“And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament …” (Genesis 1:7).
Yes, exactly the same extremely pre-scientific cosmology we see with everyone else in the larger region, just modified so that the God of Jerusalem did everything by himself (leavimg it as just a boring list of “and then, he did X”).
This foretold of the great worldwide flood of Noah’s day, which occurred during mankind’s 1,656th year (see Genesis chapter 5 and 7:11).
Even according to Jewish and Christian legend, Genesis is attributed to Moses, who supposedly lived more than thousand years after the Noahide Deluge. As such, an event in Genesis being foreshadowed by an earlier passage in Genesis is not prophecy.
Before the flood, it had never rained on the Earth — Earth was watered by a mist springing up from the ground (Gen 2:6). But after the flood, most of the water that was under the Earth’s crust was now on top of it forming oceans, and Earth was now watered by rain falling from clouds in the heavens.
Creationists really love to add things to their Bible to find naturalistic explanations for God’s miracles, proposing changes far more drastic than the theories they dismiss as absurd…
But the real reason God wanted to prophesy of this significant event from the beginning of Creation was because the story of Noah and the global deluge was to be a prophetic picture (or parable) of what would occur during Jesus Christ’s 2nd Coming! God even went so far as to secretly reveal through the details in the story that Christ’s 2nd Coming will absolutely, positively take place during mankind’s 6,000th year!!! (See chapter 4, Noah.)
Actually, the Noahide Deluge quite clearly shows that the New Testament is nothing but really popular fanfiction, not the conclusion of a masterplan spanning the entire Bible. If the Bible’s core narrative is the salvation of humanity from sin and its redemption in the eyes of God, the Great Flood that wiped the slate clean would be the one logical point for the conclusion. Indeed, it even has a big scene where God makes peace with the founders of the new world, including introducing a new natural phenomenon to serve as a monument to this covenant.
For someone who is supposed to be all of: omni-benevolent, infinitely wise and without limitations to his ability, God’s plans are strangely convoluted, inefficient and time-wasting. Almost as if there is no truth core to Abrahamic religion, just the mess of a non-factual cultural narrative being spun by various groups, in conflict both with external forces and with each other, across dozens of generations and corresponding changes in cultural and political context…