Im just trying to imagine a movie which had elements of the movie where individuao people, hills, mountains, oceans, the planet itself, the universe…hmmm are we not capable of dynamically zooming when filming movies?
Why do you demand God cannot also do the same in visions?
I think your argument there is a rather poor one given our visual experiences with movies on televison and in theatre.
You know ancient hebrew didnt contain vowels right…there is no such writing as “a” circle in proverbs. that is how we have subsequently translated it because modern language uses vowels.
The translation is “circle”.
Your arguments there still ignore a huge problem…you habe not answered the issue…why would God show the ewrth as flat knowing someday man would figure out it isnt?
The fact is, God wouldnt and did not because He didnt need to…He hasnt got amt reason to hide that from us…and the book of Job proves that fact. In the later chapter God even says to Job…what would you know about creating a universe!
Then go forward a thousand years to AD 90 when Revelation was written…mankind was a lot more advanced by the time of the apostle John…im pretty sure we were smart enough by then to be able to think 3 dimensionally…the Egyptians built pyramids with incredible accuracy long before Christs day!
Actually come to think of it, perhaps it was the Egyptians who promoted flat earthism? Look at the drawings on the internals of pyramid burial chambers!
The interesting thing is, plato and aristotle had spherical earth ideas…however ancient Chinese seemed to promote flatearthism.
Btw, it is a lie that flatearthism was promoted by religion in the middle ages, the historical evidence tells us that is flatout untrue. So flatearthism in YEC is highly problematic especially given some here believe Ellen White started YEC in the late 1800’s. Givej Adventism is such an historically driven relious denomination, it is inconsistent with the groups own habits for them to ignore history when it comes to flat earthism beliefs.
Adam’s post is now a scattershot of half-connected points:
He’s mixing theology, history, and speculation in a way that makes it hard to pin him down. The trick here is not to chase every tangent but to bring him back to the central, testable claim: what the Hebrew texts actually say and how their first hearers would have understood them.
Adam, the Hebrew word in those verses is chûg, which means circle, horizon, or dome — not kaddur, the word Isaiah actually used elsewhere when he meant a ball (22:18). That shows the text isn’t describing a sphere but using the ordinary imagery of its time. Even conservative Hebrew scholars acknowledge this, so it’s not about doubting God, but about recognizing that He spoke through the language and worldview of the people who first received it.
P.S. If God wanted to reveal a spherical earth, He wouldn’t have inspired words that describe a circle and a dome instead.
Very entertaining. Everyone talking at each other without the slightest interest in what the other is thinking. it is not one missed point. There is at least one point for each contributor. I wonder what the Jackpot score is.
There is a fallacy that goes something like this
You cannot understand because you are not seeing it as i do.
You cannot understand what I do because if you did you would be agreeing with me.
The net result is that no one is interested in what the other person is saying unless it agrees with them. And no one cares what anyone else thinks unless it is the same as them
Richard
I have missed nothing. But then I do not fall into the categories in question.
Richard
My mistake… a day late, a dollar short, and on the wrong train.
I am not the one being dismissive, or insulting about other beliefs or faith.
NB I am not claiming this for myself. It is what I am hearing. (Reading)
Richard
While at the same time treating pi as equal to three.
Right.
If the text told us that a circular “sea” ten cubits across was thirty-one cubits around, I might give some credence that God cared about teaching us some science. The fact that the Holy Spirit allowed such a gross error into the text indicates He had no interest in even simple math.
The point is that you made out a circle…that is completely false representwtion of meaning…it is not a 2 dimensional drawing…in hebrew that word also means sphere.
You are intentionally misleading and then misdirecting to twist scripture to suit ANE beliefs there which are not biblical.
That is the entire problem here…so much half truth and so little scriptural supprt simply because darwinian humanistic interpretations dont align with Christian ones that take the bible statements as authoirtstive.
The reality is this…and again answer it properly…
Why would a God who knows better (the bible clearly says He is allknowing), give 2 dimensional visions of the earth promoting flatearthism knowing that one day His creation would find out the earth is not a circle on a parchment?
The claim its because he cant illustrate finer detail is ririculous…movies zoom in all the flaming time to provide detail…why cant God also do that in vision?
Oh my – what a mess! The lack of vowels has nothing to do with the article, definite or indefinite. Literally Proverbs says God “drew circle”.
By standard Hebrew grammar, “a” is assumed when “the” is not present, so to translate “drew a circle” is just following Hebrew grammar.
God talked about the earth as flat because (a) that’s what the people He was communicating with did and (b) that’s how it looked to them and (c) He had no interest in teaching science plus (d) He doesn’t expect us to be so stupid as to think He cares about teaching us science or even getting it correct.
Don’t forget that God is not the author – human beings were. Nor is He the editor; He is the inspirer. As Peter describes that, God moved men to write – so they wrote, and they wrote freely from their own knowledge and understanding, not like scribes or as men possessed.
