Historical Standpoint

[Blondie]

Not sure what to call this.  I do have a question about the Bible, but it is more on a historical view and not debating on God and so on.  Let's leave magic and so on out of it.  Before we go any further, please take me seriously.  This is a question I have from a historical view of when it was written and was proven by scientists when we could see it for ourselves. I know this is reasoning among creationists to dispute science, etc which is not my point or what I am trying to accomplish here. Being raised in church, this is a serious question I am asking among this community.  I am asking for serious thoughts.

https://truthbehindreality.wordpress.com...-real-old/

The introduction ends by saying, “The unknown author was probably an Israelite writing sometime between 1500 and 500 B.C.”

Job 26:10
He drew a circular horizon on the face of the waters,[size=small] At the boundary of light and darkness.

This could be an indication that the world was round before any proof by scientists even among the earliest ones.

Job 26:7
He stretches out the north over empty space; He hangs the earth on nothing.

This could also be taken as the expansion of the universe.  

http://history.stackexchange.com/questio...fore-cyrus
The OT Prophet Isaiah lived Isaiah in the 8th-century BC. Cyrus, the Emperor of Persia, lived well over one hundred years later: Cyrus (580-529 BC) was the first Achaemenid Emperor

Isaiah 40:22

He who sits above the circle of the earth, And its inhabitants are like grasshoppers, stretches out the heavens like a curtain, And spreads them out like a tent to dwell in.

Another indication that the earth was round before any proof.

Now take out the point of magic, etc.  My question is how could people have known this when these two books were written, if we did not have the start of science around 1589 AD starting with Galileo Galilei?  How would this be possible?

[robvalue]

Let's say they did know something really clever, and we have no idea how they could have known it.

What can we conclude?

[JesusHChrist]

Oooh! Oooh! Oooh! Oooh! Pick me pick me pick me!

Is the answer "God"?!?

[Crossless2.0]

Regarding your first and third quotes, there is nothing there to suggest that the authors thought of the Earth as a sphere; rather, it seems they conceived of the Earth as a sort of disk. Circles are not three-dimensional. The first real demonstration that the Earth was spherical was made by the Greeks, not the Hebrews.

Your second quote would require a pretty tortured reading to come up with an expanding universe, to put it mildly. I can only speculate what lay behind the verse in question, but I would guess that the idea of the Earth hanging on nothing would be an inference based on the observation that the sun, moon, and stars apparently also seem to hang on nothing.

[houseofcantor]

Science didn't start with Galileo, I think what started with him was the modern scientific method. To answer your first question simply, math. For a more detailed explanation I dug this up for ya: http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/...rth-is-ro/

The second thing - he stretches the north over nothing.   
WTF is that actually trying to say? I don't know. I don't find any of that "Bible/Quran science" stuff to be the least bit compelling.

[Chad32]

Circular does not mean spherical. They may have still thought the world was flat, but that it just doesn't have corners. There's an old depiction of the world where the top is flat, but it isn't a circle, and it shows a dome above it. Like a tent, as it were. Obviously there is no dome above the world.

Hangs is not really an accurate term either. The world spins and rotates around the sun, held there by centripetal force. Hanging on nothing is better than saying the world sits on pillars, but still isn't quite there.

It's not easy to test the roundness of the world without planes or space shuttles, but given enough travel time and study it's possible to figure out the world is round without divine inspiration.

[Jenny A]

Nope.  I think the ancient Hebrews knew the difference between a circle and a ball just as well as we do now.  Their cosmology is in Genesis and it looks like that of much of the rest of the ancient world around them. There's a flat circle floating on the deeps. Four pillars hold up a dome that supports the heavens. There's an ocean of water above the dome. Read the first couple chapters of Genesis. The descriptions in Job and Isaiah are generally consistent with Genesis.

The Greeks on the other hand really had figured out the earth is round and did a pretty good job estimating it's circumference.

[JesusHChrist]

Hebrew model of the universe. Derp!

[Athene]

I expect there were a few persons keen and observative enough to surmise certain things about the world and their surroundings back then. There always are, aren't they?

[Minimalist]

First off you have to dismiss any of this bible bullshit claims to originality and go from there.

http://www.ancient.eu/article/226/

The Ludlul-Bel-Nimeqi is a Babylonian poem which chronicles the lament of a good man suffering undeservedly. Also known as `The Poem of the Righteous Sufferer', the title translates as "I will praise the Lord of Wisdom".  In the poem, Tabu-utul-Bel, age 52, an official of the city of Nippur, cries out that he has been afflicted with various pains and injustices and, asserting his own righteous behavior, asks why the gods should allow him to suffer so. In this, the poem treats the age old question of `why do bad things happen to good people' and the poem has thus been linked to the later Hebrew composition The Book of Job. No scholarly consensus exists on a date for the writing of Job (nor, for that matter, when the story related is supposed to have taken place) but many point to the 7th, 6th, or 4th centuries BCE as probable while Ludlul-Bel-Nimeqi dates to c. 1700 BCE. The Babylonian poem was probably inspired by the earlier Sumerian work, Man and His God (composed c. 2000 BCE) which, according to Samuel Noah Kramer, was written "for the purpose of prescribing the proper attitude and conduct for a victim of cruel and seemingly undeserved misfortune"

Just more shit stolen from the Mesopotamians and recast for their rather inept yahweh.