with Pastor Riley writing about the Kingdom I was think about beyond the 1000 years and wanted to address the misconception that the oceans disappear in the New Heavens and New Earth. As seen below in Richard C. Trench’s synonyms the word Thalassa used in the Revelation 21 passage is most often used of the sea as contrasted with the land i.e. the smaller seas, it is especially used to designate the Mediterranean and Red seas, where the word Pelagos is not used of such seas but only of the deep seas such as the Atlantic. So I would venture to say that the oceans will be in the eternal earth so the only question will the smaller seas still be there or not. Will only the Red or Mediterranean seas be removed?? Or given Israel is the location marker for the bible could only the Levantine Sea be the only part of the Mediterranean be meant???
Also the sea is often symbolic of the heathen so it could be that there are no more unbelievers.Paul
Emphasis Added in the below.
xiii.
θάλασσα, πέλαγος .The connexion of
θάλασσα with the verbταράσσειν , that it means properly the agitated or disturbed, finds favour with Curtius (p. 596) and with Port (Etym. Forsch. vol. ii. p. 56). Schmidt dissents (vol. 1. p. 642); and urges that the predominant impression which the sea makes on the beholder is not of unrest but of rest, of quietude and not of agitation; that we must look for the word’s primary meaning in quite another direction:θάλασσα , he says, ‘ist das Meer nach seiner natürlichen Beschaffenheit, als grosse Salzflut, und dem Sinne nach von dem poetischenἅλς durch nichts unterscheiden.’ It is according to him ‘the great salt flood.’ But not entering further into this question, it will be enough to say that, like the Latin ‘mare,’ it is the sea as contrasted with the land (Gen. 1:10; Matt. 23:15; Acts 4:24); or perhaps more strictly as contrasted with the shore (see Hayman’s Odyssey, vol. 1. p. xxxiii. Appendix).Πέλαγος , closely allied withπλάξ, πλατύς ‘plat,’ ‘plot,’ ‘flat,’ is the vast uninterrupted level and expanse of open water, the ‘altum mare,’1 as distinguished from those portions of it broken by islands, shut in by coasts and headlands (Thucydides, vi. 104; vii. 49; Plutarch, Timol. 8).2 The suggestion of breadth, and not depth, except as an accessory notion, and as that which will probably find place in this open sea, lies in the word; thus Sophocles (Oed. Col. 659):μακρὸν τὸ δεῦρο πέλαγος ,οὐδὲ πλώσιιμον : so too the murmuring Israelites (Philo, Vit. Mos. 35) liken to aπέλαγος the illimitable sand-flats of the desert; and in Herodotus (ii. 92) the Nile overflowing Egypt is saidπελαγίζειν τὰ πεδία , which yet it only covers to the depth of a few feet; cf. ii. 97. A passage in the Timoeus of Plato (25 a, b) illustrates well the distinction between the words, where the title ofπέλαγος is refused to the Mediterranean Sea: which is but a harbour, with the narrow entrance between the Pillars of Hercules for its mouth; while only the great Atlantic Ocean beyond can be acknowledged asἀληθινὸς πόντος ,πέλαγος ὄντως . Compare Aristotle, De Mun. 3; Meteorol. ii. 1:ῥέουσα δ᾽ ἡ θάλαττα φαίνεται κατὰ τὰς στενότητας [the Straits of Gibraltar],εἴπου διὰ περιιέχουσαν γῆν εἰς μικρὸν ἐκ μεγάλου συνάγεται πέλαγος .It might seem as if this distinction did not hold good on one of the two occasions upon which
πέλαγος occurs in the N. T., namely Matt. 18:6: “It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea” (καὶ καταποντισθῇ ἐν τῷ πελάγει τῆς θαλάσσης ). But the sense of depth, which undoubtedly the passage requires, is here to be looked for in theκαταποντισθῇ :—πόντος (not in the N. T.), being connected withβάθος, βυθός (Exod. 15:5),βένθος , perhaps the same word as this last,Etym. Note. 9 and implying the sea in its perpendicular depth, asπέλαγος (==‘maris aequor’), the same in its horizontal dimensions and extent. Compare Döderlein, Lat. Syn. vol. iv. p. 75.