In the first chapter of Genesis, God creates a rakia — typically translated as "firmament" or "expanse" — that separates the waters below from the waters above and holds the sun, moon and stars in their positions. This is not metaphor in the ancient Hebrew context: the rakia was understood as a physical structure, a solid dome over the flat earth, through whose windows the waters above could fall as rain. The cosmology of Genesis 1 is a literal physical model of the universe — one that was shared with extraordinary consistency across the ancient Near East, and one that a growing number of people today take as a literal description of actual physical reality rather than as pre-scientific mythology. Whether as biblical literalism, as part of the flat earth movement or as part of the broader astrotheological tradition that reads celestial imagery as the basis for all religion, the firmament model deserves examination on its own terms.
The Hebrew word rakia (רָקִיעַ) derives from the root raqa — to beat, stamp or spread out, as a metalworker hammers metal into a thin sheet. The word implies something solid, beaten flat, spread thin over the earth like a metal dome. Ancient Hebrew lexicons and the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) translate rakia as stereoma in Greek — meaning solid, firm structure. The Latin Vulgate renders it firmamentum — firmament, from firmare, to make firm or solid.
Genesis 1 describes this firmament in physical terms: it divides the waters below (seas, rivers) from the waters above (the source of rain and snow). The sun, moon and stars are placed "in" the firmament — not at incomprehensible astronomical distances but fixed in the dome structure above the earth. Genesis 7:11 describes the windows of heaven being opened during Noah's flood — the actual gates in the firmament through which the waters above poured down. Genesis 1:16 describes the stars as "lights" — lamps fixed in the firmament, not distant suns trillions of kilometres away.
The same model across the ancient Near East: the firmament cosmology is not unique to Genesis. The Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish describes Marduk splitting the body of Tiamat in two — one half becoming the earth, the other becoming the sky-dome that holds back the upper waters. Egyptian cosmology depicts Nut (the sky goddess) arching her body over Geb (the earth god), her body forming the solid dome of the heavens, with stars fixed on her inner surface. Sumerian cosmology describes An (sky) as a solid dome over Ki (earth). The structural similarity across independent traditions — flat earth, solid dome overhead, upper waters beyond the dome, stars as lights in the dome — has been noted by scholars of ancient religion and is interpreted variously as evidence of cultural transmission, of common experience, or of accurate description of a shared physical reality.
Astrotheology is the study of the astronomical origins of religious traditions — the thesis, associated most prominently with Jordan Maxwell, Acharya S (D.M. Murdock), Gerald Massey and others, that the narratives, figures and rituals of all major world religions are fundamentally allegories for celestial phenomena: the movements of the sun, moon, planets and constellations.
In the astrotheological reading, the sun is the central character in all world mythology. The sun's annual journey — its strength in summer, its dying in winter, its rebirth at the winter solstice — is the template for the dying-and-rising god narratives found across world religion: Osiris, Dionysus, Attis, Mithras and, in the astrotheological interpretation, Jesus Christ. The twelve apostles correspond to the twelve signs of the zodiac through which the sun passes in its annual journey. The crucifixion corresponds to the sun's position at the winter solstice — "crucified" on the Southern Cross constellation, stationary for three days before rising northward again. The star in the East that guides the Magi to the nativity is Sirius, the brightest star, which aligns with the three stars of Orion's Belt (the "three kings") to point toward the sunrise on December 25th.
A significant strand of modern flat earth cosmology takes the Genesis firmament as a literal physical description of actual reality — not a pre-scientific myth to be allegorised away but an accurate account of the earth's actual structure. In this model, the dome is real and physical, the stars are lights fixed in its inner surface, the sun and moon are relatively small local bodies moving below the dome, and the waters above are an actual layer of water beyond the dome's outer surface.
This literalist position finds support from several directions: the straightforward reading of the Hebrew text (rakia means something solid, as noted above), the consistency of the dome model across ancient Near Eastern traditions, the claim that space agency imagery of space and distant planets is fabricated, and the argument that all horizon-line and curvature observations that support the globe model can be explained by perspective, atmospheric refraction and the limitations of human vision rather than actual curvature.
The model also connects to specific atmospheric phenomena that proponents cite as physical evidence: the behaviour of the sun and moon at the horizon (appearing to sink but actually receding due to perspective), the structure of cloud formations that appear to go "behind" the sun (cited as evidence the sun is close, not 150 million kilometres distant), and the Michelson-Morley experiment (1887) whose null result for Earth's motion through the aether is cited as evidence the earth is stationary.
The firmament model connects directly to several other cosmologies and traditions in this section. The flat earth ice wall model typically incorporates the dome as its upper boundary — the ice wall at the horizontal edge and the firmament at the vertical one. The torus field model offers a geometric framework in which the dome's "hole" at the top corresponds to the torus's nadir aperture. Mount Meru cosmology describes a vertical axis mundi (world mountain) connecting the flat earth to the heavens — a feature that maps onto the firmament's central axis. The Norse cosmology describes a sky-dome (the skull of the giant Ymir) placed over the earth at creation, with the stars as sparks fixed in its inner surface. Across traditions — Babylonian, Egyptian, Vedic, Hebrew, Norse, Chinese — the solid sky and the waters above it appear with remarkable consistency, suggesting either common cultural transmission or common observation of a genuinely shared physical structure.