Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament. In Campbell, Joseph Keim O'Rourke, Michael Silverstein, Harry (eds.). Heaven and earth in the Gospel of Matthew. Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms. Creation in Jewish and Christian Tradition. In Hoffman, Yair Reventlow, Henning Graf (eds.). When the Gods Were Born: Greek Cosmogonies and the Near East. Creation and Cosmology: A Historical and Comparative Inquiry. The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Religion. Heaven and Earth in Ancient Greek Cosmology: From Thales to Heraclides Ponticus.

Creation ex nihilo : Origins, Development, Contemporary Challenges.

'Creatio ex Nihilo in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible'. The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy. The Cambridge Companion to Early Greek Philosophy. Creation, Un-Creation, Re-Creation: A Discursive Commentary on Genesis 1–11. The Oxford Dictionary of the Jewish Religion.

In Berlin, Adele Grossman, Maxine (eds.). Reading the Old Testament: An Introduction to the Hebrew Bible. Dictionary of Nature Myths: Legends of the Earth, Sea, and Sky. Planets, Stars, and Orbs: The Medieval Cosmos, 1200-1687. After Galileo began using a telescope to examine the sky it became harder to argue that the heavens were perfect, as Aristotelian philosophy required, and by 1630 the concept of solid orbs was no longer dominant. Tycho Brahe's studies of the nova of 1572 and the Comet of 1577 were the first major challenges to the idea that orbs existed as solid, incorruptible, material objects, and in 1584 Giordano Bruno proposed a cosmology without a firmament: an infinite universe in which the stars are actually suns with their own planetary systems. This became the dominant model in the Classical and Medieval world-view, and even when Copernicus placed the Sun at the centre of the system he included an outer sphere that held the stars (and by having the earth rotate daily on its axis it allowed the firmament to be completely stationary). Around the 4th to 3rd centuries BCE the Greeks, under the influence of Aristotle who argued that the heavens must be perfect and that a sphere was the perfect geometrical figure, exchanged this for a spherical Earth surrounded by solid spheres. The ancient Hebrews, like all the ancient peoples of the Near East, believed the sky was a solid dome with the Sun, Moon, planets and stars embedded in it. The caption underneath the engraving (not shown here) translates to 'A medieval missionary tells that he has found the point where heaven and Earth meet.' The Flammarion engraving (1888) depicts a man crawling under the edge of the sky, depicted as if it were a solid hemisphere, to look at the mysterious Empyrean beyond. The Vulgate translates rāqīaʿ with firmamentum, and that remains the best rendering. The meaning of the verb rqʿ concerns the hammering of the vault of heaven into firmness (Isa. Rāqīaʿ means that which is firmly hammered, stamped (a word of the same root in Phoenecian means 'tin dish'!). Rāqīaʿ derives from the root rqʿ ( רָקַע), meaning 'to beat or spread out thinly'. These words all translate the Biblical Hebrew word rāqīaʿ ( רָקִ֫יעַ‎), used for example in Genesis 1.6, where it is contrasted with shamayim ( שָׁמַיִם‎), translated as ' heaven(s)' in Genesis 1.1. This in turn is a calque of the Greek στερέωμᾰ ( steréōma), also meaning a solid or firm structure (Greek στερεός = rigid), which appears in the Septuagint, the Greek translation made by Jewish scholars around 200 BCE. The same word is found in French and German Bible translations, all from Latin firmamentum (a firm object), used in the Vulgate (4th century).

It later appeared in the King James Bible. In English, the word 'firmament' is recorded as early as 1250, in the Middle English Story of Genesis and Exodus.

Firmament earth