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Biblical cosmology

This article is about the cosmology of the Bible. For an overview of approaches to the cosmos in its totality, see Cosmology. For the cosmology of the ancient near east more broadly, see Cosmology in the ancient Near East. For post-biblical Jewish cosmology, see Jewish cosmology. For for Quranic cosmology, see Quranic cosmology.
God creating the cosmos (Bible moralisée, French, 13th century)

Biblical cosmology is the account of the universe and its laws in the Bible.[1][2] The Bible was formed over many centuries, involving many authors, and reflects shifting patterns of religious belief; consequently, its cosmology is not always consistent.[3][4] Nor do the biblical texts necessarily represent the beliefs of all Jews or Christians at the time they were put into writing: the majority of the texts making up the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament in particular represent the beliefs of only a small segment of the ancient Israelite community, the members of a late Judean religious tradition centered in Jerusalem and devoted to the exclusive worship of Yahweh.[5]

The ancient Israelites envisaged the universe as a flat disc-shaped Earth floating on water, heaven above, underworld below.[6] Humans inhabited Earth during life and the underworld after death; there was no way that mortals could enter heaven, and the underworld was morally neutral;[7][8] only in Hellenistic times (after c. 330 BCE) did Jews begin to adopt the Greek idea that it would be a place of punishment for misdeeds, and that the righteous would enjoy an afterlife in heaven.[8] In this period too the older three-level cosmology in large measure gave way to the Greek concept of a spherical Earth suspended in space at the center of a number of concentric heavens.[9]

The opening words of the Genesis creation narrative (Genesis 1:1–26) sum up the biblical editors' view of how the cosmos originated: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"; Yahweh, the God of Israel, was solely responsible for creation and had no rivals, implying Israel's superiority over all other nations.[10] Later Jewish thinkers, adopting ideas from Greek philosophy, concluded that God's Wisdom, Word and Spirit penetrated all things and gave them unity.[11] Christianity in turn adopted these ideas and identified Jesus with the Logos (Word): "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1).[12] Interpreting and producing expositions of biblical cosmology was formalized into a genre of writing among Christians and Jews called the Hexaemal literature. The genre entered into vogue in the second half of the fourth century, after it was introduced into Christian circles by the Hexaemeron of Basil of Caesarea.[13][14]

  1. ^ Lucas 2003, p. 130
  2. ^ Knight 1990, p. 175
  3. ^ Bernstein 1996, p. 134: "The canon of the Hebrew Bible [...] was formed of [...] diverse writings composed by many men or women over a long period of time, under many different circumstances, and in the light of shifting patterns of religious belief and practice. [...] Indeed, the questions under investigation in this book concerning the end of an individual's life, the nature of death, the possibility of divine judgment, and the resultant reward or punishment [...] are simply too crucial to have attracted a single solution unanimously accepted over the near millennium of biblical composition."
  4. ^ Berlin 2011, p. 188
  5. ^ Wright 2002, p. 52: "The religious ideology promoted in a majority of the texts that now form the Hebrew Bible represent the beliefs of only a small portion of the ancient Israelite community: the late Judean individuals who collected, edited, and transmitted the biblical materials were, for the most part, members of a religious tradition centered in Jerusalem that worshipped the god Yahweh exclusively."
  6. ^ Aune 2003, p. 119: "The archaic cosmology conceived of the world in terms of a three-tiered cosmos consisting of the earth as a flat disc in the middle, surrounded by the river Ocean (the Greek version) or floating on water (the Israelite version), with heaven above and the underworld beneath [...]"
  7. ^ Wright 2002, pp. 117, 124–25
  8. ^ a b Lee 2010, pp. 77–78
  9. ^ Aune 2003, p. 119: "During the Hellenistic period a geocentric model of the universe largely replaced the older three-tiered universe model, for Greek thinkers (such as Aristotle and Eratosthenes) proposed that the earth was a sphere suspended freely in space."
  10. ^ Wright 2002, p. 53: "Biblical texts from all historical periods and a variety of literary genres demonstrate that in Yahwistic circles, that is, among people who worshipped Yahweh as the chief god, God was always understood as the one who alone created heaven, Earth, and all that is in them. [...] Yahweh, the Israelite god, had no rivals, and in a world where nations claimed that their gods were the supreme beings in the universe and that all others were subject to them, the Israelites' claim for the superiority of Yahweh enabled them to imagine that no other nation could rival her [...]. Phrases such as 'Yahweh, God Most High, Creator of heaven and earth' [...] and related phrases for Yahweh as creator and almighty master of the cosmos have parallels in earlier Canaanite terminology for the god El. [...] In fact, the Israelites did not create these phrases but inherited them from earlier Canaanite civilizations. Moreover, later editors of the Hebrew Bible used them to serve their particular monotheistic theology: their god is the supreme god, and he alone created the universe."
  11. ^ Kaiser 1997, p. 28
  12. ^ Parrish 1990, pp. 183–84
  13. ^ Roberts 2019, p. 199–200.
  14. ^ Kochańczyk-Bonińska 2016, p. 161–162.

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