This was how the universe appeared to the ancient Israelites who authored the Bible and to most everyone else in ancient times. The earth appeared to be flat and circular sitting on pillars with a rotating solid sky dome overhead which carried the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars and allowed water to leak through "windows of heaven" or sluice gates to form clouds and rain. God was imagined to live on top of the dome and walk on it.
The Hebrew word "shamayim" is translated as both sky and heaven. To the ancient Hebrews they meant exactly the same thing. God lived in and on the sky dome with the Sun, the Moon, and the rest of the "host of heaven"(the stars).
The Bible’s immovable earth set on pillars
The sky is imagined as something that has to open to let things pass through it
Joshua commands the Sun to stand still in the sky
Jesus probably saw the universe the same way everyone else did in his day
The Bible’s flat earth
In the Bible the earth is a round flat object with ends and which is immovable and set on pillars.
Here God is imagined to draw a circle on the face of the waters to make the earth.
(Prov 8:26-27 NRSV) when he had not yet made earth and fields, or the world’s first bits of soil. When he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,
A circle is of course a flat round object. Some would say that the ancient Hebrews had no word for sphere so they used circle, but that is not true. There is a Hebrew word for ball used in the bible. A flat round earth was intuitive to these primitive people. If you picture yourself in their place, it would not be too hard to imagine the earth as being round and flat as you turn around to trace the outline of the horizon where the sky seems to meet the earth.
Here God is imagined to sit above the circle of the earth looking down on it’s inhabitants who are small like grasshoppers.
(Isa 40:22 NRSV) It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in;
Again a circle is a flat two dimensional object and there was a Hebrew word for ball which would have been more appropriate if the author would have been aware of the earth’s spherical nature.
Here the author of Daniel writes of a dream of Nebuchadnezzar where a tree grows at the "center" of the earth. Assuming that the tree grew on the surface, this is most certainly the center of a flat earth as a spherical earth would have no center on it’s surface. Also notice that the tree grew so tall it’s top reached heaven and was visible to the "ends of the earth". So these verses indicate that Nebuchadnezzar and the author of Daniel pictured a flat earth as everyone else did in their time.
(Dan 4:10-11 NRSV) Upon my bed this is what I saw; there was a tree at the center of the earth, and its height was great. The tree grew great and strong, its top reached to heaven, and it was visible to the ends of the whole earth.
Here it is possible that this gospel author still imagined a flat earth as Jesus is able to see all the kingdoms of the world from a high mountain. This would not be possible on a spherical earth.
(Mat 4:8 NRSV) Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor;
Here the author of Job imagines that God could take the edges of the earth and shake the wicked out of it.
(Job 38:13 NIV) that it might take the earth by the edges and shake the wicked out of it?
Here the author of Job is saying something is longer than the earth. A flat earth with ends could be compared for length, but longer has no meaning for a spherical earth.
(Job 11:9 NRSV) Its measure is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea.
One end of a flat earth to the other end of a flat earth is mentioned here (a spherical earth had no ends).
(Deu 13:7 NRSV) any of the gods of the peoples that are around you, whether near you or far away from you, from one end of the earth to the other,
Again, some would say that the ends of the earth is not be taken literally and that would be true today, but the phrase is leftover from when people used to really believe the earth had ends, which was the case for the ancient Hebrews and most everyone else at that time.
Here is a few more verses that mention the ends of the earth
Deu 28:49, Deu 28:64, Deu 33:17, 1 Sam 2:10, Job 1:7, Job 28:24, Job 37:3, Psa 2:8, Psa 19:4, Psa 22:27, Psa 33:13, Psa 33:14, Psa 48:10, Psa 59:13, Psa 61:2, Psa 65:5, Psa 72:8
The Bible’s immovable earth set on pillars
Here the earth is imagined to be set on pillars and immovable.
(Psa 93:1 NRSV) … He has established the world; it shall never be moved;
(1 Sam 2:8 NRSV) For the pillars of the earth are the Lord’s, and on them he has set the world.
(Isa 24:18 NRSV) or the windows of heaven are opened, and the foundations of the earth tremble.
The Bible’s solid sky dome
Here God is imagined to create a solid sky dome that separates the waters into two parts.
One would become the oceans and the other would remain above the solid sky dome to provide an explanation of where water came from to cause clouds and rain in the absence of the knowledge of evaporation.
