HEAVEN AND EARTH

MODULE 1: The Meaning of Heaven and Earth

SESSION 2: The Words “Heaven” and “Earth” in the Hebrew Bible

I have learned something great that have improved my focus to the authors of the Hebrew Bible. Literally in modern context and definition, the earth is simply a sphere, globe or the planet where we live and heaven can be referred to as the deep space beyond the sky. The understanding of heaven and earth varies depending on traditions and culture passed from generation to generation. For instance, traditionally, everyone would like to believe that the heaven is somewhere above the sky and we literally believe something that is up is superior to something that is below. This is also true even for the readers of the bible where they get confused in scriptures (tension in the text) like Exodus 20:3-4(NASB), Jonah 2:1-7 etc where there seem to be a mix up of the actual location of heaven and earth. Different elements like heaven, earth, waters are mentioned synonymously and without rooting yourself into the mind of the author you might get confused.

However, the best way to unlock the mysteries in text is to try understand the main idea and focus of the author (the messages they were trying to convey). Under that we need to have two steps including (1) recognizing your own understanding eg. of the cosmology and note that it might be different from that of the author (2) conduct the open minded search with the aim of trying to understand what the author was trying to communicate.