A Short History of the Waters Above the Firmament

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE WATERS ABOVE THE FIRMAMENT

Within the biblical account of creation is embedded an element of cosmology, the origins of which are to be found in ancient Near Eastern mythology but the lasting impact of which was felt through the Middle Ages and into the early Renaissance. I refer here to the “waters above the fi rmament”: And God said, “Let there be a fi rmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” And God made the fi rmament and separated the waters which were under the fi rmament from the waters which were above the fi rmament. And it was so. And God called the fi rmament Heaven.1 For centuries, the meaning of these “waters” raised questions for all interpreters of the second day of creation, from the early Chris- tian fathers such as Origen (185–254 C.E.) and Augustine (354–430 C.E.) to scholastics of the Middle Ages such as Aquinas. Whether the supracelestial waters represented physical matter in a literal reading of Genesis 1 or whether they symbolized some immaterial cosmic realm understood within a Platonic or Aristotelian cosmological context set the terms for exegesis and debate. Yet throughout the period from late antiquity to the Middle Ages, none of the natural philosophers or theologians who engaged with the cosmological implications of the biblical six days of creation had the luxury of recognizing the ancient Near Eastern background of the “waters above the fi rmament.” Yet this ancient Near Eastern mythological motif entered the stream of Western cosmological thought and remained, albeit reinterpreted,

1 Gen.1.6–8 Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version. Cf. the translation of the JPS, Tanakh, The Holy Scriptures ( JPS, 1985): God said, “Let there be an expanse in the midst of the water, that it may separate water from water.” God made the expanse, and it separated the water which was below the expanse from the water which was above the expanse. And it was so. God called the expanse Sky. Another reference to the waters above is also found in Ps.148.3–4: Praise him, sun and moon, praise him, all you shining stars! Praise him, you highest heavens, and you waters above the heavens! 340 chapter seventeen as part of the picture of the world until the fi nal dismantling of the ancient-mediaeval world-view. This paper assumes an extra-biblical Near Eastern background for this element of the biblical account of creation, without going into the details of the refl ections of specifi c myths or texts, and thus the specifi c debt of “P,” the “Priestly” author of the Book of Genesis, and follows the history of the cosmic waters “above the fi rmament” to later formulations in the cosmologies of mediaeval European natural philosophy. Both sides of this history, from the cosmic waters of the ancient Near East to those of Mediaeval Europe, are well-known within their respec- tive historiographies. The idea that there is a relationship between the Book of Genesis and Near Eastern mythology goes back to H. Gun- kel’s Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit: Eine religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung über Genesis I of 1895. Of course the biblical contribution to the formation of a European cosmology was repeatedly analyzed and explicated in the Hexaemeral treatises of the Middle Ages. But the link between these two historical extrema, the Near Eastern and the Mediaeval, with respect to the supracelestial waters, has not so far been a focus of discussion. In this short paper, I will not detail the extensive literature of either aspect of the history of the supracelestial waters, i.e., the relation between the Bible and Near Eastern mythology or the later developments in conceptions of the cosmic waters in the early Christian and Mediaeval periods. My purpose is merely to draw attention to the supracelestial waters as a literary motif and a cosmological conception that joins ancient Near Eastern creation mythology and cosmology to later Christian and European cosmogonic and cosmological ideas. Two essential elements in Mesopotamian cosmogonic mythology are that the world came to be fi rst from an original watery state and second as a result of the separation of heaven and earth. The original watery state of the world before anything else was created was personi- fi ed as the goddess Nammu, whose epithet Amatuanki “mother who gave birth to heaven and earth” evokes her cosmic status.2 The cosmic regions above and below that emanated from her became the two principal elements of all further cosmic evolution. An Early Dynastic Sumerian myth introduces heaven and earth before any other gods

2 See K. Tallqvist, Akkadische Götterepitheta (Hildesheim and New York: Georg Olms, 1974), p. 262.