It doesn't make sense to have God create everything right at the start (in one, short verse) and then backtrack to do the job again by daily increments. As the curtains rise on the actual account, God is moving to and fro over the dark waters as a strong breath of wind (a more concrete version of our "spirit"). Why this odd start? It follows the ancient Middle Eastern cosmology! Their gods do not create the dark, primeval waters (or other personifications) of chaos but must overcome them! Hence, in the Bible those dark waters and a formless earth were already there! (The New Oxford Annotated Bible--the New Revised Standard Version whose 4th edition was published in 2010--makes this point clearer as do many older translations. It pays to look at several translations.) Another piece falls into place!

The first thing God created was light, which he separated from darkness as though separating salt from pepper! The ancients had no clue as to the nature of light and neither does God's book. We now know that visible light is but a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum and that all objects radiate light more or less according to the blackbody radiation curve. In a dark room your chair radiates light mostly in the invisible infrared wavelengths, but a few photons of visible light are also produced. Visible light, in tiny quantities, was already there! Those dark, primeval waters were already creating some light as does all matter. God merely increased the light which he separated into days and nights. God's book is unaware that a rotating, spherical earth caused its inhabitants to experience periods of day and night. Nobody ever sorted light beams!

Notice that day and night are created before the sun, itself! This is often counted as a ghastly error since it seems obvious that the sun is the source of our daylight. However, the ancient authors (ignorant as cattle in matters of science) were not stupid. Surely, such an obvious blunder could not have escaped their notice! They probably made a distinction that we moderns would never think of, namely that sky light and sunlight are independent sources of light! The bright, blue sky does seem independent from the sun and the sky does brighten before the sun even rises. The authors of Genesis probably envisioned God as creating a diffuse light which was then separated into day (a sunless sky) and night. The sun came later and was created to rule over that period of daylight, adding its own heat and light, even as the moon ruled the night. Hence, the inseparable association of sun and bright sky except for early morning and dusk. David Presutta, in his methodical book "The Biblical Cosmos versus Modern Cosmology," reaches the same conclusion.

Genesis mysteriously talks about a heavenly vault (firmament) that separates waters above from waters below. Once again, the ancient cosmology of the region gives us the key to the mystery. That vault is a solid sky-dome! It rests like an upside-down bowl upon the earth or, perhaps, on mountain pillars just beyond the edge of a pancake-like earth. Genesis, in following the ancient, Middle Eastern script, presents a three-layered affair! There was the sky-dome above, a flat earth in the middle, and the watery deep below upon which earth and dome were founded. Creating the sky-dome was a major part of creating the ancient cosmos, a necessary step that had to be taken BEFORE the creation of the earth, sun, moon, or stars. Thus, God raises up a firmament (a solid sky-dome: Job 22:14, 37:18, Psalms 19:1, 104:2-3, 150:1, Isaiah 34:4, 40:22 and many other verses) in the midst of the primeval waters, dividing the waters into portions above and below the sky-dome (Exodus 20:4, Psalm 148:4). And so, a space was made for a pancake-like earth.

The firmament proper is not an expanse of airy sky as some wishful thinkers allege! God actually hammers out the sky-dome (vault of heaven or firmament) as though it were made of a metal-like substance. (See Job 37:18 in the New English Bible where the sense of the verb is made clearer and involves a hammering-out process.) God even walks on his sky-dome! (Job 22:14). You might fly through an airy sky but you don't walk on it, not even metaphorically! A really, really ambitious and hardy fellow, who went to the ends of the earth where the sky-dome met the earth, might be imagined as climbing up to heaven! (Amos 9:2). Climbing up on an expanse of air would have been a neat trick! And God called the sky-dome "Heaven," a realm that probably included the upper portion of an airy sky just below the dome itself, that being the domain of high-flying birds (Genesis 1:20). "Heaven" (in this old sense) is sometimes translated as "sky," but it is not our modern sky. Their sky was the realm of God and angels--not airplanes--and was covered by a dome.

