Can you be quite certain that interpretation is thoroughly watertight (!) against the weight of all that other evidence? It appears that your continued belief in the “ocean”, despite its absence from the rest of ANE literature and even, you suggest, the rest of the Bible, depends on your interpretation that Genesis 1 teaches that the waters are above the heavenly bodies. Now it seems the writer of Genesis 9 agreed with the writer of Job, but was he unfamiliar with chapter 1 of his own book (which even the critical scholars don’t believe, attributing both ch1 and ch9 to the same “priestly” source)? He closes his speech by, once more, associating the perpetual sign of the rainbow with the clouds. God goes on to say that whenever he brings such clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds (as everybody knew, that happens when the clouds drop rain) he will remember his covenant, and that never again will he send the waters ( mayim, as in both Job 26 and Genesis 1) to flood the earth. What, then, do you make of Genesis 9, in which God covenants with Noah not to flood the earth again? The sign of this is the rainbow he sets “in the clouds” ( anan, the same word used in Job 26). > yet the clouds do not burst under their weight. The first part is indubitable, for example in the instance of Job 26.8, which says: A I understand it your position has now become, then, that the Israelites knew rain came from clouds, and that Genesis is therefore an exception to that belief, positing a heavenly ocean with no actual function, but instead just as the content of some mythical belief, or metaphorical function?
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