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In ancient history, most cultures believed that the earth was flat, and if you went too far in a particular direction, off the edge you would fall! The ancient Bablylonians or Egyptians are said by some to have believed in a circular earth, but the earth shown in their diagrams was a circular, flat disk floating in the ocean. Until the time of Pythagoras, about 600 B.C. no one even suggested a spherical earth, and even then it was strictly an idea. It took until about the third century before the idea of a spherical earth really started to take hold, and many more centuries to provide confirmation in most minds that it was true. Until people could travel great distances and collect various observations, the spherical earth remained unproven.
But the Bible makes some very definite statements written years and even centuries before, about a round, spherical, rotating earth. In Isaiah 40:22 we read: “It is he that sitteth on the circle of the earth.” The Hebrew word for circle , khug, means “sphere”. This writing in Isaiah dates to about 700 B.C. Remember, even if some try to late-date this portion of Isaiah so that it is close to the time of the Greek scientists, would it be likely that he would be familiar with their speculations? Besides, there is much better evidence for an 700 B.C. date for Isaiah than any later dates proposed by some critics.
Even further back in the Book of Job, written probably before most if not all of the Old Testament (at the very least earlier than 1400 B.C.)., Job 26:10 speaks of a circular boundary of the seawaters: “He has compassed the waters with bounds, until day and night come to an end.” The word compassed is from the same Hebrew root word, khug, and means “drawn a circle”. This verse also implies the two hemispheres of the earth, one in the daylight, the other at night at any given time. The same word for spherical shape is used again in Proverbs 8:7, written in about 900 B.C.: “…when he set a compass upon the face of the deep.” All these teach the spherical shape of sea level on a global level. And in Job 38:14, the earth’s rotation is implied: “…it (the earth) is turned as a clay to a seal”, describing either the clay vessel turning on a potter’s wheel to received the impression of the signet ring seal of the potter, or it could be describing a rolling cylinder leaving impressions on the clay, as the light of dawn passes across the turning earth. In either case, this speaks of a rotating earth.
And no, the Bible does not teach that the earth is flat with four corners, as some allege that Revelation 7:1 teaches. The word translated as corners (gonia) is more properly translated “quarters”, “angles” “extreme limits” or “directions”. So no matter what way you slice the earth, the Bible teaches it is a round ball!
