gnostic
The Lost One
You are ignoring my posts, in which I indicate that other religions that pre-dated all Hebrew Scriptures, described or defined the sky as "expanse", meaning that your selected passages of Jeremiah and Isaiah presented nothing special or unique.
And this stretching out of heavens doesn't mean the UNIVERSE; what it does describe is the sky.
And the sky doesn't mean "universe". You are just putting modern concept of the universe on to selected passages.
The heaven or heavens as desribed by every ancient literature, whether of religious nature or not, always confine itself to the sky.
The sky is always confine to what people can see when they look up. And what they see are only the clouds, the sun, moon and a limited amount of stars. They didn't know anything about galaxies, supernovae or the universe.
When Jeremiah or Isaiah or Genesis mentioned anything about the stretching out of heavens, they are only referring to sky, and not to the universe. This stretched out heavens are sometimes referred to as the EXPANSE.
Why do you keep ignoring my point when I say the sky is sometimes called the EXPANSE?
As to the passages from 1 Kings 8 you have cited, about the heavenly abode. Again, there are nothing special or unique about what Solomon saying about the heavenly abode being in the sky.
Other ancient cultures and civilisations also make that faulty assumptions about where the deities lived - their heavenly abodes.
Do you seriously think Solomon is the first to assume that god's abode is in the sky? That God in the bible is the only one to have house built in the sky?
If you do, then your reading range have been seriously limited.
In Egyptian myth, a lot of gods have their homes in the sky, and the most prominent one is the sun god Re (or Ra) and the sky god Horus. The Old Kingdom Egypt started building pyramids as tombs for their kings and queens, so that they may ascends to the sky and dwell with the gods. The pyramids were built the way they were built, because the pyramids symbolised the ladders or stairways to heavens.
Re was more important than Osiris, as the figure ruling the afterlife, during this period (Old Kingdom) from the 3rd dynasty to the 6th dynasty.
The Canaanite deities are similar or the same as those worshipped in the Bronze Age city of Ugarit (modern Ras Shamra). Most of these deities have their own palaces in heavens, or more precisely, in the sky. There is even story about the young god Ba'al being angry and upset that every deities have palaces except him, so to placate the angry God, they had one built, that was even large and more magnificent than that of El, the king of the gods.
In the Sumerian, Akkadian and Babylonian myths, the gods dwell in temples built in each city, but they also dwell in the sky. There is a myth called the epic of Etana, in which the young king's wife was barren. And the only way to make her fertile is to gain herbs from a goddess.
The story actually started with a snake and an eagle, who chose to become allies, hunting and sharing food together. But the eagle betrayed the snake by killing and eating the snake's young. In revenge, the serpent crippled the eagle and stripped off its feathers. Etana saved this eagle, nurse it back to health, until it was strong enough to fly again. Etana told the eagle about his vision of obtaining the cure for his wife's barren, of flying to heavens and receiving the magic herbs from a goddess. The goddess is unnamed, but it could be Inanna (Ishtar) goddess of love or it could be Ninhursag mother goddess and goddess of childbirth. Anyway, the eagle promised to aid Etana in retrieving the herbs.
So they flew to the heavens to meet the goddess. But the first flight was unsuccessful because Etana got scare when they flew so high, but they tried again the second time. Because part of the tablet is missing, we do not know if Etana and the eagle was successful. The assumption is they were, because Etana is a king of Kish, in the King Lists of Sumer, and his son (Balih) is mentioned as being Etana's successor. The oldest tablets to this epic, is written in Old Babylonian, none of them written in Sumerian, but the myth is older than these tablets, because of the discovering of Sumerian stone figurine of man mounted on a large bird, which we could assume to be Etana and his eagle friend.
My point is that according to the myth of Etana, is that the heavenly abodes of the gods could be reach by flying there.
In Exodus, Moses met God on Mount Horeb. And in Genesis, people were trying to built a tower to reach the heavens.
Genesis 11:4 NIV said:
In the KJV translation, it used the singular heaven, but the NJPS, a lot more precise word used - "sky".
The question to you is this, was this tower (of Babel) meant to reach the "sky" or to the "universe"?
