increase. God was preparing His people for something way
beyond what they had been used to. Linking Isaiah 54: 2 to
the Tabernacle and to the question of ‘stretching the heavens’
seems, if the reader will pardon the expression, quite a stretch
in itself—we need to dispense with that image entirely.
Our focus should instead be on why the Israelites are
being told by God to “enlarge the place of [their] tent”. The
reason He is telling them this is because they “will spread
abroad to the right and to the left … your descendants will
possess nations. And they will resettle the desolate cities”
(v. 3). There is no sense here of limitation or constraint.
Instead, the ‘tent’ of Israel is to be greatly enlarged to
accommodate all of the new territory and nations that will
come under the Israelites’ purview. The Lord is saying to
Israel, in effect, ‘Get ready, I am going to expand you beyond
anything you can imagine’.
Stretching only during Creation Week?
According to Genesis, in the beginning God made the
expanse [raw-kee-ah] and called it ‘heaven’ (Genesis 1: 8).
Neither placing the lights in the expanse of the heavens,
nor the creation of the stars (Genesis 1: 14–16) necessarily
refer to any stretching or spreading.
13 Later, when the Flood
takes place and the floodgates of heaven are opened (Genesis
7: 11; 8: 2), there is also no reference to stretching. The idea
that the ‘stretching of the heavens’ had to occur during
Creation Week is not demanded by Scripture. It might have
occurred then, or it might have occurred at a later time, or
there may have been a combination of these events.
Hartnett and Humphreys, however, assume that most or
all of the ‘stretching of the heavens’, whatever it consisted of,
occurred during Creation Week. Pace agrees.
claims: “Many of the seventeen verses connect the stretching
with events of the Creation Week.” He concludes that “the
stretching (an increasing of tension) occurred during the
first six days of Creation, and was completed (stopping the
increase of tension) during that period”.
15 While possibly
true, this is unsubstantiated on scriptural grounds in terms
of forcing us to accept that it had to occur during Creation
Week. This is because there are no passages in Scripture that
directly connect the ‘stretching of the heavens’ with the act
of Creation. It is merely an assumption by some creationists.
Job 9: 8
Job is believed to be one of the oldest books in the Bible.
Job 9: 8 says: “He alone stretches out the heavens and treads
on the waves of the sea.” The context seems to be in the
present tense, not the past. Consider the last part of the
verse: “[He] … treads on the waves of the sea …”. Think of
Jesus Himself walking upon the water (Matthew 14: 25 and
elsewhere). The image of God treading on the waves of the
sea is a present description of His continuing power—it
has nothing to do with Creation Week. Since the last part
of Job 9: 8 is clearly not tied to Creation Week, we need
not assume that the first part of the verse must relate to
Looking at the Hebrew text, Humphreys asserts that
several of the ‘stretching’ verses “are qal perfect, implying
a past action”, while two other verses ( 2 Samuel 22: 9–10
and Psalm 18: 8–9) “follow a qal perfect verb with a waw
consecutive prefixing a qal imperfect verb, which implies
15 But these two particular passages ( 2 Samuel
and Psalm 18) relate to God coming down and ‘bowing the
heavens’ in a theophany. Hebrew scholar David Brewer
states: “The imagery here is similar to what we see when
the Lord descended to Mount Sinai (Exodus 19: 16–19).”
These verses are about God’s judgment and rescue, not about
Creation or Creation Week. These passages are irrelevant to
the question of when the ‘stretching of the heavens’ occurred
and should be dropped from the discussion.
Past action with continuing after-effects?
Humphreys also refers to Isaiah 45: 12; 48: 13 and
Jeremiah 10: 12; 51: 15, stating that these are all ‘qal
perfect, implying past action’.
15 Yes, these verses do imply
past action. But does that mean that the action has been
completed? Isaiah 40: 22 may provide greater insight
to our understanding. Here we see natah used as a qal
active participle (He ‘… is stretching’), followed by a waw
consecutive with the verb maw-thakh’ as a qal imperfect,
which might be translated as ‘and He has spread them out
like a tent …’. So we may have past action in some of the
relevant passages, but this does not necessarily signify
Apart from how we may interpret these verses,
Humphreys asserts that, even with all of the stretching (an
increase of tension) of the heavens occurring during Creation
Week, the “results of the increase, such as a slow increasing
of the gravitational potential of the cosmos, could still be
occurring to this day”.
15 In other words, we might have an
action during Creation Week (the initial stretching), but there
may be after-effects of that stretching up to the present day
(in Humphreys’ view, possibly “a slow increasing of the
gravitational potential of the cosmos”). But in that context, if
there are any after-effects of past stretching into the present
day, regardless of what they are, then it is also plausible to
infer that current expansion might be among those after-effects in terms of how we interpret the text.