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"But they that are learned shall shine as the brightness of the firmament: and they that instruct many to justice, as stars for all eternity." [Daniel 12:3]

Would this refer to the bright blue sky overhead or would it refer to the air that is the space between the clouds and the earth?

That was the argument made by the those who disagreed that the firmament was spherical, but St. Augustine countered by referring to things like balls which were made of tent material into a spherical spherical shape.  Fathers who believed that the firmament was a sphere thought it went all the way around, but that beneath the actual earth surface (on the other side) there was water and the entrance to Sheol (Hell).  That's precisely how St. Hildegard described it as well.  I believe that cassini once cited St. Hildegard as speaking of the world shaped like a sphere, but then ignored the text right there in the very passage he posted, where she said that no one could live on the underside because down there was water and the entrance to Sheol.  She was clearly talking about the same thing that the Fathers discuss here.

Also very clear from the Fathers, they did not believe in gravity, and so they would have had no way of explaining how people could "stick" to the bottom of a ball, and none of the Fathers believed in Antipodaeans (people stuck upside down unear the earth).  Pope Zachary in a letter to St. Boniface declared the notion that there were other people who lived beneath the earth to be heretical.

This could be referring to the brightness of the stars in the firmament, but again would those stars be under the clouds in the space between the clouds and the earth?


This brings up another thing I wonder about---

Is it possible the sky is blue because of the waters?


It never made sense to me that the sky would be blue but outer space would be black.  I mean, the sun is in outer space too right?

Yet, the sky turns black at night and that is what happens to the color of water (as in the ocean) at night.