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prettygoodwordfirmament (FUR-muh-muhnt) - n., the vault of the heavens, the sky; in Ptolemaic cosmology, the eighth celestial sphere, carrying the fixed stars.
Another old one, going back to the early 13th century, taken this time from Latin firmāmentum, the sky, originally support/prop, from firmāre, strengthen/support/make firm + -menutum, noun suffix of agency ("that which"). Firmāmentum was used in the Vulgate Bible to translate the Septuagint Greek steréōma, foundation/framework, from stereós, solid/rigid. This in turn was used to translate Hebrew rāqī́aʿ, the barrier used in Genesis 1:6 to separate the heavenly waters from the earth below, which has a root sense of being beaten out thinly -- which is an interesting image for what Elohim was doing.
---L.
Another old one, going back to the early 13th century, taken this time from Latin firmāmentum, the sky, originally support/prop, from firmāre, strengthen/support/make firm + -menutum, noun suffix of agency ("that which"). Firmāmentum was used in the Vulgate Bible to translate the Septuagint Greek steréōma, foundation/framework, from stereós, solid/rigid. This in turn was used to translate Hebrew rāqī́aʿ, the barrier used in Genesis 1:6 to separate the heavenly waters from the earth below, which has a root sense of being beaten out thinly -- which is an interesting image for what Elohim was doing.
---L.
