At my church's Bible Study we have been looking at Genesis again. Chapter 1, verses 6-8 has gotten my attention:
And God said, "Let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water." So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it. And it was so. God called the expanse "sky." And there was evening, and there was morning—the second day.
The question that came up for me is that the Bible says that God made the sky separate water from water. The water underneath the sky was gathered into "seas" (vs 9 and 10)
And God said, "Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear." And it was so. 10 God called the dry ground "land," and the gathered waters he called "seas." And God saw that it was good.
What about the water above the sky. We know that this water comes into play during the 40 days/nights flood of Noah's day. Genesis 7:11-12 says:
In the six hundredth year of Noah's life, on the seventeenth day of the second month—on that day all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened. And rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.
But before the flood where was this water? I read a paper back in 2002 that attempted to address this problem and it tried to equate Neanderthals with the
Nephilim from Genesis 6. I'll save the Neanderthal question for another post. However, I think the article did make a good stab at explaining what the Bible means about "water" above the sky. The theory set forth was that it was a giant ice sheet in orbit around the earth - a canopy. It was further theorized that the this canopy of ice shielded the earth from a lot more cosmic
radiation
than what is filtered out today. This would not only explain where the water that flooded the earth came from, but also why before the flood people aged extremely more slowly than after the flood.
I don't think the answer is a canopy, but a ring - like the rings around Saturn. Some astronauts and scientist report a faint ring even today. Saturn's and Uranus' rings are made of mostly ice, dust, and rocks. If the earth had a ring, and if were mostly ice, it could more than explain where some of the flood waters came from. This
isn't something scientist agree on. Some who do hypothesize a ring, think it was only temporary and was formed from a meteor impact hitting the earth and tossing debris into orbit. Another theory was that a small comet could have gotten too close to the earth's gravitational field, broke into pieces and formed a temporary ring. Don't forget an object orbiting another is just caught in is gravitational field and is slowly falling into it.
Eventually, both theories end with the contents of the ring burning up in earth's atmosphere.
It's just a theory. But whether or not you reject the idea that a ring of ice used to encircle the earth, there is good evidence that there was a ring of some kind that affected the climate and life on the earth at some point in the past.
There is such a thing as several invisible rings that circle the earth. The earth has
a core of mostly made of iron and nickel. This make the earth attractive to charged particles like electrons. This is why we "ground" electrical systems by running a wire to the ground. What we have is a spinning,
hunking-huge charged-metallic sphere which gives rise to the earth's magnetic field called our magnetosphere. This field is not just fun to play with - magnetizing smaller pieces of metal to make toys, speakers, microphones, and what-not, but it also helps protects us from cosmic radiation and high-energy radiations that would be deadly to life on earth. God knew what he was doing.
References to look at:
Would a Saturn-like ring system around planet Earth remain stable?The earth's ringRunning Rings Around EarthRings around Earth shaped past climate: studyCan Planet Earth Ever Have Rings? Does the Earth have rings?Magnetosphere
