to pound something flat, and so to stretch it out into a wide, thin surface.
The picture behind this word is a hammer and a piece of metal. You strike the metal again and again, and it grows thinner and broader until it is a sheet you can cut into threads or wrap around something else. The same downward blow is what a foot delivers to the ground, and what the Bible pictures God doing when he opens out the earth and the sky.
That one image covers a surprising range of scenes:
- a foot brought down hard on the ground in anger, grief, or spite
- a defeated enemy pounded down into the mud of the street
- gold and silver beaten into sheets for the tabernacle and for idols
- the earth stretched out over the waters and the sky spread above it
What holds the range together is force plus width. In every case something is driven flat and, by being driven flat, made to cover more ground. That is why the word travels so easily from a workshop to the sky: Job 37:18 asks whether a man could help God spread out the skies, hard as a mirror of cast metal, and the noun for the wide expanse overhead (רָקִיעַ) is built straight from this verb.
Isaiah in particular plays the two settings against each other. In the same chapters where a craftsman hammers gold over a block of wood and calls it a god, the God of Israel is the one who hammered out the earth itself. The idol maker beats metal into a shape; the Creator beat out the ground the idol maker stands on.
Nuances
Disputed
How much of the metalworking picture the verb retains when it describes God spreading out the earth and the sky.
- majorityThe verb keeps its hammering force in these lines, so the sky is conceived as a solid vault beaten out firm, in continuity with how neighboring cultures described the heavens; Job 37:18, which likens the spread out skies to a cast metal mirror, is read as evidence of that conception.; Paul H. Seely, "The Firmament and the Water Above, Part I: The Meaning of raqiaʿ in Gen 1:6-8," Westminster Theological Journal 53 (1991): 227-40; Othmar Keel, The Symbolism of the Biblical World: Ancient Near Eastern Iconography and the Book of Psalms (New York: Seabury, 1978)
- minorityIn the creation lines the verb has weakened to the general sense of extending something out broadly, and the metal comparisons are poetic figures rather than claims about the substance of the sky.; John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2009); C. John Collins, Genesis 1-4: A Linguistic, Literary, and Theological Commentary (Phillipsburg: P&R, 2006)