(Gen 1:6-7 NRSV) And God said, "Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters."
So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so.
Here is another verse which mentions the water above the sky dome.
(Psa 148:4 NRSV) Praise him, you highest heavens, and you waters above the heavens!
Here celestial bodies are attached to this sky dome.
(Gen 1:14-17 NRSV) And God said, "Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night; and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth." And it was so. God made the two great lights–the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night–and the stars.
God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth,
Notice that the lights, the Sun, the Moon, and the stars are set inside the sky dome.
Here it is mentioned that the sky dome is hard.
(Job 37:18 NRSV) Can you, like him, spread out the skies, hard as a molten mirror?
(Prov 8:28 NRSV) when he made firm the skies above, …
God is imagined to walk on top of the sky dome.
(Job 22:14 NRSV) Thick clouds enwrap him, so that he does not see, and he walks on the dome of heaven.’
The sky is imagined as something that has to open to let things pass through it
Here notice that heaven has to be "opened" for things to pass through, things in and above heaven to be seen, and for rainwater to come through. One would think that would not be necessary unless the sky was imagined to be solid. Some would say that this was not be taken literally, but the sky was imagined to be solid in most cultures for over 1500 years after the last books of the bible were written.
(John 1:51 NRSV) And he said to him, "Very truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man."
(Acts 10:11 NRSV) He saw the heaven opened and something like a large sheet coming down, being lowered to the ground by its four corners.
(Acts 7:56 NRSV) "Look," he said, "I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!"
(Mat 3:16-17 NRSV) And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, "This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased."
(2 Chr 6:26 NRSV) "When heaven (same Hebrew word as sky) is shut up and there is no rain because…
(Psa 78:23 NRSV) Yet he commanded the skies above, and opened the doors of heaven (same Hebrew word as sky);
(Mal 3:10 NRSV) Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, so that there may be food in my house, and thus put me to the test, says the LORD of hosts; see if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing. (talking about rain for crops)
(Rev 11:6 NRSV) They have authority to shut the sky, so that no rain may fall during the days of their prophesying,
(Gen 7:11-12 NRSV) In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, on that day all the fountains of the great deep burst forth, and the windows of the heavens were opened. The rain fell on the earth forty days and forty nights.
Joshua commands the Sun to stand still in the sky
Here Joshua was imagined to have commanded the Sun and the Moon to stand still over particular geographic locations like a helicopter could be imagined to hover over a particular mountain or valley as if the Sun and the Moon were only a few miles high instead of 93 million (Sun) and 1/4 million (Moon) miles away. To the author the Sun and the Moon were attached to a rotating solid sky dome, just a few miles above his head.
(Josh 10:12-13 NRSV) On the day when the LORD gave the Amorites over to the Israelites, Joshua spoke to the LORD; and he said in the sight of Israel, "Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and Moon, in the valley of Aijalon."
And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stopped in midheaven, and did not hurry to set for about a whole day.
Jesus probably saw the universe the same way everyone else did in his day
Here it is indicated that Jesus himself pictured the stars as objects that could fall to the earth which would seem reasonable if he pictured the stars as little lights attached to a solid sky dome just a few miles up like everyone else in his day.
Instead, apparently unknown to Jesus, stars are objects typically millions of times larger than the earth and unimaginably distant.
(Mark 13:24-25 NRSV) "But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven, and the powers in the heavens will be shaken.
For further reference I recommend videos by a fellow in Georgia who refers to himself as “King Heathen.”
He does an excellent job of demonstrating these verses visually.
Flat Earth According to the Bible part 1
Flat Earth According to the Bible part 2
Flat Earth According to the Bible part 3
and so………what is your point????….
if you can’t understand this….how can I, or I mean??????? ….Us????? (Trinity??),,,,,,, expect you to get …..anything……I mean…….how many clues do you need??????????????
God
Actually, Francis, I don’t see your point. I thought it was an interesting article; I’d been looking for something that pulls together just what the Bible says about the flat earth and geocentrism.
[...] Abraham, Moses, and pre-Zoroastrianism history as claimed in the Byblos, is a farce. Ezra created the bible for political reasons after Cyrus let the Jews back into Jerusalem so they could rebuild the temple that was destroyed by the Babylonians. The teachings such as slavery, a flat earth, the heavenly fixture, the centrality of the earth in the heavens, the creation of the universe, et al have been demolished. Yet still, people persist. Give it up already, and move on. Honestly. [...]
