Right. We don't need to talk about toilets.
Your contention is it is unacceptable to believe that those two references to heaven might be to different concepts.
However, you haven't given much that is convincing. Your best argument is that they are linked by proximity. That's something to consider, but a more important factor would be context.
The context of v8 is God naming an item.
The context of v9 is an adjective phrase — used to modify other items in scripture, like bird, hills and men — that tells us it was all things on Earth of that category that were affected.
That very readily might lead translators to capitalize the v8 instance and leave it singular, while making v9 plural and lower-case, as my NKJV does.
I'm not a scholar of Hebrew, but I think my analysis — perhaps guess is a better word — is reasonable.
I don't have the knock-down refutation of your challenge, but I don't think I've been KOed myself.
I disagree wholeheartedly.
We should rather be open regarding our preconceptions and willing to discard them when they are shown to be impossible.
I don't think you have brought enough to the table to assert that with confidence. I'll admit there are some slightly tenuous issues of grammar and sense with Brown's mapping onto scripture — things like you have raised — but those problems are not fatal to his ideas, my limited knowledge notwithstanding.
Nothing that might not be explained with the right knowledge.
Or, perhaps further insight will indeed show that his theory needs reworking.
However, I think it's best to leave possibilities on the table.
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Let me try one more thing. Vs 9, as you pointed out, has "heaven" used in a prepositional phrase that modifies "waters". Within the prepositional phrase are the preposition "under" and the object of the preposition "heaven". And one more thing, the definite article "the". I showed before how that definite article shows up in the Hebrew as a suffix added to "heaven".
There are two ways a definite article is used to indicate, definitively, which item is being talked about. One way (1) is for the item to be the only one of its kind, and the other way (2) is to be referring to an item that is referenced elsewhere, either previously, or in the same sentence.
Here are some examples:
1) The Lord our God. "The" refers to God as the unique Lord who is our God.
1) The United States of America
1) The President of the USA
1) The earth
1) The moon
2) The cow in the field (this is not talking about a cow in the barn, but one that you could find in the field--thus a particular cow)
2) The car at the stoplight (same here. There might be more than one car at a stoplight, but if there were, you would need more clarification, like "the blue car at the stoplight")
2) I want to buy a car. The car must have leather seats for me to buy it.
2) The car must have leather seats for me to buy it. (Note that even without the first sentence, "the car" implicitly refers to something that is already known about, not something that has yet to be mentioned or discussed.)
2) I have to go to the hospital. (Note that the British often won't use "the" in this case, because it suggests that there is only a single hospital. But we see "the hospital" as a reference to a concept, not a building. Thus it doesn't matter which "hospital", we are just going to a place that fits the description of "hospital" and has "hospital" in the name. But that concept is already well known to us and our listeners when we say it.
What about this: "The cow"?
I think you would say you don't have enough information for "the cow" to make sense. That's because there's no clarifying information, and we know there are more than 1 cows in the world. "Cow" might be a concept, but not one that indicates there's a single representative of "cow" that we would all recognize. It needs either an antecedent to have "the" in front of it, or a clarification in the sentence itself.
That's what the word in Gen 1:9 is. it is "the heaven".
[Gen 1:9 KJV] And God said, Let the waters under
the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry [land] appear: and it was so.
Since there is no more clarification
in the sentence, we would normally look to the previous sentences for context. It would be strange to look several sentences later for the first hint of context for a definite article. What do we find when we look at the previous verse? A description ("firmament") and name ("heaven") that gives the antecedent--exactly what we would expect.
This is the argument from proximity, but it isn't a vacuous argument--it's an argument from language structure and human perception, both of which are more solid than just taking ruler and finding the nearest reference, although that would also give the same conclusion.
