Genesis 1:6-8 - Arthur Peake's Commentary on the Bible

When, on the second morning, light resumes the sway which had been interrupted by the night, God begins the task of evolving order out of chaos. First He makes a firmament, by which is meant a solid vault over-arching the earth. Then the waters of the abyss are divided into two portions, one of which is placed above this firmament, to constitute the waters of the upper or heavenly ocean, the other left where it was, to form the deep that coucheth beneath (Genesis 49:25). This, it must be understood, is not identical with the ocean, though the ocean issued from it (Job 38:8-11); it is beneath both sea and land. It feeds the sea through openings in the bed of the ocean, the springs of the sea (Job 38:16 *) or the fountains of the great deep (Genesis 7:11). In the vault of the sky there are windows (Genesis 7:11) or sluices (the channel for the waterflood, Job 38:25 *); when these are opened the waters of the heavenly ocean stream down on the earth in the form of torrential rain. The representation of the division of the waters of the abyss probably goes back to the Babylonian account of the division of the corpse of Tiamat by Marduk after that deity had vanquished her. We are told that he split her in two like a flat fish, and made one half a covering for the heaven; then he fixed a bar and set a watchman, bidding them not let her waters escape. The other half of the corpse is said by Berossus (third century B.C.) to have been made into the earth; and we can hardly doubt that, though this is not explicitly stated in our cuneiform sources, it correctly represents the authentic Babylonian view. The formula and it was so has been accidentally transferred from its proper place at the end of Genesis 6, where the LXX reads it, to the end of Genesis 7. The omission of the clause and God saw that it was good may be accidental, the LXX reads it after heaven.