Overanalyzing "Above"

So, I had some stuff on my mind tonight, and I thought I might blog about it, but I also felt like unwinding, like I usually do at night, only to suddenly realize that I hadn't actually blogged about what I had had on my mind. Oops.

We're learning about the Creation this week, and part of our scripture study has involved overanalyzing the various accounts of the Creation. I say "overanalyzing" because we literally spent over half an hour discussing what it meant that there was water "above" the firmament/heavens/expanse, rather than "in" it. I don't remember if any consensus was reached, but I mostly chalk it up to imprecise language. Most prophets weren't English Majors (if they even spoke the English language at all), so maybe they didn't get too hung up on which preposition they used.

And maybe we shouldn't either. Yes, it's good to look closely at scripture, and if you can gain any insights from such a thorough examination, all the better, but if something doesn't make sense, like water, which I assume means humidity and clouds, somehow being "above" the firmament, which I take to mean the sky, then it's probably safer to assume that it doesn't matter than to wonder why Moses might have mentioned comets or ice planets when writing about the creation of the Earth. No, the water was not "above" the firmament, in that the clouds were not "above" the sky, but maybe people look at the sky differently in other cultures, or maybe Moses was referring to atmospheric layers centuries before anyone would discover them, or maybe whether the water was "above" or "in" the firmament isn't really important enough to argue about for half an hour (or write about hours later) when we could be focusing on other things instead.

We could have talked about our favorite aspects of Creation or perhaps drawn some insight from the example of taking life or long-term projects "one day at a time." We could have observed the themes of opposites and divisions, with light being separated from darkness, earth separated from seas, and waters being separated from each other (regardless of their position in relation to the firmament). We could have talked about how the world just works and how blessed we are to live on it. But instead we argued about where, exactly, the water was and how (or if) the dinosaurs and/or evolution factor into all of this.

This wasn't our finest scripture study session, but thankfully, now that I've blogged about it like I had thought I had, I've come up with a few examples of the kinds of questions I wish I had asked instead. The exact wording of the scripture probably didn't matter; in the future, I'll try to focus more on questions that do.