With the sky-dome in place, God sets the boundaries of the waters below and dry land (the earth) appears. Notice that God does not create the dry land! Land, it seems, was there all along but mixed up with the primeval waters. The sea now encroached only so far before stopping at the beach, the appointed limit set by God. The fountains of the deep were also checked and no longer flooded the earth. In unleashing Noah's flood God does just the opposite. He breaks up the blockage in the fountains of the deep which, once again, flood the earth (along with a super-heavy rain). More pieces are now falling into place!

The Bible tells us that God's throne is set above the highest stars (Deuteronomy 28:12, Job 22:14, Psalms 57:5, 104:2-3, 13, 113:4, Isaiah 14:13, Amos 9:6). But there are no "highest stars" in our universe! Once again Babylonian cosmology unravels the mystery. "Highest stars" makes sense only if there is an absolute up and down. The illusion that some stars are higher than others comes with the sky-dome. The stars overhead look highest because the solid dome would be highest there. Stars near the horizon would be much closer to earth. God's throne is placed above the zenith of the sky-dome, putting it above the highest stars since all the stars are attached to the dome.

Note that in Genesis 1 the stars are all created on the 4th day. Their creation is finished, a done deal. Unfortunately for believers, it's an astronomical fact that stars have been forming since their first generation! Hubble and other space telescopes, that can access the infrared spectrum normally blocked by our atmosphere, can actually look inside the dense dust clouds where stars are now forming! Every major theoretical stage of star formation has been documented by actual observation. We can see proto-stars inside dust clouds that are still collapsing, stars that have not even reached the stage of nuclear fusion! Their infrared signature, due to heat, comes solely from gravitational collapse. (As matter collapses it heats up.)

Being only a little higher up than the mountains, God could look down on the earth with his keen eyesight. With a bit of poetic license, people looked like grasshoppers from that distance. They would look more like atomic particles if real astronomical distances were involved! One day God had to come down from heaven to monitor the Tower of Babel project. (Notice the word "down," which is entirely relative for a spherical earth.) In those days God's omnipotence had some startling limitations! Jacob could even dream of a really high ladder that reached heaven. The ancients could look up and see the heavenly ceiling with its collection of stars affixed to it, and it didn't seem that far away. Doesn't the moon look a lot closer than it really is, especially when it is near the horizon?

When God looked down on the earth from his perch just above the top of the sky-dome, he could see the great circle of the earth. No, he wasn't looking at a spherical earth! When the ancients looked at the horizon, which defined the bottom of their hemispherical sky-dome (where the vault rested on the earth), they naturally interpreted it as a great circle. God, at a greater elevation, could actually look down and see the circular form of the horizon--the great circle of the pancake-like earth.

Have you ever wondered what the Bible meant when it talked about a city or nation at the CENTER of the earth (Genesis 48:16, Exodus 8:22, Psalm 74:12, Ezekiel 5:5, 38:12, Daniel 4:10)? There is no such place for a city or nation on a spherical earth! Apologists try to rewrite that to mean the center of activities or influence. But, aside from being a forced interpretation of dubious merit, it is rather lame given that Israel was more of a road between the real centers of power and influence. The Babylonian cosmos, as usual, supplies a much more credible answer. A pancake-like earth naturally has a center that might be occupied by a favored city or nation. Of course, every people of note saw themselves at the center and the Hebrews were no exception. Their flat earth rested on pillars (I Samuel 2:8, Job 9:6, Psalms 18:15, 75:3, 82:5, 93:1-2, 102:25, 104:5, Proverbs 8:29, Isaiah 2:8, 24:18, etc.). A spherical earth has nothing to do with pillars.

