Biblical cosmology

[3][4] Nor do the biblical texts necessarily represent the beliefs of all Jews or Christians at the time they were put into writing: the majority of the texts making up the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament in particular represent the beliefs of only a small segment of the ancient Israelite community, the members of a late Judean religious tradition centered in Jerusalem and devoted to the exclusive worship of Yahweh.

[8] In this period too the older three-level cosmology in large measure gave way to the Greek concept of a spherical Earth suspended in space at the center of a number of concentric heavens.

[10] Later Jewish thinkers, adopting ideas from Greek philosophy, concluded that God's Wisdom, Word and Spirit penetrated all things and gave them unity.

[12] Interpreting and producing expositions of biblical cosmology was formalized into a genre of writing among Christians and Jews called the Hexaemal literature.

[15] In the "logos" (speech) model, God speaks and shapes unresisting dormant matter into effective existence and order (Psalm 33: "By the word of YHWH the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their hosts; he gathers up the waters like a mound, stores the Deep in vaults"); in the second, or "agon" (struggle) model, God does battle with the monsters of the sea at the beginning of the world in order to mark his sovereignty and power.

[16] Psalm 74 evokes the agon model: it opens with a lament over God's desertion of his people and their tribulations, then asks him to remember his past deeds: "You it was who smashed Sea with your might, who battered the heads of the monsters in the waters; You it was who crushed the heads of Leviathan, who left them for food for the denizens of the desert..."[16] In this world-view the seas are primordial forces of disorder, and the work of creation is preceded by a divine combat (or "theomachy").

[17] Creation in the "agon" model takes the following storyline: (1) God as the divine warrior battles the monsters of chaos, who include Sea, Death, Tannin and Leviathan; (2) The world of nature joins in the battle and the chaos-monsters are defeated; (3) God is enthroned on a divine mountain, surrounded by lesser deities; (4) He speaks, and nature brings forth the created world,[18] or for the Greeks, the cosmos.

This myth was taken up in later Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature and projected into the future, so that the cosmic battle becomes the decisive act at the end of the world's history:[18] thus the Book of Revelation (end of the 1st century CE) tells how, after the God's final victory over the sea-monsters, New Heavens and New Earth shall be inaugurated in a cosmos in which there will be "no more sea" (Revelation 21:1).

[26] After the 4th century BCE this was gradually replaced by a Greek scientific cosmology of a spherical Earth surrounded by multiple concentric heavens.

[9] The three-part world of heavens, Earth and underworld floated in Tehom, the mythological cosmic ocean, which covered the Earth until God created the firmament to divide it into upper and lower portions and reveal the dry land;[27] the world has been protected from the cosmic ocean ever since by the solid dome of the firmament.

[28] The tehom is, or was, hostile to God: it confronted him at the beginning of the world (Psalm 104:6ff) but fled from the dry land at his rebuke; he has now set a boundary or bar for it which it cannot pass (Jeremiah 5:22 and Job 38:8–10).

[32] In Revelation, where the Archangel Michael expels the dragon (Satan) from heaven ("And war broke out in heaven, with Michael and his angels attacking the dragon..." – Revelation 12:7), the motif can be traced back to Leviathan in Israel and to Tiamat, the chaos-ocean, in Babylonian myth, identified with Satan via an interpretation of the serpent in Eden.

[49] The heavenly bodies (the heavenly host - Sun, Moon, and stars)[citation needed] were worshiped as deities, a practice which the bible disapproves and of which righteous Job protests his innocence: "If I have looked at the sun when it shone, or the moon ... and my mouth has kissed my hand, this also would be an iniquity..."[50] Belief in the divinity of the heavenly bodies explains a passage in Joshua 10:12, usually translated as Joshua asking the Sun and Moon to stand still, but in fact Joshua utters an incantation to ensure that the sun-god and moon-god, who supported his enemies, would not provide them with oracles.

[51] In the earlier Old Testament texts the bene elohim were gods, but subsequently they became angels,[52] the "messengers" (malakim), whom Jacob sees going up and down a "ladder" (actually a celestial mountain) between heaven and Earth.

[53] In earlier works the messengers were anonymous, but in the Second Temple period (539 BCE–100 CE) they began to be given names, and eventually became the vast angelic orders of Christianity and Judaism.

[63] In the cosmology of the ancient Near East, the cosmic warrior-god, after defeating the powers of chaos, would create the world and build his earthly house, the temple.

[86] In the New Testament, Jesus' parable of the rich man and Lazarus reflects the idea that the wicked began their punishment in Hades immediately on dying.

[87] The Satan does not inhabit or supervise the underworld – his sphere of activity is the human world – and is only to be thrown into the fire at the end of time.

[87] It was only with the early Church Fathers that he was identified with the serpent in the Garden of Eden and came to be seen as an active rebel against God, seeking to thwart the divine plan for humankind.