Raqia Intro

I, with my own hands, stretched out (natah) the heavens, and all their hosts didst I command. Isaiah 45:12

Raqia research

For my friends who care about this work: Please pray that God will help me move forward with this research, that I have long been burdened with, but which has taken so long for much of it to come forth. I’m sorry! And that “he who stretched forth the heavens” would stretch and inspire my own thinking, not because I expect to have all the answers (we see in part and know in part), but at least that I will be able to share what he wants the world and his body to know, to the degree any of that knowledge has been entrusted to me.

Technical notes

The articles listed under this raqia folder ideally should live on my other website: hebrewcosmology.com. I’ve done a little ping-pong between these two sites, using the theme and tech of the one to help build the other. Well I have completely migrated this creationontrial.com site off of WordPress, to a static site generator technology (hugo). This allows me to save the article content in source control in plain-text markdown and so forth. While it has it’s draw backs, I can’t conceive ever going back from that humongous benefit, since this is core research, where the content king. I share all that to say: Until I can migrate hebrewcosmology.com off of WordPress, for newer or ongoing work (or simply pre-migration work of articles), I plan to make that content here. But ideally the articles at this location will ultimately be moved back to that other site, once it’s ready… God willing.

Note on astronomy images

Occasionally I make use of some deep space astronomy images within these posts on the Hebraic view of the heavens. At least as often I use terrestrial images, which I am not referring to here – i.e. sunsets, wide-view shots of the sky, stars in the night sky, and so forth. All of which things the ancients not only mostly could have seen as well as we do, but actually they saw these sites far more often than we “enlightened” ones do today, because in our “great wisdom” we’ve allowed our night skies to be totally light polluted, and thus most of us hardly ever see the stars of the night. But here I’m referring to pictures that obviously required a telescope of some large degree of magnification. Most of these I took myself as an amateur astrophotographer. Please understand that I make use of these images fully cognizant of the risk that it seem I am reading these images into Scripture, which could rightfully be called an example of reading modern science into Scripture. Even so, among other things, I don’t like to make a post without a picture, and I have these in abundance, so please don’t take this wrong. Furthermore, for those of us who claim to walk according to the faith of Abraham, whom God personally took out of his tent one night and showed him all the myriad stars in their glory (I bet that night was a new moon! or that it had not risen at that hour, to allow maximum visibility of the stars), we do believe such wonders were called into being by the same God who stretched out the heavens, and who commanded all the stars according to their hosts. So I don’t read these pictures straight into the text, but neither do I believe they contradict it.

Contrast this with John Walton’s book Genesis 1 as Ancient Cosmology, whose cover is decorated with ancient Egyptian gods and godesses. Such a pantheistic, pagan worldview is anathema and contradictory in its very heart and soul to the Hebraic one. Such is not the case with the objects we see today, even though yes, they go beyond what the ancients had seen.