And God said, “Let there be a vault between the waters to separate water from water.” So God made the vault and separated the water under the vault from the water above it. And it was so. – Genesis 1:6-7

Today’s Scripture Reading (April 6, 2015): Genesis 1

There is evidence that we need to name something before we can see it. The idea has surfaced over the idea that our ancestors couldn’t see blue, basically because they had not conceived of the color’s existence. Some observant people began to notice that the color blue isn’t even mentioned in a number of ancient documents. The color seems to appear about 4500 years ago in Egypt, and from there it spread, apparently very slowly, to the rest of the world. It is actually an old idea. William Gladstone, a career British politician and eventually a British Prime Minister, noted that in the “Odyssey” Homer describes the ocean as being “wine-dark” and other strange hues, but never uses the word ‘blue.’ Is it possible that Homer in the 8^th century B.C.E. had no word for the “deep blue sea?”

Even in the Bible, while English translations may mention the color blue (a number of times during the book of Exodus) there is a question about what color the Bible is really trying to imagine. And the color that the Bible intends might be more of a violet, a bluish purple, than a true blue. But then again, why would ancients need a word for the color. Blue is actually quite rare in nature. Other than the sky, there are very few examples of blue. And so we just didn’t see it. Some have argued that maybe we saw blue simply as another shade of grey. And maybe that made every day look a little dull.

Whether we saw the color blue or not, we did notice that there was a similarity between the blue of the water and the blue of the sky. It really doesn’t matter what you call the color, the idea that there was that what was above looked an awful lot like what was below. The obvious conclusion for the ancients was that there was water above and land and water below. And, every once in a while, the water that existed above leaked through to the space below in a phenomenon we call rain.

We know that this isn’t really the way the universe works. The water is gathered below, and water vapors gather in the sky in a great water recycling program, but really what exists above is emptiness, nothing, vacuum – well, at least when it is compared to what is below. But having said that, what the ancients believed, and what we know, is that we live in a fragile space between the emptiness above and the water and land below – what Genesis calls “the vault.” It isn’t a wide space, but without that space life can’t exist.

And it is a space that as of yet we haven’t been able to find anywhere else. There is evidence that it might have existed on Mars, but it has long since vanished. It might have existed on Venus, but it has long since turned hostile and intense to the point where it makes the existence of life impossible on our sister planet. But here, the space – or the vault – is just what life needs. And according to Genesis, its existence is only because God said so.     

Tomorrow’ Scripture Reading: Genesis 2