World Views (2): Biblical
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By George Elder, 3/4/26
Ultimately, there are as many world views as there are individual human faces. At the same time, we are collective creatures and hold world views in common with others, i.e., as expressed by our culture in the epoch in which we find ourselves.
Such was the case of the ancient Israelites who recorded their view of the world in the Hebrew Bible—what the Christians call the Old Testament, to which they added a New Testament. All of this scripture is sacred, and one would assume both fundamentalist and modernist Christians believe it to be true. But that is not the case, since neither faction accepts the biblical view that the earth is a flat round disk over which sits the sky as a hard blue dome. That fundamentalists claim the “inerrancy” of scripture—but either ignore or deliberately distort this essential feature of the Bible—is one of the ways we know their religion has withered. Vital religions seek the truth, wrestle with discrepancies; their many candles signify the valuing of “light.”
According to the Bible, the earth is a solid flat disk. In verses attributed to the prophet Isaiah (8th century BCE, although these particular verses are later), we read:
Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth? It is he [God] who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers. (NRSV, 40:21-22)
Elsewhere, we learn that this “circle” or disk of the earth is sitting on cosmic “waters” and requires “pillars” that act like pylons to keep it steady. (Job 9:6) It is very important that the earth not move (fellow astronomers would argue against Copernicus on this point) and that it have high mountains around its circumference to keep back the waters. Let us note that this biblical earth is only relatively flat since mountains and valleys are readily acknowledged.
There are four different Creation stories in the Old Testament, and the first one in Genesis (chronologically, the last) reads:
And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. (1:6-7)
In the King James Version of the Bible, “dome” is translated as “firmament” (from a Hebrew word for a strip of metal) indicating that the sky ends and is firm enough to hold back more cosmic waters that are not just under and around the earth but above the sky as well.
While we know today that this description of the world is incorrect (we have more data), it is not entirely fantasy. Empirically, the earth does feel immovable under our feet; and the sky does appear to our eyes—when unobstructed by tall buildings—as a vast blue dome. The sea curves away at the horizon as if surrounding circular land. Water does spring up from below us; it also comes down from above in the form of rain. Indeed, the ancients concluded there must be sluices or “windows” in the firmament to allow rain, hail, and snow to fall. It was the best science of the day. (Genesis 7: 11-12)
That best science, however, was not particularly biblical but broadly Babylonian. This was the high culture that dominated the ancient Near East for over a thousand years before its military defeat by Persia in 539 BCE. We can read its influence from the Babylonian Creation myth, the Enuma Elish (“When on high . . .”). There, we find a young male god of the storm named Marduk who slays the old female water monster Tiamat—a personification of the cosmic waters that were in the Beginning:
Then the lord paused to view her dead body,
That he might divide the monster and do artful works.
He split her like a shellfish into two parts:
Half of her he set up and ceiled it as sky,
. . . to allow not her waters to escape.
. . . which he made as the firmament.
Marduk would go on to define the earth from her other half, to hold back her lower waters.
It is an ambiguous account, slaying Tiamat yet using her body to form “heaven and earth,” overcoming her cosmic waters yet needing to hold them back since still in existence. Genesis 1:1 is similarly ambiguous since Yahweh is supposedly creating ex nihilo, from nothing, although a pre-existent “formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep.” The Hebrew word for “deep” (tehom) is cognate with “Tiamat.”
There was no ambiguity, however, among the ancients anywhere or in the Bible that God or the gods are responsible for what we see and are necessary for our survival. The Hebrews introduced the religious notion that Yahweh God was one and transcendent or above it all—while remaining something of a storm god himself. The Babylonians and others persisted in their belief that the gods were many and nearly identified with created nature. Nevertheless, everyone knew that divinity required worship in order for humans to remain in right relationship with that Other force. In most cases, that meant sacrifice, bloody or otherwise. It was part of their world view.
Finally, the biblical view included an afterlife. When people died—righteous or wicked—they continued to exist in some way. They did so together in a dreary place called Sheol that was underground, an afterlife location shared by many other cultures. Nobody went to “heaven” (a religious name for the sky) reserved for supernatural beings eventually called angels while their Creator sat on a throne in the “heaven of heavens”—presumably above the firmament but not in the cosmic waters that are also there. (Deuteronomy 10:14)
Like others, the biblical underworld was dark and dusty—and there was perpetual thirst. But the real torment was no longer being in the presence of God. The despairing still-living Psalmist cries out:
For my soul is full of troubles, and my life draws near to Sheol . . . like those forsaken among the dead, like those slain that lie in the grave, like those whom you remember no more, for they are cut off from your hand. (88:3-5)
This model of an amoral afterlife will begin to shift by the 2nd century BCE, under influence from the Persians (and their keen sense of evil as opposed to good) and from Greco-Roman culture (and its view of an immortal soul opposed to the body). We can witness the shift in late scriptures like the Book of Daniel and in the New Testament letters of Paul. It will eventually become part of the “Medieval World View” that we will explore in the next post on this topic—and what Christians today actually believe to be true.
Jungian Comment
Although the biblical world view that we have just summarized attempts to be empirical, it is still mostly imagery. It could not be otherwise—as explained in the post “World Views (1)”—since world views are by nature subjective. They are always carrying as much if not more psychological confession as they are describing what is really there. Accordingly, the biblical view of the world is a portrait of the human psyche from which we can learn about ourselves.