Doesn't it strike you as odd that the Bible speaks of the ends and corners of the earth? That's flat-earth language! A spherical earth absolutely lacks ends and corners. The modern use of these terms seems to be a holdover from a time when they really did apply to a flat earth. I can't imagine that anyone would turn to "corners" and "ends" when first describing a spherical earth! Whatever the case, those ancient biblical authors were addressing their fellow Hebrews. Had God been speaking to us, his creation account would have begun with the Big Bang! Ask yourself how an ancient reader of those scrolls would have interpreted "corners" and "ends" of the earth. Obviously, that reader would have taken those words as references to a flat earth, the general belief at that time. What else could they mean? If, contrary to good sense, those words really refer to a spherical earth then either God needs a course in remedial writing or else he has deceived his readers!

Have you ever wondered why the stars (a huge part of the visible universe) were created last among the heavenly lights--as though they were an afterthought? The sun, being the brightest and most important of the three lights, is listed first. The moon, which clearly outshines the stars, comes next. Finally, the myriad of stars, insignificant specks attached to the sky-dome, come in a distant third. They "also" were created. In the New Testament the stars might be shaken loose from the sky-dome during a great calamity and drop to earth like winter figs in a gale! (Revelation 6:12-14). Mark and Matthew also talk about stars falling to the earth in a time of great calamity. God's book doesn't have a clue about the sizes of stars or the astronomical distances between them. Forget about galaxies. Don't even think about dark matter!

The sky-dome also comes complete with windows and sluice gates (Genesis 7:11, 8:2, 2 Kings 7:2, Psalm 78:23, Isaiah 24:18, Malachi 3:10, Revelation 4:1). During Noah's flood God opened these gates and the primordial waters above the dome (Genesis 1:7, Psalms 104:2-3, 13, 148:4, Jeremiah 10:13) poured out to flood the earth below (along with water coming up from the unstopped fountains of the deep). It's a good thing the authors didn't attribute all that rain to condensation since the atmosphere can only hold a few inches of water worldwide! Above the sky-dome are storehouses for hail, snow, and heat as well as living quarters (Job 38:22-24, Psalms 78:23-24, 135:7, 2 Corinthians 5:1; see also the annotations for Job 38:22-24 in The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version With the Apocrypha, 4th edition).

Another mystery in the Bible is its pillars of heaven (2 Samuel 22:8, Job 26:11, Amos 9:6). It should strike you as odd that heaven needs supporting pillars! More arcane talk? Nope! It comes right out of the ancient Middle Eastern cosmology. Here, "heaven" refers to the sky-dome, and being a massive structure it needs a solid foundation. One ancient solution envisioned a foundation consisting of a ring of special mountains somewhere beyond the edges of the pancake-like earth--the pillars of heaven. When the earth was shaken by an angry God (instead of an earthquake) the pillars of heaven shook as well since they rested on the earth. Heaven and earth were shaken together! Isn't that a hoot! It all becomes crystal clear once you familiarize yourself with the ancient cosmology of the Middle East!

The Bible speaks of waters (read ocean) beneath the earth (Exodus 20:4, Deuteronomy 4:18, 5:18, Psalms 24:2, 136:6). That's an odd place to put an ocean! Once again we turn to the ancient cosmology of the Middle East. The Bible is not talking about subterranean rivers or other minor sources of water within a spherical earth. It's talking about a flat earth. The flat earth rested like a mat upon the primeval waters and was covered by a sky-dome. A portion of the primeval waters sat above the sky-dome while the rest were adjacent to and below the earth, the pancake-like earth being supported by pillars in the Bible. Was it pillars all the way down? The Bible actually acknowledges that question! Unfortunately, the acknowledgment doesn't come with an answer (Job 38:6)! Fish, and presumably sea monsters, swam in those waters beneath the earth!

According to the Bible (Isaiah 13:10, Matthew 24:29, Mark 13:24-25) a fearful day of retribution is coming and God will darken sun, moon, and stars. Did you ever wonder why the moon is on that list? The moon shines from reflected sunlight and, therefore, does not require any action by God. Take out the sunlight and the moonlight goes with it. The ancients, however, saw the moon as an independent light. They had no idea that they were looking at reflected sunlight. Therefore, the moon required God's attention along with the sun and stars! An ancient reader would have certainly understood the passage in that light. (Pun fun!)

