I've attached a copy of what I am working on.

I want to get the sunbeams to not be seen through the hand. Just filling the rest of the circle outside of the hand. I feel like I should know how to do this easily for how long I have been dabbling in inkscape but I am lost at the moment. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Hi.

That hand is hollow. You need to fill up the space so it can hide the sunrays.
Seems it's a raster image. As the raster image itself cannot be edited with inkscape, you need to draw a vector shape beneath those black outlines.

I don't want to edit the hand at all, just cut those beams out so they don't show. I want to keep the hand hallow for the look I'm going for. Is there no way to edit the beams with my hand being a PNG file? Thanks for the help, I'm still trying to learn all of this stuff.

As @Lazur pointed out you need a background for your hand.
And I don't see a reason to keep a raster image in a vector drawing program.
One way to get your background for the hand is like this:
1. select your bitmap and vectorize it (Shift+Alt+B)
2. draw a freehand path (F6) from the bottom ends of the hand along/within the black circle
3. union (Ctrl++ or Menu|Path|Union) this path with the vectorized hand. You get a closed shape
4. draw a rectangle (F4) sligthly larger than your hand
5. keep this rectangle selected and lower it (Page Down) such that the hand appears again
6. select the vectorized hand and the rectangle but not your bitmap hand
7. do division (Ctrl+/ or Menu|Path|Division) to cut out the hand from the rectangle
8. delete the outer rest from the rectangle
9. select the inner parts (but not your bitmap) and union them (Ctrl++ or Menu|Path|Union)
10. lower this object (Page Down) until it is behind your bitmap and the black circle
Done! I hope you can follow this procedure.
Maybe there is an easier way.



Actually, I overlooked that there is an empty space between the thumb and the index.
With the same principle as above (here red rectangle) you get the shape of the empty space and subtract it (Ctrl+- or Menu|Path|Difference) later from the green background. For this operation you need to duplicate the vectorized hand a second time.

lostinvectographics wrote:I don't want to edit the hand at all, just cut those beams out so they don't show. I want to keep the hand hallow for the look I'm going for.

Oh sou you want the whole thing to be hollow -and preferably flattened -like prepairing the image for vinyl cutting?

Then first, trace bitmap the raster image and get rid of the raster image once and for all.
After that, follow the rest of the steps as @theozh suggested above and end up with that green path you can use as a solid fill.

Final steps:
subtract the green path from the rays and add the hand drawing to it with simple boolean operations. Add the circle around it (after converting the stroke to path...) and then you have it, nice and flattened.

Oh sou you want the whole thing to be hollow -and preferably flattened -like prepairing the image for vinyl cutting?

Yes exactly why I'm keeping it hallow.
I already traced it to bitmap I will follow the steps that @theozh laid out.

Thanks a ton guys!