FIRMAMENT

'Firmament' is a name for the sky or the heavens, generally used in the context of Christianity, Judaism and Islam. In the Vulgate, the word ''firmamentum'' is used, which in Classical Latin means a strengthening or support. For Jewish and Christian astronomers familiar with Greek astronomy, the firmament was the eighth sphere carrying the fixed stars and surrounding the seven spheres of the planets in the geocentric model.
The word is mentioned in the Bible, in the course of the creation story of ():

God said, "Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

It appears that the ancients believed that there were bodies of water, one in the sky and one on earth, and that something structural — a firmament — would be necessary to keep the water of the heavens separated from the body of earthly water. They may have believed, furthermore, that this firmament was essentially an elliptical dome, atop a flat Earth, upon which the stars were affixed. Once medieval Christians had taken up the Ptolemaic system, the idea of the firmament had to be accommodated to a spherical Earth and celestial spheres.

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See also

External links

See also

★ Shamayim

★ Hebrew astronomy

★ Biblical cosmology

★ Primum Mobile

★ Celestial spheres

External links

★ The Vault of Heaven.

★ Firmament, Catholic Encyclopedia.

★ Global Warming - The Aftermath of Noah's Flood