Babylonian Talmud

English

What is heaven? R. Yose bar Chanina said, That there is water. It was taught in a Mishnah, fire and water. Teaching that the Holy One, blessed be He, brought them and mingled them one with the other, and made from them the firmament.

Sefaria Community Translation · cc0

Hebrew / Aramaic

b. Chagigah 12a (Vilna) · cc-by-sa

Notes

The crux's second half asked in three words — mai shamayim, what is heaven — and answered from the name itself. R. Yose bar Ḥanina: sham mayim, 'there is water'. A mishnaic tradition: fire and water, which the Holy One brought and mingled with each other, and out of them made the firmament. It is an answer of exactly the kind the Latin bench never gives, because the Latin word yields nothing: caelum can be etymologised (Isidore tries chaos, others caelare, 'to engrave', for the stars) but it cannot be made to spell out what heaven is made of. Where the Bavli reads the substance out of the noun, Remigius and the Glossa have to import a substance — the empyrean, fiery not by heat but by brightness — from elsewhere.

Threads

• → echoes · Babylonian Talmud
  The sugya passes from when heaven was made to what heaven is without a break: Resh Lakish's stretching, then 'mai shamayim' — sham mayim, or fire and water mingled into the firmament. The Bavli treats the two halves of this crux as one question.
• ← parallel · Chalcidius
  Both benches decide that the heaven of the first verse is not the one overhead, and both get there by reading the chapter against itself. Chalcidius: those content with a hasty understanding think this heaven is meant, but the firmament is not called heaven until the second day and the dry is not called earth until the third, so the heaven and earth of the beginning must be older, and drawn in by the understanding rather than by the senses. The Bavli asks what shamayim is and answers by decomposing the word. The move is the same — the name in v. 1 cannot be the thing the chapter later names — and the machinery is entirely different.
• ← parallel · Philo of Alexandria
  Both benches answer what is heaven by taking the word apart, and each takes apart a different word in a different language. The Bavli decomposes shamayim, there is water, sham mayim. Philo etymologises the Greek stereoma, which is the Seventy's word and not Moses's, and gets the corporeal heaven out of it. The method is the same and neither could have used the other's word.