Simply there is no clear cut metion of the words “flat earth” in the bible. Isrealis who live in hilly areas cannot say the earth is flat. Bible mostly uses allegorical language with reference to teaching the audience. It is not basically speaking about science though scientific inferences can be drawn from the Bible but it is not a Sicince book. It is historical, social, religious book.
Thanks.
The bible doesn’t say, or at least isn’t translated to directly say the words: “flat earth” but anyone who reads it with an open mind will see that it is assumed by the authors, just like it was assumed by all other authors in ancient times up until the Greeks just a few hundred years before Jesus.
As most people in their times, even the authors of the New Testament still believed in the primitive ancient view of the universe:Jesus being able to see all kingdoms of the world from the top of a mountain, the ends and corners of the earth, ends of heaven, the layers of heaven (the sky) and heaven(s) (the sky) opening, etc…
I also disgree about science being able to be drawn or infered from the bible. The bible suffers from the same lack of knowledge and virtually no science to speak of in the ancient times it was written. The authors were obviously all trapped in the ignorance of their day.
In contrast, from one end of the bible to the other it teaches blind faith which is one of the things that science was developed to filter out of man’s thinking.
Evg. Aftab Anwar says:
Don’t you mean mythological, servile and superstitious?
I have often heard “the bible isn’t a science book.” But after I read Daniel Boorstin’s “The Discoverers” I realized that the bible was an excellent science book…for that day. The “scientists” of that day believed the same way the bible authors believed. Not just about the earth and the universe, but about the workings of nature and the animal (human) body. That was the best they had meaning the words weren’t inspired by an entity with great knowledge…much less infinite knowledge. To the people proposing that this was “imagery” and “figures of speech” I contend that any biblical references to “god” doing anything were also figures of speech and imagery. Just as they believed the earth was a disk (not flat as in no mountains, but with no curvature as in a sphere) and that the sun, moon and the stars were embedded in a dome, they believed that god did this and god did that.
That’s very well put. I agree with what you are saying about believers not having it both ways. The authors of the Bible were obviously trapped in the limits of understanding that existed in ancient times and expressed these primitive views clearly in their writings.
It’s almost comical for anyone to suggest that even though virtually everyone on earth until the time of Galileo thought the sun actually rose in the east and set in the west (because they believed Sun revolved around the earth) that the biblical authors who lived in ancient times didn’t mean the words sunset and sunrise literally as if they somehow knew the earth rotated and didn’t bother to write or tell anyone about it.
This is particularly bizarre in light of the biblical tale of Joshua commanding the sun to stand still in the sky over a geographical feature of the earth as if the sun were small and only a few miles high in the sky which is exactly what everyone else on earth believed at the time this was set down in writing.
Stimulating post.Its easy to see how the underworld mythology grew out of this primitive understanding too.eg.people discovered deep caves which would have led to ‘sheol’ or ‘hades’ the shadowy dwelling place of the dead.Then later volcanic lava was evidence of the fires of hell below….
Capella, I have a question for you: what point do you intend to make with this article? You seem to infere that because the Bible does not present accurate science we therefore cannot place trust in the rest of it, but I want to clarify.
The overall goal of my website is to present the problems in the Bible that exist from cover to cover which yes, shows that the Bible can’t be trusted to support belief in an invisible father figure.
In other articles I point out among other things: prophecy failures, immorality by Bible heroes, problems with Creationism/ID, how women are basically property in much of the Old and New Testaments, utterly ridiculous Bible stories, and numerous contradictions and errors in the Bible.
There are some Christians that think the biblical authors somehow had modern knowledge of the shape of the earth, the layout of the solar system, etc… This article shows that the biblical authors had the same level of understanding that everyone else had back in the primitive times it was written.
Of course the Bible is not flat. It’s spherical all the way up. The way down are the turtles. Though it has some corners on it…
So true how they wrote from the limited knowledge they had in their times. Also, Joshua
should have commanded the Earth to stop moving,(spinning)since the sun already does not move in relation to the earth.:)It would’nt have made a difference in the daytime if the Sun stopped.
