Biblical cosmology is the account of the universe and its laws in the Bible. The Bible was formed over many centuries, involving many authors, and reflects shifting patterns of religious belief; consequently, its cosmology is not always consistent. Nor do the biblical texts necessarily represent the beliefs of all Jews or Christians at the time they were put into writing: the majority of the texts making up the Hebrew Bible or Old Testament in particular represent the beliefs of only a small segment of the ancient Israelite community, the members of a late Judean religious tradition centered in Jerusalem and devoted to the exclusive worship of Yahweh.
The ancient Israelites envisaged the universe as a flat disc-shaped Earth floating on water, heaven above, underworld below. Humans inhabited Earth during life and the underworld after death; there was no way that mortals could enter heaven, and the underworld was morally neutral; only in Hellenistic times (after ) did Jews begin to adopt the Greek idea that it would be a place of punishment for misdeeds, and that the righteous would enjoy an afterlife in heaven. In this period too the older three-level cosmology in large measure gave way to the Greek concept of a spherical Earth suspended in space at the center of a number of concentric heavens.
The opening words of the Genesis creation narrative (Genesis 1:1–26) sum up the biblical editors' view of how the cosmos originated: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"; Yahweh, the God of Israel, was solely responsible for creation and had no rivals, implying Israel's superiority over all other nations. Later Jewish thinkers, adopting ideas from Greek philosophy, concluded that God's Wisdom, Word and Spirit penetrated all things and gave them unity. Christianity in turn adopted these ideas and identified Jesus with the Logos (Word): "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" (John 1:1).
Cosmogony (origins of the cosmos)
Divine battle and divine speech
Two different models of the process of creation existed in ancient Israel. In the "logos" (speech) model, God speaks and shapes unresisting dormant matter into effective existence and order (Psalm 33: "By the word of YHWH the heavens were made, and by the breath of his mouth all their hosts; he gathers up the waters like a mound, stores the Deep in vaults"); in the second, or "agon" (struggle) model, God does battle with the monsters of the sea at the beginning of the world in order to mark his sovereignty and power. Psalm 74 evokes the agon model: it opens with a lament over God's desertion of his people and their tribulations, then asks him to remember his past deeds: "You it was who smashed Sea with your might, who battered the heads of the monsters in the waters; You it was who crushed the heads of Leviathan, who left them for food for the denizens of the desert..." In this world-view the seas are primordial forces of disorder, and the work of creation is preceded by a divine combat (or "theomachy").
Creation in the "agon" model takes the following storyline: (1) God as the divine warrior battles the monsters of chaos, who include Sea, Death, Tannin and Leviathan; (2) The world of nature joins in the battle and the chaos-monsters are defeated; (3) God is enthroned on a divine mountain, surrounded by lesser deities; (4) He speaks, and nature brings forth the created world, or for the Greeks, the cosmos. This myth was taken up in later Jewish and Christian apocalyptic literature and projected into the future, so that the cosmic battle becomes the decisive act at the end of the world's history: thus the Book of Revelation (end of the 1st century CE) tells how, after the God's final victory over the sea-monsters, New Heavens and New Earth shall be inaugurated in a cosmos in which there will be "no more sea" (Revelation 21:1).