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Moses was raised in Pharaoh’s family as a son. He would have received the best education in the most powerful kingdom of the world. The ancient Egyptians were a highly advanced society fluent in mathematics and engineering. Acts 7:22 says Moses was “educated in all the learning of the Egyptians, and he was a man of power in words and deeds”.
Moses was chosen by God to lead the Israelites out of Egypt and into the promised land. God counted on him to organize over two million people after defying Ramses and He entrusted Moses to disseminate and administer His Holy Law.
The Torah, or first 5 books of the Old Testament, was written by Moses. The Bible says that God’s Law was dictated through angels to Moses, the mediator (Gal. 3:19). Parallel with that truth, ancient Hebrews believed that God revealed the creation history in Genesis directly to him, as well.
So the question is, with regard to Genesis Chapter 1, did the angels tell Moses a phony childish story because he and the rest of the Israelites were too simple-minded and unsophisticated to understand a heliocentric cosmology?
Got your Bible out? Follow along. Look at what Genesis teaches:
Vs. 1 – God created the heavens (plural) and the earth. A general statement, no chronology intended.
Vs. 2 – Earth, before it was technically called earth, was just a ‘blob’ of water, if you will.
Vs. 3-5 – God created light. This was light BEFORE the sun, moon and stars were created. End of Day 1.
6-8 – God then created the firmament (expanse) to separate the waters. This firmament, or dome, is ‘raqiya’ in Hebrew which means a ‘solid extended surface’. This firmament made a separation of the water ‘blob’. The ancient Hebrew understood this dome or vault as solid and that is what Scripture says (Job 37:18). It is a structure.
God called this expanse or firmament heaven and David said in Psalm 19:1 this structure – the expanse (same word ‘raqiya’) – this work of His hands – is His glory! So this heaven was created after the water blob. This heaven is the solid expanse that separates the waters from above it (Psalm 148:4) and the waters below it.
I refer to ‘this heaven’ because there are 3 in Scripture. Remember when Paul said he went up into the 3rd heaven (2 Cor. 12:2)? There is the heaven that God lives in (Psalm 104:3; Psalm 148:4; also see my post ‘What’s in the Water?’) , the heaven of the expanse or firmament, and the heaven where the birds fly and clouds form (Matthew 6:26 – the word ‘air’ is literally heaven). Paul went up to the 3rd heaven where God is. Day 2.
9-10. God then gathered the waters below, or the formless earth, into one place and made dry land materialize. He called the dry land earth. So technically, earth was not earth yet in verse 2.
11-13. God created vegetation and it sprouted. Still NO SUN yet the vegetation was growing! Day 3
14-19. God created the lights and put them IN the firmament heaven. Verse 14 is differentiating the firmament heaven from the other heavens. In other words He created the sun, moon and stars (16) and put them inside the solid expanse (17). The sun and moon are their own light source (‘two great lights’). The moon is not a reflection of the sun. The lights are INSIDE the firmament or dome. If the lights were under the firmament, it would have said under or below as God said the ‘waters below’ in vs. 9. Since the sun and moon are inside the firmament heaven, what we see must be some sort of projection. End of day 4.
20-23. God created all the creatures that live in the waters. Day 5
24-31. God created all the animals and man. Day 6
The Israelites could understand God’s highly technical Law, but they couldn’t understand the solar system.
The ancient Hebrew believed that the earth does not move, it’s stationary (Psalm 93:1) with a solid dome or firmament over it and God’s throne is on top of the firmament in the waters above (Psalm 104:3). The sun and moon follow their own circuits (Psalm 19:5-6), and they are moving but the earth is stationary. This is what the Bible teaches and this is what they believed.
Modern day Christianity tries to find ways to reconcile the Bible with the solar system model but fails. So we say that the Old Testament writers wrote their narratives in quaint, superstitious, poetic ways because they didn’t have modern technology and knowledge of astronomy and astrophysics.
But they had Yahweh, the Creator Himself!
So, if God gave Moses this information through angels, then God must have assumed that Moses and the rest of the Israelites were too dumb to understand the heliocentric model and the angels lied for God. Therefore, God must have lied because the angels would have only spoken what they were given.
But Yahweh cannot lie and Moses was extremely intelligent.
Dan Baker