Dratted moving targets! 
I’ve been wondering if someone was going to bring up that last one. Some have noted that seen in 3D the earth looks like a dome because only one hemisphere is seen at a time, but the “dome” idea is closer to the convex shape of an ancient shield.
And the text still has no intent to teach science or even to get it “right”.
Uh, no – that’s something that is argued from assuming a MSWV and inserting it into the text. The verb form in illustrative; the meaning “to ride a circuit” shows that the base meaning is that of a line enclosing a space. This can be pushed to mean “vault”, as the KJV renders it somewhere, but to stretch it to “sphere” is a worldview error.
Even if that were true (it isn’t), better to insert meaning from the Old Testament’s own context than to try to stuff in meaning from a MSWV.
Why would He make Himself meaningless to the people He was talking to by trying to force on them things they would have thought patently ridiculous?
YHWH-Elohim had no interest in your modern penchant for wanting everything to fit your science, Adam. His intent, and that of His chosen writers, was to communicate truth about Himself. What those people thought about the universe was just part of the way to communicate with them – “speaking their language”, putting things in terms they would recognize.
Your idea that the Hebrew scriptures are totally isolated from their ANE culture is not just the same sort of thinking that led to a couple of ancient heresies, it’s contradicted by the text itself!
Job also has reference to the storehouses for snow and hail. That’s not scientific. Of course, like much of Scripture it is poetic. It does not mean that the author or audience believed there were barns in the sky. But insisting that the Bible must be scientific runs into problems with quite a few metaphors and other figures of speech. Taking the Bible seriously must include making a serious effort to understand what it means, on its terms, rather than just imposing what we want.
I have not located the brochure lately, but somewhere I had a Muslim flier claiming that the Quran had advanced science ideas in it, as supposedly proving Islam.
Adam, you’ve packed a lot of scatter into a single post—half accusation, half theology, half geometry. That’s three halves too many. You seem to have difficulty focusing.
If the Hebrew word really means ‘sphere,’ then explain why no Hebrew reader before Copernicus thought it did. You can call it a misrepresentation, but history calls it an anachronism.
As for your ‘movies zoom in all the flaming time’ argument—if God needed Hollywood camera tricks to make His point, maybe you’re giving Him too little credit and yourself too much.
Ditto, Hinduism.
The scholarly claim from our church professors is that historically, Abraham gave science to the Egyptians…that ANE also got its ideas from God…not the other way around. We do not believe that idolatrous society gave science its knowledge in ancient times…we say that the bible is quite explicit in that all knowledge comes from God.
If we take the above and think about it logically, a heathen who ignores God, doesnt listen to God, that individual is hardly going to be the source of God breathed revelation…so why would any Christian here claim that ANE gave ancient jews their scientific knowledge about origins and reality when God would habe given it to them directly?
God says many times in the bible come out my people and i will teach you my ways…Gods way is the way of truth about life…that isnt just about religious doctrine…if it was only about religious doctrine, we wouldnt need anything else in the bible outside of tales about morality. What we read is far more extensive than that…its days, times, places, people, their ages, children, grandchildren, great grandchildren…entire lineages/family trees…a record of people who really existed from cover to cover.
What ANE seemed to be intent on doing was to corrupt those visions given to propets and turned them into a heresy just the same as with religious beliefs. The old testament prophets of Baal in Elijahs time are an evidence of that. God didnt speak to Elijah through the thunder and lightening in that cave, he demonstrated His mighty with those things, he spoke to Elijah in a still small.voice. heathens dont natively listen for the whisperings of the Holy spirit…Christ told us the Holy Spirit would come to help disciples spread the gospel (not do it for them). The charge is for us to take the gospel to the world, then the end shall come.
The particular examples from the Quran were both rather imaginative in thinking that the quote indicated any advanced knowledge and doubtful as evidence of the Quran’s inspiration because they have older parallels in the Bible.
For the Old Testament, the idea of the shape of the earth being a topic is also problematic because their concept of “the earth” was the known world. Revelation refers to the corners of the earth. Picking out the “circle” of the earth as supposedly displaying awareness of the globe while ignoring the corners is not a consistent exegesis; it’s just picking apparent matches without taking the text seriously..
Adam, you’ve just confirmed my point. You’re assuming a priori that God gave Abraham and Israel their science “directly,” while everyone else was corrupting it. That’s not an argument—it’s a faith assertion.
What scholars are pointing out is far simpler: the biblical texts look like every other piece of ancient Near Eastern literature in how they describe the cosmos—flat land, dome above, waters above and below. If these descriptions were uniquely divine, we’d expect them to stand out as radically different. They don’t.
So the question isn’t whether God could have done it differently, but whether the texts themselves show independence from their cultural environment. The evidence says no.
And they missed the ‘new world’ entirely; which is what one would expect from a tribal religion that emerged out of that area of the planet.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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