And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waaters.

     And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.

     And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

     And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.- Genesis 1:5-1

     These biblical passages have caused readers to fail to understand the view of the universe held by the Hebrews and neighboring peoples even as recently as the first century AD.

     This view comes down to us from the Hebrew writings of the second century B. C. But the writings of related peoples have also been preserved for us, especially the records of ancient Babylon.

     The Hebrew word which, in the Bible, is translated into the English word "firmament" is Rakia, a word referring ordinarily to a metallic plate beaten out into sheet-like form.

     The Hebrews applied this term to the sky because they sincerely believed that it was an invisible material substance. that it was, in very fact, a "firmament"

    The earliest Hebrew civilizations tried to measure the extent of the world and made maps that showed what, to them, was the whole world.  Like other primitive peoples they naturally thought the earth flat. They imagined it to have been formed primarily as a disc-shaped body upon the waters. In the middle of the world they placed the Mediterranean, which word means "the middle of the earth."

        Those waters surrounded most of the extant ancient world maps. The world, to them, was a round disc surrounded by an ocean, and a place consisting only of Africa, Europe, and Asia.The first of these ancient world maps was reportedly made in Babylon more than 2,500 years ago. It shows a small world, surrounded by bitter waters.