הַיֹּשֵׁב֙ עַל־ח֣וּג הָאָ֔רֶץ וְיֹשְׁבֶ֖יהָ כַּחֲגָבִ֑ים
הַנּוֹטֶ֤ה כַדֹּק֙ שָׁמַ֔יִם וַיִּמְתָּחֵ֥ם כָּאֹ֖הֶל לָשָֽׁבֶת׃
Isaiah 40:22, MT
I find it strange that the question of the earth’s shape even comes up among semi-intelligent people today. How has society so debased itself that people have reverted to primitive thinking and pre-scientific reliance on nothing but what your five senses can demonstrate to you? Did we not already establish that reality can be counterintuitive and that data and experimentation must often trump what we see with our eyes? That said, and for whatever reason, people in this generation are allowing themselves to be persuaded by arguments meant to present themselves as healthy skepticism and calling into question what our elders have told us.
This isn’t a terrible idea. We should never accept things just because we were told that they are true. The bad aspect of this calling things into question is that those who believe that the earth is flat often share other conspiratorial thinking and live beyond the bounds of healthy skepticism. It is becoming more common today to run into someone who kicks up this conversation around the dinner table among friends. It has even made its way to Israel and has taken on expression in the Hebrew language. The normal response is to simply refer our flat earther friends (“flerfs”) to science and to the evidence that we have that the universe (indeed, the cosmos) is what we know it to be from the observations of our instruments. Now, I am not a scientist and wouldn’t want to engage in these discussions, but recently they have taken a path into the realm of biblical Hebrew, which interests me far more than the conspiracy theories that are whipping back and forth in today’s societies.
The Bible is often called into the discussion by both fundamentalists, who think that every word of the Bible is true and inerrant, and by skeptics who argue that the thinking of the biblical authors was primitive, that they could not have envisioned the cosmos in the way that we see it today. A YouTuber named Nuriel, who calls himself Round About, has taken to opposing flerfs on a different footing from the majority of those who take up opposition to the flat earth arguments. Round About is a Bible-believing Jew who takes up the opposite position of flat earth Evangelicals. Whereas they read the Bible literally when it says that God stretched out the heavens and made a firmament, Round About argues that the Bible doesn’t at all teach that the earth is flat and that those verses which seem to argue in support of a flat earth are metaphors. This makes his argument a bit different from most, in that he accepts the Bible as inerrant while opposing flat earthers. Normally, those who are on the inerrantist side accept flat earth, and those who oppose it either reject biblical authority or acknowledge that the Bible teaches a flat earth while admitting that these parts of the Bible should be rejected as pre-scientific and mistaken.
First, I will admit that Round About puts out some good arguments against flat earth claims. He accepts scientific data and what science has demonstrated regarding reality. He denies that the Bible teaches flat earth out of dedication to the dogma of inerrancy. Whereas we agree with Nuriel that the earth is spherical, should we accept what he has to say about the Bible not teaching a flat earth? Let’s look at the question together.
