(May 7, 2022 at 11:54 am)Klorophyll Wrote:(April 18, 2022 at 1:45 pm)JairCrawford Wrote: Oh I could very well be wrong about that. But I’d need to see the specific studies on the consensus of the time. Specifically what does “round” mean? It could mean a sphere, or it could mean a circle. That’s a big difference. I know many modern Christian leaders refer to a verse in the Bible about “the circle of the Earth” as ‘proof’ that biblical writers knew that the earth is a sphere, even though the text blatantly and explicitly says circle, not sphere. So I’d need to see more info on these studies to be convinced.
You can find the original narration of the consensus here :
https://islamqa.info/en/answers/118698/c...h-is-round
Their main justification is the verse:
“He created the heavens and earth for a true purpose; He wraps the night around the day and the day around the night”
[az-Zumar 39:5].
The exegesis goes like this : The equivalent in Arabic of "wrapping around" can't apply to something that is flat, as the verse kind of describes how the Earth appears when looked at from afar, one half of it is roughly covered in sunlight and the remainder in darkness.
Thanks for the added context! I think the key to interpreting what the writer was envisioning here comes down to what the cosmological model was at the time it was written. For instance, if some sort of domed firmament was still the prevailing view at the time, that is, a domed firmament shielding the circular earth, then the “wrapping around” could refer to the firmament.
