The account was in Hebrew! If you think raqia means a solid dome, then you are the illiterate one.
I am not saying that you are merely “illiterate” as in illiteracy which would mean is you can’t read.
I am saying that you are a “science-illiterate” which you have no understanding or you have poor understanding of Natural Sciences, particularly of Earth Sciences & Astronomy.
As I said, about Genesis 1:14-18, it is claiming that the stars (including the Sun) and the Moon are all created and place inside the dome…this dome have been called all sorts of things, like firmament, vault, expanse, when translated into English, but you are right, in Hebrew, it is raqia or the more precise transliteration raki'a (רקיע). hence, the sun, moon & stars were set inside the raqia.
Genesis 1:7 clearly stated that there are “water above the dome”, with the dome being NRSV translation of raki'a (רקיע)…so the water is above the raqia. And that the raki'a or dome is the “sky” (Genesis 1:8,
“God called the dome Sky.”)…which would also mean the water being above the “sky” or as KJV translated it, the “Heaven”, Hebrew šamáyim (שָׁמַיִם).
The main problem is that water above the raki'a, and the raki'a is the šamáyim (Sky or Heaven).
But you are forgetting several things.
One. Genesis - along with 4 other books that were attributed to Moses as the author of the Torah or what the Christians called the Hebrew Torah, the Pentateuch, where Moses supposedly lived in the Late Bronze Age (eg c 1590s to 1050 BCE), or more precisely in the early half of the Egypt’s 18th dynasty (based on what 1 Kings 6:1 say about the “exodus” out of Egypt starting 480 years before Solomon began building his Temple). Except none of these books attributed to Moses existed in these periods. The 5 books only started to appeared in the 6th century BCE, during the time of people of Jerusalem - royalties, aristocrats and priests from Judah were living in exile in Babylon.
Two. As I said there are no original Late Bronze Age of the Torah or Pentateuch, hence no biblical narratives in the 18th dynasty period. The early Hebrew texts certainly didn’t exist prior to the 11th century BCE. There are evidence of early Hebrew writings in the 10th century BCE, eg inscriptions on the Zayit Stone and the Gezer Calendar, but none of these texts are parts of the biblical narratives.
What exist in the Late Bronze Age, are only texts and inscriptions written in Canaanite cuneiforms, none of them in Hebrew alphabets.
As i said earlier, none of the books (eg genesis, Exodus , Numbers, Leviticus & Deuternomy) that were attributed to Moses, were ever found in the Late Bronze Age period. These books of the Torah, only began to appear during the 6th century BCE, Exile in Babylon.
Three. The people of Judah or Jews in 6th century Babylon would explain, where the Jews got the idea of the Hebrew raqia or raki'a (רקיע) from - they got it from Babylonian astronomy, where the ancient Babylonian astronomers believed the all planetary and stellar bodies exist inside the solid dome.
You are “science-illiterate” because if knew anything about meteorology and about the Earth atmosphere, then you would and should understand that rain only come from precipitation or from clouds located only from Troposphere, the lowest atmosphere on Earth. As you move up to the next 2 atmospheres, while there are clouds in the Stratosphere and Mesosphere, there are increasingly less water vapour, the higher you study, until there are no water at all, eg Thermosphere, Exosphere.
By the time, you have gone beyond the Karman Line, which is about 100 km above the mean sea level, you have would reach the start of space. The Karman Line is on the lower quarter of the Thermosphere, the area where the Aurora phenomena occurred.
The Exosphere ends about 10,000 km from Earth’s surface, while the moon is about from 362,000 to 405,000 km from Earth (clearly the moon’s orbit around the Earth is elliptical, not circular). And the Sun is about 149 million km from Earth.
I’d highly doubt that the Sun and Moon, are within the Earth’s raki'a or dome. I am very doubtful, more so, that the water above, are water beyond the even the nearest neighbouring stars, eg Alpha Centauri, a triple star system, which is about 4.5 light-year away, or Sirius, a bin star system about 8.7 light-year away.
How could any rain water be beyond these stars that flood the Earth in (mythical) Noah’s time, if the water above the dome or raqia?
That anyone today, believing in the water above the dome, don understand science at all.
If you can’t attack the message, attack the messenger
