LIGHT, LUMINARIES AND LIFE. 185 
to a geocentric conception of the universe, doesn’t it?” My 
reply was that we are not bound to the word “ firmament ” in 
its secondary (and poetic) meaning; and that, if you substitute 
the true word expanse the difficulty vanishes, and we get a 
scientific fact stated, the geocentric conception notwithstanding. 
It would seem almost that the poetic idea, as expressed (¢.g.) in 
Addison’s well-known couplet-— 
“The spacious firmament on high, 
And all the blue ethereal sky,” 
had so interwoven itself with modern literature that it 
required more moral courage than the Revisers of 1884 
possessed, for them to boldly translate rakia by expanse in the 
text. 
Let us consider the three definite statements :— 
v. 14.—‘“ Let there be lights an the firmament of heaven ” ; 
v. 15.—‘“ Let them be for lights zn the firmament of the heaven” ; 
v. 17.—“God set them in the firmament of the heaven.” 
We shall have to deal with these more at length later on. 
For the present we do well to see what lead they give us as to 
the idea present in the mind of the writer of this chapter, 
when he used the word rakia in these places, and at an earlier 
stage of the narrative (v. 6, 7, 8). The most hostile critic 
wiil surely refrain from imputing to him such puzzle-headedness 
as to make him mean one thing by the word in the earlier 
passage and a totally different thing in the later. He identifies 
the expanse with “heaven,” to which he does not even hint at 
assigning a limit. And if, by all canons of criticism, we have 
the common fairness to allow him to use the word in the two 
passages consistently, we are driven to the conclusion that when 
he spoke. of “the waters above the firmament” in the earlier 
passage, as divided by it from the waters under the firmament 
(terrestrial waters) he placed the waters above the firmament 
beyond the region of space in which the great luminaries 
appeared to move. If this be admitted, then we may further 
assert that to him “the waters above the firmament” meant 
simply the nebulous and slightly luminous (or illuminated ?) 
masses of the “ Milky Way,” which in those oriental skies, and 
to the keen sight of people living so much in the open air, 
could hardly fail to suggest the idea of fluidity. It is surprising 
to find this rather knotty point (where “science” must have 
something to say) evaded by Professor Driver in his Genesis 
(5th ed.). At any rate, I have failed to find it squarely dealt 
with in that most valuable and learned work. 
N 2 
