BIBLICAL COSMOGRAPHY. — The ancient Hebrews held ideas concerning the structure of the world that were consonant with those then widespread in the East. They represented the earth as a flat, round disk, with Palestine and Jerusalem at its center, interrupted here and there by seas and surrounded by the great ocean, to which God has set limits that must not be crossed (Iob 26, 10).
This disk rests upon the primordial waters of the great abyss, or téhōm (Gen. 1, 2; cf. the Akkadian tāmtu), and is supported by columns (Ps. 18, 16). From the great abyss the waters rise to feed the springs and rivers. In the depths of the earth lies the śē'ōl (Iob 10, 21 ff.; cf. the Akkadian arallil), destined to be the dwelling place of the departed souls, who appear as shadows, rēphōl'm (Ps. 88, 11). Above, the solid celestial vault (“firmamentum”) has the task of separating the upper waters from the lower (Gen. 1, 6 ff.) and of holding the latter in their reservoirs (Iob 38, 22). When God wishes to send rain, he opens the floodgates (Gen. 7, 11; 8, 2) and lets the waters flow. The heaven of the stars would be the highest (according to G. Schiaparelli) and extremely thin, like a curtain or skin (Vulgate, cf. Ps. 104, 2); according to others, the stars, together with the sun and the moon, would instead be affixed to the solid firmament (cf. Gen. 1, 14, 15, 17), with the consequent difficulty of explaining the motion of the stars, which the Hebrews recognized and accepted. In short, the Hebrews conceived of the cosmos by analogy with a house, whose ground floor corresponds to the earth’s surface, the underground floor to the śē'ōl, the roof to the celestial vault, and the terrace to what lies above the heavens (v. ESAMERONE).