The "Circle of the Earth"

Well, the obvious picture - the same that was intended, and that no doubt came to the Hebrew readers back when this was written: ol' YHWH sitting up there on his throne, above the stars and sun and such on the dome of the "firmament." And that dome was "spread out like a tent" over the circle = disk of the earth. Look at Daniel 4:10-11 : How do we do that on a sphere? You are putting words into Isaiah's quill that just weren't there. He meant "disk," because he thought the worrld was an immovable disk: as did his contemporaries. The early Church fathers had enough Greek "book learnin'" to know it was really a sphere, and start the apologetics to rationalize that error away. The "immovable" held on until Galileo's day and a little after, and then the spinmeisters respun those verses, too, or at least quit reading them as often.

To educated Greeks, I would imagine, but I don't know about a bunch of folks off in the wilds of Asia Minor. I have no idea where to even look for any real scholarship on exactly who found out abour sphericity when, or where. And I'm quite certain that the OT writers thought it flat, just based on the quotes I posted above.
And the whole lot *knew* that Earth was immovable.

CA, that's why I said "I don't know...." Those poor guys didn't have Fox News, ya' know. And I'm aware that the people Paul, et al., were trying to convert were more Greek than Semitic, too - I just have no real knowledge of how well they, or for that matter Caesar Augustus, were educated in astronomy or physical geography.[This message has been edited by Coragyps, 11-10-2003]