We could go on exploring the mysteries of the biblical cosmos, but it's time to start wrapping this post up. The Genesis I creation account (and related verses in the Old Testament) are obviously a Hebrew version of the standard cosmology of the day. Much of it may have been borrowed from Babylon itself since the deportation of 586 BCE sent the Jerusalem intellectuals to Babylon. Over the years they had plenty of time to absorb the finer points of Babylonian cosmology. And why not? The Babylonian view was a splendid example of the accepted views held throughout much of the ancient Middle East. Bible scholars (as versus apologists) generally hold that Genesis was mostly written up (or put into final form) at about this time. It may surprise some readers to know that Genesis is not the oldest part of the Bible.

Perhaps, as some apologists allege, the biblical cosmos is a simplification for the benefit of people living in a pre-scientific age. Thus, the sun (which looks like a relatively small orb) seems to move across the face of what looks like a sky-dome and, then, must "hasten" back to its starting point after setting. It's all appearances! The ancients would have been hopelessly confused if the passage discussed a rotating, spherical earth orbiting a huge sun 92 million miles away. But, what would be the point of watering EVERYTHING down to appearances for the sake of a few ancients and losing billions of people in today's scientific age? Wouldn't God have thrown in a couple of clear descriptions of galaxies or the first 50 digits of pi for our sake even if those passages confused the ancients? The key word is "clear." Many people have claimed to find such passages, but it always comes down to wishful thinking that convinces only believers.

Was Adam and Eve also a simplification? Modern genetics and evolution would have been every bit as confusing in a pre-scientific age! This simplification argument, consistently applied, undermines the entire foundation of traditional Christianity! Do you really want to go there dear Christian? Moreover, the biblical account tightly fits the ancient cosmology of the Middle East (as illustrated above) and often goes far beyond mere appearances. Who has observed the parting of the primeval waters, portions going above and below the earth? Who has observed God's mansion above the sky-dome? Was God regaling Job with wondrous facts about earth and heaven or was he confining himself to simple appearances? The Genesis I creation account (and related verses) are hardly intended as a collection of personal observations! Those passages are a tightly woven fabric wholly in tune with an ancient theory of the cosmos that made sense in those days.

Apologists are also big on metaphors. Those scientifically silly descriptions are merely picturesque word paintings! Funny, how generations of theologians spanning a 1000 years or more, who scrutinized every inch of the Bible, never recognized those "obvious" metaphors! They were short on science to be sure, but they certainly had a solid grasp of the language. Funny, how those same verses suddenly turned into metaphors (with the exception of a flat-earth society here and an earth-centered society there) once science exposed the errors! Had metaphoric usage been intended it would have been spotted 1000 years ago by theologians scrutinizing the Bible! If they couldn't find it, and God intended it, then the Almighty needed a course in freshman Hebrew composition!

A few verses are always cited as proof that the Bible is dealing with a spherical earth. I guess those few verses are supposed to erase the multitude of flat-earth verses! At best, you have a contradiction which is also fatal to God's book. Moreover, a careful examination of those verses show that they don't actually support a spherical earth after all. Some of them actually support a flat-earth! Keep in mind that different Bible translations will bring some problems into a sharper focus while making others harder to see. So, it's a good idea to use several translations. They should include a translation that sticks fairly close to the Hebrew and Greek (such as the New Oxford Annotated Bible) and one that abandons word structure in favor of the best modern meaning of the words (such as the New English Bible). The King James translation brings out some fascinating insights that get smoothed over in other translations but is considered obsolete for critical work. Their translators had to work with inferior manuscripts and did not have the benefit of modern archaeological findings which now throw light on the meaning of some passages and obscure words.