In Genesis 1:6, God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” Ancient people believed that there was a solid glass-like dome that held up the waters above the earth. That dome was called the “firmament” in the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. The word firmament comes to us in English from the French who got it from the Latin language where it is firmamentum which refers to “a support, a strengthening,”1https://www.etymonline.com/word/firmament. This word is used in the Latin Vulgate version of the Old Testament to translate the Greek word stereoma which is used in Genesis 1:6 of the Septuagint version of the Old Testament. Stereoma means “firm or solid structure.”2https://www.etymonline.com/word/firmament. It can be seen that the English word firmament has a pedigree referring to a firm or solid structures which supports something. This is perhaps no surprise when we notice that the word “firm” is used in firmament. So the translators of the King James, Latin Vulgate and the Septuagint versions of the Bible all believed that the original Hebrew word should be understood as being a “firm or solid support.” The Hebrew word that is translated “firmament” in Genesis 1:6 is rāqîaʿ (רָקִ֫יעַ) which literally means means “expanse”3#H7549, Strong’s Hebrew and Greek Dictionaries. The word is derived from the root raqqəʿ(רָקַע), meaning “to beat or spread out thinly”, e.g., the process of making a dish by hammering thin a lump of metal.4https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmament
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In the Ancient Near East (ANE) when people looked up at a clear, blue sky, they saw a transparent what they believed to be a dome above a flat earth. It was an awesome object, created by God himself on the second day to hold back the endless quantities of blue water clearly visible above it. There was water above and water beyond the horizon; doubtless there was also water below. God had divided the waters “above” from the waters “below” by constructing this immense dome that held open the space for dry land. In ancient Egypt the dome had been the goddess Nut, who arched her back over the earth so that only her hands and feet touched the ground. She was the night sky, and the sun, the god Ra, was born from her every morning.5Cosmology and Culture, Joel R. Primack Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Cruz http://physics.ucsc.edu/cosmo/primack_abrams/COSMO.HTM
Sometime around the mid 300s B.C., Greek astronomers discovered that eclipses of the moon happen when the earth is between the sun and the moon. (Solar eclipses happen when the moon is between the sun and the earth.) One piece of evidence Aristotle used to support his argument that the earth is spherical was the shadow cast by the earth on the moon during a lunar eclipse. Aristotle stated: “in eclipses the outline is always curved: and, since it is the interposition of the earth that makes the eclipse, the form of this line will be caused by the form of the earth’s surface, which is therefore spherical.” Further, eclipses are not phenomena that occur “once in a while” or “now and then.” They are not random; they are highly regular and predictable. Not only does Hildegard seem unaware of this predictability, but she also has no knowledge of the true cause of eclipses.Chrysostom, one of the four Great Church Fathers of the Eastern Church and Archbishop of Constantinople, explicitly espoused the idea, based on scripture, that the Earth floats miraculously on the water beneath the firmament. Athanasius the Great, Church Father and Patriarch of Alexandria, expressed a similar view in Against the Heathen.6https://beforenewton.blog/daily-readings/september-9-medieval-european-cosmology/
In Christian Topography, written in 547 A.D. 7Alexandrian monk Cosmas Indicopleustes, who had travelled as far as Sri Lanka and the source of the Blue Nile, the author argues that the universe consists of only two places, the Earth below the firmament and heaven above it. Carefully drawing on arguments from Genesis, he describes the Earth as a rectangle, 400 days’ journey long by 200 wide, surrounded by four oceans and enclosed by four massive walls which support the firmament. In Christian Topography, the author dismisses the spherical Earth theory as “pagan.” The Syrian Bishop, Severian,8https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severian_of_Gabala in 408 A.D., wrote that the Earth is flat and the sun does not pass under it in the night, but “travels through the northern parts as if hidden by a wall.”9https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2010/03/31/why-severian-of-gabala-is-famous/ Basil of Caesarea (329–379 A.D.)10https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Basil-the-Great argued that the matter was theologically irrelevant.[11https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth#Europe
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