Perhaps you are imposing a modern definition of the word ‘star’ onto the text. We think of it as ‘body massive enough for nuclear fusion’—but I suspect the ancients defined it more like ‘bright spot in the sky smaller than the sun and moon.’ In which case, including comets and meteors would be perfectly legitimate.
The problem is… they didn’t know one from the other … this is hardly divine inspiration.
If they had a word for comet, that would show that they knew the heck they were looking at, and how the Cosmos worked. They didn’t… so they didn’t.
This is also why the writer of Genesis thought you could still measure days without the Sun existing for 3 days of creation…
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Part of my Hebrew studies were under a Jewish rabbi who was also on the peer-review committee of JBL (Journal of Biblical Literature published by SBL.) He presented basically the same cosmology I heard in my evangelical seminary:
(1) The ERETZ (the land, traditionally translated as “earth”, which should NOT be understood as “planet earth”, which is an anachronism) was a circular disk we today call the horizon.
(2) Thus, the circle of the earth is what an observer sees when looking in all directions.
(3) “The four corners of the ERETZ/land” did not contradict “the circle of the earth” because nobody thought they were living on a rectangular land. It was obviously a circular disk! In the ANE, “the four corners” was basically the same kind of idiom one finds in all sorts of cultures all over the world: a descriptive system based on obvious directions. That is, the sun rises in the east, sets in the west, the sun is at its highest point of the day to the south, and the most shaded relief from the sun is to the north. Maps showed either a diamond or a plus-sign with the words for the four directions.
The four points of a diamond and a plus-sign aren’t deep mysteries. They are simply “corners”. That’s how language works. (I realize that generalizations quickly break down from exceptions. So I’ll just mention anecdotally that my monolingual students would sometimes try to read too much into idioms and expressions, and “the four corners of the earth” is an example of that. But the students who were fluent in several languages or who had had graduate-level linguistics experience, they were far more flexible and would rarely jump to radical conclusions about idioms like “the four corners of the earth.” An analogy to this would be a non-English speaker hearing about “raining cats and dogs” for the first time might think that an ancient culture thought domesticated animals fell from above on the roof–but those with lots of language experience would immediately recognize it as an idiom.
Needless to say, NOT ONE of the rabbinical scholars nor any of the evangelical professors of Hebrew I worked with ever claimed that the ancient Hebrew simultaneously spoke of “the circle of the earth” and “the rectangle of the earth” (that is, “the four corners of the earth” as a literal shape of their ERETZ/land) as both being literally descriptions. “The four corners of the earth” is a favorite of Skeptics Annotated Bible because they think it maximally mocks the culture which produced the Bible. But I don’t know of any Hebrew scholar who fails to grasp such an obvious idiomatic expression. The ancients were not stupid. They knew that a circle and a rectangle couldn’t both be the shape of their ERETZ.
(4) I don’t recall any definitive claims about when the cosmology of the Greeks concerning a spherical earth reached Hebrew culture and changed the cosmology. So I don’t know.
(5) The ideas of “planet earth” or “the globe” are anachronisms. The ancient Hebrews didn’t have any concept of a big globe. They thought of the universe as “the heavens and the earth/ERETZ”, that is, “the sky and the land.” The horizon (which they referred to by means of the idiom “the circle of the earth”) was the edge of their world, not the edge of their planet. I remember asking some of the rabbis if the ancient Hebrews ever thought of additional lands existing beyond the horizon. From what I can recall, I never got a consistent answer. I got some impression that over time the Hebrews concept of the ERETZ did get larger and that there was a belief that eyesight stopped at the horizon but that other lands existed beyond the horizon that simply couldn’t be seen, even if one climbed a mountain in order to improve one’s view.
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Running through this whole thread is, as on all such threads, the inability of us moderns to conceive of any worldview that is not based on scientific materialism.
One doesn’t need a concept of the world as flat, round, domed or anything else until one has some concept of a “cosmos”, ie that all the material things in the world, which one regards as separate from the personal or divine things, can be viewed as a totality, a self-contained system, rather than as a series of relations, eg the heavens as above the earth and sea.
As Socratic.Fanatic hints, eretz meant “ground”, not “the totality of ground” (just as earth menat “soil” long before it meant a planet)." Shemayim meant sky (ie what’s “up there”), not “all the sky you can think of in a particular shape”.
That concept of cosmos was only developed in western Greek thought many centuries after the Hebrew account’s sources, so how (and why) could they have the kind of Victorian goldfish-bowl concept that’s always trotted out (but never proven except by the selective use of metaphorical texts and the ignoring of clearly phenomenological ones)?