Jung writes: “Water is the commonest symbol for the unconscious.” (CW 9.i, par. 40) And there is much water in the Beginning in both Babylonian and biblical mythology. This means that we begin our psychological lives as infants in an unconscious state that is as formless and with as much potential for life as water itself. Functioning as a symbolic “Mother,” the unconscious gives “birth,” under normal development, to the structures of consciousness. A female Tiamat, therefore, must be overcome by her opposite who is symbolically male.
But Tiamat does not disappear! She becomes the very stuff of consciousness—expressed by her two parts, “heaven and earth”—while her “waters” persist above and below. When Jung encountered materials like this, he concluded: the “meaning can only be disentangled if we reduce them to a common denominator. This denominator is the libido,” i.e., psychological energy. According to the natural law of the conservation of energy, it cannot disappear and only re-appear in different forms. (CW 5.659)
One benefit of exploring a different world view is coming upon unexpected imagery. If “water” symbolizes the unconscious, then—according to the Bible—the unconscious is all around us, “above and below,” and not just in our depths. It follows that our modern “depth psychology” misses half the truth, or at least half of the symbolic truth—since we are never speaking with literal certainty in this field.
Besides, we dare not miss the biblical image that we are living inside a kind of air bubble of awareness that can be burst in upon or flooded—by the unconscious—at any moment! Will the “earth” remain stable, will the “firmament” hold?
It is also common in Jungian studies to say that the distinction “earth and heaven” symbolizes the basic opposites of consciousness and the unconscious. The Bible’s “earth,” then, is the conscious mind centered by an ego whose multitude of contents diminish in clarity as they approach their circumference. And, yes, it is essential that this ego-consciousness be strong and stable in order to adapt to life’s demands, so as not to collapse at life’s inevitable difficulties. The early astronomers, we can see, were mixing inner and outer truths by insisting that the earth could not “move.”
I find it interesting that this consciousness is symbolically a circle (in ancient Buddhism, the earth is also a circle, a “wheel lying on its side”). For the ancients, perhaps even for today, the circle is an image of completeness. This means that the shape of the Bible’s “earth” expresses coherence or the confidence that comes from “making sense of it all.” But it also means that consciousness is imitating the archetype of Wholeness—the union of consciousness and the unconscious as the ideal goal of psychological development (imaged in Buddhism as the sacred maṇḍala, “circle”).
That tells us that the ego is valuable and even a sacred anticipation of the Goal.
There is little distinction in the Bible between “sky” and “heaven”—or the “firmament.” This is more unexpected imagery for a Jungian since we often say that the ethereal realm of the collective unconscious must be made firm by conscious down-to-earth realization. But here “heaven” is just as firm as “earth,” while both are holding back “waters” that we have identified as the unconscious. How then to understand a “heavenly” unconscious that is holding back a “watery” unconscious?
Jung provides a solution in his discussion of the psychological meaning of “water.” He is speaking of “primitive man,” i.e., tribal cultures and ourselves when we are functioning, as we often do, in a primitive way:
His consciousness is still uncertain, wobbling on its feet. It is still childish, having just emerged from the primal waters. A wave of the unconscious may easily roll over it, and then he forgets who he was and does things that are strange to him . . . All man’s strivings have therefore been directed toward the consolidation of consciousness. This was the purpose of rite and dogma: they were dams and walls to keep back the dangers of the unconscious, the “perils of the soul.” (CW 9i, par. 47)
It follows that the “sky-heaven-firmament” of the Bible—where God resides when he is not above it all—is religion itself with its sacred “rite and dogma.”
Institutional religion expresses symbolically the Waters of the collective unconscious in order to protect us from being flooded by them directly. Yet it also provides with these symbolic forms open “springs” and “sluices” for access to the life-giving Water that we need.
Conversely, when religious institutions are weak or in decay, individuals are exposed to the “perils of the soul”—forgetting what it means to be human and doing strange things, Jung says, even against their own best interest. They begin to call a missile defense system the “Iron Dome” or “Golden Dome” and think that is more important than the “consolidation of consciousness”—which is the best protection against evil that we know.
Finally, Jung is very clear that he does not know if there is or isn’t an “afterlife” as the Bible claims. Here he is following Kant’s epistemological limit on what we can know:
“Beyond the grave” or “on the other side of death” means, psychologically, “beyond consciousness.” There is positively nothing else it could mean, since statements about immortality can only be made by the living, who, as such, are not exactly in a position to pontificate about conditions “beyond the grave.” (CW 7, par. 302)
Nevertheless, we can learn from the amorality of Sheol. Since rewards and punishments cannot be experienced in that kind of an afterlife, they must be settled while living. This gives, I think, a certain urgency to Jewish ethics that is not found among Christians who can always look to the Beyond for final justice.
We are told that Sheol is a torment, a “dark” place of “thirst”—with the special pain of being “cut off” from God. This imagery confirms Jung’s understanding of why we are so desirous and still so dissatisfied. Behind it all, unconsciously or in the “dark,” is what we really desire—a “thirsting for the eternal, which as you can see can never be satisfied with the best . . .” of anything impermanent. (CW 14, par. 192)
For modern persons, the Eternal is the archetypal psyche. If we pay attention to its manifold expressions—which is the modern form of “worship”—then, Jung goes on, “the unconscious will yield up its contents, and these in turn will fructify the conscious like a fountain of living water.” (par. 193) Like springs from below, like rain from above.