The very basis of this article is a bit messed up I’m afraid… I don’t know where you got this ‘dome set upon pillars’ thing. The Bible indicates that there was a layer of water above the atmosphere that drastically changed the atmospheric pressure and protected the earth from harmful rays from the sun. That’s extremely different from what you’ve said Christians to believe. There was no rain before the flood. The Bible states that. I’d like to see the Biblical references for how you put together this weird idea… I’ve never heard of it.
I’m sorry, but I don’t think you read my article very carefully. Please read it again. I didn’t say that the ancient bible authors said the dome was set upon pillars. The earth was set on pillars according to the bible authors.
I also didn’t say anything about rain being before the flood according to the bible authors. You apparently misunderstood something else there. It does plainly state in the bible however that the “windows of heaven were opened” to provide much of the water for the flood.
The bible authors from the old testament to the end of the new testament believed that the waters you talk about were up there above what they thought was the solid sky dome of the sky keeping them up there. Like other ancient peoples, being unaware of the concepts of evaporation and condensation, etc… this was their primitive way of explaining where water and clouds came from when it rained, hence the references all through the bible about the sky being “shut” and “opened” to let water and other things through.
If you had read the whole article you would have seen all of the biblical references I list on these things. BTW, this isn’t my idea, this is standard non-apologetic information. Only fundamentalist try to claim the bible authors somehow had modern day knowledge about these things and they hold no credibility in the scientific community.
Your assertion about a layer of water above the earth is a good example. If there was ever a layer of water somehow being held above the earth as creationists/ID people claim, it would have had an effect on the air pressure, but not a good effect. The water would have exerted so much pressure on the air below it that the air pressure would have been as great as it is on the planet Venus which has crushed every probe that has attempted to land on it like an empty beer can. All humans would have been killed very quickly. None of this sort of nonsense ever makes it past scientific peer review.
However the bible authors definitely described a solid solid sky dome, again just like most other primitive ancient people believed.
There’s no reason to believe the Biblical authors had any special advanced knowledge of science. They believed pretty much the same things other cultures did in their day (flat earth with “ends” set on pillars, water leaking out of sluice gates in the sky, etc…) and this is very obvious in the scriptural references.
great article. It’s a good way to get fundamentalists to think, if that is possible about the veracity of the book they lead their lives by. I don’t mind people believing in the gospel thing but when they mock years of hard science and research it does annoy me a bit.
was it a common misconception that the world would look like a circle from some distance away, in the context of looking at it from deep space?
Yes, apparently at least some ancient Hebrews thought if they could go high enough into the sky that the earth would look like a circle, probably from noticing that the horizon appears to encircle them.
It appears that they also thought the sky was solid and hard to penetrate so any idea of going out much further into “space” was beyond them. In any case it appears that they believed the water that makes clouds and rain (being ignorant of evaporation) existed above the sky dome.
A: I think some need to look up what the word ‘Firmament” means.
B: Of course as Cap states the ancient scribes thought the world was flat. No different than the Sun and Moon, both were “flat circular discs”.
The best description would be; circular or disc.
As the author notes in Isa the author uses two different words to define circle and ball.
C: The bible tells us they were closely influenced by Egypt, I do not think there is an argument regarding Sun Disc verses Sun Sphere
To the North and east they had ancient Sumerian and Babylonian influence. I think the author has pointed this out in other articles. It is known that both of these cultures support the Firmament(hammered fashioned dome) which was passed down to the Canaanites.
D: The Hebrews IMO were Canaanite who lived in the hills and separated themselves from the major population. I prefer the work of Israel Finkelstein as he appears to be with no agenda.
His work shows no entry of a Israelite force into Canaan as the bible suggest, nor evidence a Davidic and Solomonic biblical kingdom.
So I think we must look to where the facts lead. My conclusion is
1:they simply rewrote the oral myths that either some participated in creating or editing
2: or all was done(myth was fully developed) prior to scribes recording the legends and myths.
3: We have to research outside the bible to verify particular cultural clues such as ‘Firmament’. When this is done and was done with the term ‘Firmament” as used in the bible; Firmament is defined as a “hard/hammered dome covering”.
The term “Firmament” gives a point of reference towards an older culture with records of beliefs, events etc.
stars will never fall from the sky. The only possibility is that this earth will move closer to the sun. If that happened then we would all die of heat exhaustion even before the sun looked much bigger in the sky. If the galaxy collapsed in on itself the stars would move toward the bright band of the milky way but it would happen over many human generations.