This situation obtained throughout the ancient near east - there’s a new and important book out by cuneiformist Francesca Rochberg, Before Nature, that demonstrates this in relation to cuneiform science (as well as, quite incidentally, scotching the myth that there was a universal “ANE cosmology” shared by Israel). But to be truthful, the same story can be seen in the philological writings of C S Lewis long ago on words like “world” and “nature” to show just how anachronistic are the attempts to reconstruct the supposed “science” behind the ANE myths.
To the Babylonians, for example,the stars were neither large bodies nor points, but deities. Neither were they painted on a solid dome, but (in one cuneiform text) shepherded like a flock across the sky by I forget which god. That simply doesn’t map to any idea of "what they thought they really (ie materially) were. They were gods, end of.
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Bingo! Yes, a star to them was a dot of light which moved slowly in very predictable ways according to the time of night and the calendar date. Many ancient cultures considered what we’d call a planet a wandering star, because it moved far more than most other stars. And what we call a meteor was to some cultures a rapidly moving star that lasted only briefly. And there is nothing wrong with these expressions. Our modern names for natural phenomena are not necessarily the correct or best terms. Besides, a lot of English speakers still call a meteor “a falling star.” Why not? Semantic domains of words are determined by the culture, not by some future scientist.
It reminds me of the common complaint that “the Bible errs because it calls bats a kind of birds.” They assume that modern taxonomy is the only “correct” way to name animals. Yet the ancient Hebrews’ word was applied to “winged creatures larger than an insect”, even though a lot of Bible translators have rendered it as simply “bird”, despite the fact that such a rough equivalent is only about 98% accurate. Meanwhile, few people complain that English speakers err when they talk about “flying squirrels.” Indeed, if someone from an culture said, “English speakers in America sure are stupid! They think that that species of squirrel can fly rather than just glide!” Of course, that is much like the pedantry of saying that the sun doesn’t really rise so “sunrise” is an erroneous term. Moreover, gliding is a kind of flight!
So if non-linguists glean nothing else from my comments, please consider that it is extremely difficult for outsiders (especially from a very different language from thousands of years future) to correctly differentiate denotation/connotation, literal versus figurative/symbolic, and etymological versus lexicographical.
Think about that when considering that a “guinea pig” isn’t really a pig and a “stuffed animal” was probably never alive and didn’t require a taxidermist—even though taxidermists put stuffing into dead animals but rarely to amuse and comfort children.
P.S. Immediately after posting, I noticed that Jon_Garvey was thinking of many of the same concepts. Yes, everybody who ever took a Hebrew exegesis class in the Torah had to come to terms with these basics. I see that Jon wrote of ERETZ carry the idea of “the ground.” Yes, a similarity in English at the time of the KJV Bible (because the space age led us to consider “planet earth” the primary meaning of “earth”) was “falling to the earth”. Today we might say “I fell to the ground”, and if we did say “I fell to the earth”, it would usually refer to a fall from a much great height, such as a return from the moon or a falling out of orbit.
When the 1611 translators of the King James Bible wrote of “the earth”, “planet earth” wasn’t the presumed primary meaning. Farmers were “tillers of the earth”, and it didn’t refer to the planet; it was about “tilling the ground”. And that is why I like some of the modern translations which boldly risk offending traditionalists and dare to write: “In the beginning God created the sky and the land”. Perhaps even more “literal” would be “In the beginning God created the up-there and the down-here.” In case, “the heavens and the earth” in the original Hebrew wording is an IDIOM for the UNIVERSE as they knew it.
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Yes, this information is all correct. The flat earth-Columbus story is false, and Copernicus didn’t believe anything like the “Copernican principle.” Also, that link to Eratosthenes is excellent. The only quibble I have: Aristotle knew the sphericity of the earth a century prior to Eratosthenes; what Eratosthenes did was to measure the earth’s dimension, not to prove its sphericity.
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But fortunately for great stories around the world, what correct history takes away from us, other better history makes up for the loss!
Below is a link to the famous Bedford Level Experiment, first done in 1870, and then frequently attempted into the 1900’s. A small religious group of zealots truly believed that the Bible taught a flat earth, and until orbital photography was possible, there was really no way of putting all these concerns to bed.
An Englishman, Samuel Rowbotham, began pursuing his religious quest to understand the flat Earth as early as 1838 … demonstrating to we moderns that faith in an ancient book frequently makes a person oppose the triangulation of evidence revealing the natural world for a completely opposite conclusion.
Now that we do orbital photography . . . flat earth societies are mostly the reserve for those with more than their share of ironic humor.
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