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 meaning in bible