One more passage about the flat earth…
(Job 38:14)”The earth takes shape like clay under a seal.”
Do a google search on “clay seal” and you’ll see that it’s a flat circular disc. Similar to the way people would seal an envelope shut by pressing a stamp into a few drops of hot wax, in ancient times they sealed things shut with a blob of fresh clay. Then they’d press a stamp into it to flatten it out.
We recognize you for this post. It was an extraordinary review which was very useful.
“The bible authors from the old testament to the end of the new testament believed that the waters you talk about were up there above what they thought was the solid sky dome of the sky keeping them up there. Like other ancient peoples, being unaware of evaporation and condensation, etc… this was their primitive way of explaining where water and clouds came from when it rained, hence the references all through the bible about the sky being “shut” and “opened” to let water and other things through.”
We certainly have to remember, the Bible is a history book written by men. At the time of its writings, their knowledge was limited, and they could only compare events to things they were familiar with.
I agree completely. This is only directed against those who try to say the Old Testament writers somehow had current day knowledge of the nature of the universe, mainly people who live in the Bible Belt here in the US.
I have always been curious as to how the ancient “Dome Believers” explained the earths shadow on the moon?
I don’t know, but the ancient Greeks listed the shadow on the moon as one of the reasons why they started coming around to the idea of a spherical earth.
So the bible is clearly written with the knowledge of the day. While the vast majority of people will agree that the earth is a sphere and that it revolves around the sun, many of those same people will also argue for biblical literalism. You can’t have it both ways! And if you allow that the bible is written based on the limited understanding of the time, then how do you reconcile that with the idea that the bible is the divinely inspired, infallable word of god? You can’t! So if we agree that the bible is incorrect on these issues (you either insist that the earth is flat, or you agree that the bible is wrong, or you hide your head under a pillow and hope this goes away like a bad dream), then how can it be trusted on ANYTHING? How do you decide that it’s ok for the bible to have it wrong on this issue, but still believe everything else? You can only do that if you’ve already decided that this is what you WANT to believe, regardless of the facts. In which case there is no point in debating the facts.
Earth is ground. The disc is pangaea. The dome is the atmosphere. A layer of invisible instant incineration. Which all happens after the splitting of waters. Which is the splitting of light and dark. Which is the fundamental process and equation for all things after that. Duh!
Yea, except if you want to imagine that there was some reason for ancient bible authors to encode what really happened into primitive simplistic analogies you have several problems.
The “heaven and the earth” are created before the “let there be light” which most people trying to shoehorn modern cosmology into the primitive Genesis myths say is the big bang. There was no space for the earth or the chaotic “waters” to exist before the big bang, so that’s obviously wrong.
The earth is also created “days” before the Sun and stars which causes some other problems. Modern cosmology says that the elements that make up the earth were created inside of previously existing stars as a result of nuclear reactions during their lives and during their death throes. Also the sun and the earth came about a the same time in modern solar system formation models.
I’ve got another article that deals with this:
Does the creation account in Genesis fit the Big Bang and modern cosmology?
Could people have got the idea that the sky was a solid metallic vault from having seen pieces of iron and stone (meteorites) falling from the sky? Isaiah’s vision of God in Isaiah 6:1-6 looks to me like a description of a fireball and the fall of a meteorite (the ‘live coal’ or ‘hot stone’ of verse 6).
An excellent article.
It is known that a handful of greek philosophers knew (and even measured the diameter)that the Earth was a sphere but they were flirting with their own safety. The Earth was considered to be flat from the beginning of time to as recent as about 4 centuries ago, when Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake. A little later, Galileo Galile was placed under house arrest by the Catholic church for publicising what he actually saw and was only pardoned a couple of decades ago by that same church.
Going back thousands of years, the ancient egyptians had a concept of a sky dome with a sun, moon and stars. It is depicted in their drawings and on their stone carvings. Their world was flat and covered with a dome represented by a god in a human shape.
Before the telescope, it was common practice for people to speculate about how big the stars were. Some thought that they were like hanging lamps, while others thought that they were actually holes in the sky dome. Their sizes were thought to range from diameters of about 1 m to about 10 m.
It was thought that (on a clear day and with good eyesight) it was possible to actually see details in heaven. Say, large features such as the gates, the garden walls and light reflections from water ponds.
