When I read the first verse of the Bible, I’m exposed to two words which come to me with my own pre-conceived meanings:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Genesis 1:1).

Putting aside the word “heavens” for a moment, when I encounter the word “earth”, I bring to it my modern conception of the planet we live on. It’s that wonderful blue orb I’ve seen pictures of from space. It’s the place where all of humankind lives, the place where virtually all of human history has happened.

Then there is “heaven”. It’s the place where we go to be with God after we die. It’s a place of eternal bliss in the presence of God. It doesn’t exist in our present realm or dimension, it is beyond this universe. We can’t get there by traveling in space, it exists elsewhere.

So, in reading Genesis 1:1, I bring my modern concepts of “heaven” and “earth”. But, the more I study the Bible, I find that those modern definitions are unhelpful. I’m importing ideas into the text that are not there.

What did the writers mean when they used their words “heavens” and “earth” in Genesis 1:1? They certainly weren’t thinking of space and this third-rock-from-the-sun upon which we live. In order to understand what they meant, let’s look elsewhere in the Bible. Take Psalm 24:1-2 for example (emphasis mine):

The Lord owns the earth and all it contains, the world and all who live in it. For he set its foundation upon the seas, and established it upon the ocean currents.

What am I to make of the earth in these verses? It seems like the author conceived of it as a thing that was built upon a great body of water. Am I to think of the globe of the earth as floating upon some great cosmic ocean? What of its “foundations”? How does that mesh with my idea of our planet positioned in space?

There are more places in Scripture that challenge my understanding of these terms:

Bless the Lord, O my soul! O Lord my God, you are very great! You are clothed with splendor and majesty, covering yourself with light as with a garment, stretching out the heavens like a tent. He lays the beams of his chambers on the waters; he makes the clouds his chariot; he rides on the wings of the wind; he makes his messengers winds, his ministers a flaming fire. He set the earth on its foundations, so that it should never be moved (Psalm 104:1-5, ESV).

Here when it says the “heavens [were stretched out] like a tent”, “heavens” here seems synonymous to what I would call “the skies”. In fact, that’s how the New English Translation (NET), the translation I use most frequently, translates that word.

So, without listing numerous additional references, I can already see that “heavens” equals “skies” and the “earth” as conceived in Scripture is not the same thing as what I have in mind when I hear that word. I mean, that should be obvious, right? The writers of Scripture simply didn’t have access to our scientific understanding of these things.

Now, at this point, it seems I can do one of two things. I can “forgive” the writers their ignorance and look for things hidden in the text, things that were beyond the knowing of the authors, things divinely inspired, such that I’m able to make the text synthesize with my modern scientific understanding. Or, I can dig in, study deeply, and seek to meet the original writers on their own terms.

In the case of Genesis 1:1, rather than me seeing it as an affirmation of modern-day Big Bang Cosmology, I’m discovering that I really do need to go back and consider what the authors meant by “the heavens” and “the earth”. I need to learn their concepts so that I might discover what they were actually trying to say. In so doing, I’ll be challenging many of my own preconceptions while also opening myself up to learning much more from the text. It means dropping my modern way of looking at Scripture in favor of learning the ancient way.