Then God said, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.” Thus God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament and it was so. The word is used in the Genesis creation narrative: The New Revised Standard Version uses "dome", as in the Celestial dome. This translation is used by the New International Version and by the English Standard Version. Ĭonservatives and fundamentalists tend to favor translations that allow scripture to be harmonized with scientific knowledge, for example "expanse". Raqa adopted the meaning "to make firm or solid" in Syriac, a major dialect of Aramaic (the vernacular of Jesus) and close cognate of Hebrew. The original word raqia is derived from the root raqa (רקע), meaning "to beat or spread out", e.g., the process of making a dish by hammering thin a lump of metal. The notion of solidity is advanced explicitly in several biblical passages. The connotation of firmness conveyed by the Vulgate's firmamentum is consistent with that of stereoma, the Greek word used in the Septuagint, an earlier translation. The word "firmament" is used to translate raqia, or raqiya` (רקיע), a word used in Biblical Hebrew. The word is a Latinization of the Greek stereoma, which appears in the Septuagint (c. This in turn is derived from the Latin root firmus, a cognate with "firm". The word is anglicised from Latin firmamentum, used in the Vulgate (4th century). It later appeared in the King James Bible.
The word "firmament" is first recorded in a Middle English narrative based on scripture dated 1250.