I frequently wonder why some clever adventurer did not go to the “ends of the Earth” (where the dome touched the ground) and actually climb onto the dome and ascend into heaven by walking on top of the dome. Just the same, someone from heaven could descend to Earth the same way.
Heaven (the stuff on top of the sky dome) has had to be shifted periodically. After Galileo, it had to be moved from being just high in the sky to being in outer space. Since the NASA space explorations, it has had to be moved out further and further. Heaven is now beyond our Solar System. The days are gone when the prophets could sit and watch their sheep while contemplating God and a Paradise in Heaven, with a garden of Eden, just out of eyesight. It was a nice thought – while it lasted.
Do you have any further resources on the solid skydome/flat earth in the bible? And I read other translations of Job that don’t seem to make it as obvious that its talking about a solid skydome. I used to be Christian but now consider myself agnostic, although my mind keeps making excuses for the bible and thinking “oh this is metaphorical! Oh it’s just a fancy, old way of saying what modern science says”. Any help is appreciated (:
The first time I remember reading about the sky in the Bible as being imagined as solid was a long time ago in William Harwood’s “Mythology’s Last Gods.” After doing some research, I realized that other ancient cultures such as the Egyptians also believed this and it wasn’t anything unusual for the time. For them the sky wasn’t something that could be “reached” by any means. You could get closer if you climbed a mountain, but to ancient peoples there was no way to get up there and because of the primitive state of knowledge at that time and the aspect of human thought that causes us to crave closure in our knowledge about all things, imaginations ran wild. Carl Sagan mentioned that in this modern age there’s still tribes of people who believe that stars are the campfires of gods living in the sky.
I’m an ex-Christian also and at the time I was a Christian, I noticed that our church tended to project modern knowledge, morals and culture onto these primitive people who wrote the Bible because they were taught to be examples. Bible translators also contribute to this heavily. There’s no reason however to think that Biblical authors had modern cosmology. That’s modern translators and Biblical commentators interpreting it that way.
For example: The King James Bible which was written in the 1600s translates the Hebrew word for sky more accurately as “firmament.” The New Revised Standard which is supposed to be the King James Bible modernized translates the word as “dome.” In other modern translations the word is obscured further as “vault” or “expanse” for example.
So it’s not even remotely doubtful that they meant a solid structure? I also was wondering is it possible Jesus meant meteors when he said the stars would fall for heaven? Or is there a specific word for that or some place else in the bible that addresses that?
In the bible the author of Job described the sky as “hard as molten mirror.” God is described as walking on the sky. The sky is often described as having to “open” to let things get through or for things to be seen or to let water come through for rain and clouds (what ancient people often called “sluicegates” in ignorance of modern day knowledge of evaporation).
Unless one believes that the authors of the Bible had special knowledge of modern cosmology that they for some reason didn’t share with anyone back then or mentioned in the Bible and weren’t being literal when they said for instance “sun rise” or “sun stopped in sky” as they did in the Bible when everyone else in their day literally believed the sun rose and moved across the sky (instead of the earth rotating) then I think you have to conclude they literally believed in a “firmament” or skydome as mentioned.
As far as the stars of Jesus falling from the sky, one can believe that this was a bad translation and he meant meteors or missiles or whatever, but when you start going there, all bets are off as far as really understanding the Bible. One could wonder for instance if Jesus really meant sex and masturbation when he said to “love” your neighbor as yourself. In that case, things mentioned in the Bible can be twisted to mean anything one wants or needs them to mean.
To be sure there are a vast amount of translation and copyist errors in the Bible from being handed down generation to generation over thousands of years particularly before stories were transcribed for the first time (before being handed down orally) but this is what we have to work with.
The Greek word used for star in the quote of Jesus in the book of Mark is “aster” which means “star.” The same Greek word that’s the root of our English word “disaster” which means “bad star” (an astrological concept).
I just remembered the story of God throwing down boulders in Joshua so if Jesus meant rocks/boulders/meteors, he probably would’ve used that word, not one for a literal star. Also, do you have any links to more information about the evidence or lack thereof for the global flood? Perhaps even on your blog? (: I love reading and learning about this stuff. It’s fascinating to me.
I’ve got a couple on this website:
mr. peebles article on the Bible flood myth
The “Love Ark”