The Biblical Cosmos

A Pilgrim's Guide to the Weird and Wonderful World of the Bible

Robin A. Parry, Hannah Parry

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781625648105
  9781498222525
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630876227
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Études bibliques

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of the Bible.

When we read Scripture we often imagine that the world inhabited by the Bible's characters was much the same as our own. We would be wrong. The biblical world is an ancient world with a flat earth that stands at the center of the cosmos, and with a vast ocean in the sky, chaos dragons, mystical mountains, demonic deserts, an underground zone for the dead, stars that are sentient beings, and, if you travel upwards and through the doors in the solid dome of the sky, God's heaven--the heart of the universe.

This book takes readers on a guided tour of the biblical cosmos with the goal of opening up the Bible in its ancient world. It then goes further and seeks to show how this very ancient biblical way of seeing the world is still revelatory and can speak God's word afresh into our own modern worlds.

1

Joining the Flat Earth Society

The Big Picture

“Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him” (Rev 1:7). I vividly recall puzzling over this passage when I was at school. I imagined Jesus appearing in the sky over my town in Wales—because it is obvious that Jesus would return to Wales (with Welsh being the language of the angels, and all that)—but the burning question was how the people in Australia could see him too. It was suggested to me that the solution was television, which allowed the biblical prophecy finally to be fulfilled. Call me a cynic, but the idea that Jesus had delayed his parousia simply to give us time to invent TV so that Australians could watch him return seemed a little far fetched! So what is going on? That question is one of those that we hope to get some answer to in this opening tour of the biblical earth.

The earth’s surface is the most familiar part of the biblical cosmos, so it seems like a sensible place to begin the tour. You will easily recognize a lot of the same features from your own home: sea, land, mountains, rivers, lakes, trees, deserts, and animals. But before we start to feel too at home we need to look closer. Things that at first sight seem to be ordinary turn out upon second look to be very strange.

A Flat Earth

The biblical earth, like that of the other cultures in the ancient world, was not a globe but was flat. We see hints of this in all sorts of ways. Biblical language often speaks of:

• “the four corners of the earth.”14

• “the ends of the earth.”15 This phrase appears over fifty times in the Bible.

• the “pillars” of the earth16 and its “foundation,”17 which hold it still and ensure its stability. The biblical earth is thus fixed down and utterly immovable.18

A moment’s reflection will show that all such language works on a flat-earth model, an earth fixed firmly on pillars and a foundation. One might, of course, take it metaphorically—and indeed we still use much of this language today in precisely such a non-literal sense. That is certainly possible. However, various other biblical texts suggest that it was more-than-metaphor to the original authors and audiences of Scripture. Consider Nebuchadnezzar’s dream: “The visions of my head as I lay in bed were these: I saw, and behold, a tree in the midst of the earth, and its height was great. The tree grew and became strong, and its top reached to heaven, and it was visible to the end of the whole earth” (Dan 4:10–11). This would obviously only make sense as an image if the earth was flat.

We might also think of Job 37:3, which implies that the lightning God hurls to earth can be seen to the corners of the earth. That too suggests a flat earth. Consider also the devil’s temptation of Jesus in the wilderness: “Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory” (Matt 4:8). On a globe you could not see all the kingdoms of the earth, even from the highest mountain imaginable. Now recall those words concerning Jesus’ return with which this chapter opened: “Behold, he is coming with the clouds, and every eye will see him, even those who pierced him, and all tribes of the earth will wail on account of him” (Rev 1:7). It’s the same issue. All these images make sense if the world was envisaged as flat.

Interestingly, even when the Bible does use clear metaphors for the earth they are metaphors that assume its flatness. Thus Job 38:13 says that the dawn will “take hold of the skirts of the earth, and the wicked will be shaken out of it.” The earth is here like a sheet that is shaken out to flick off the dirt.

But some claim otherwise. I vividly recall being told how the Bible amazingly taught that the earth was spherical:

When he established the heavens I [Wisdom] was there;

when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,

when he made firm the skies above,

when he established the fountains of the deep . . . (Prov 8:27–28)

He has inscribed a circle on the face of the waters

at the boundary between light and darkness. (Job 26:10)

Do you not know?

Have you not heard?

Has it not been told you from the beginning?

Have you not understood since the earth was founded?

He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth,

and its people are like grasshoppers.

He stretches out the heavens like a canopy,

and spreads them out like a tent to live in. (Isa 40:21–22)

It would be really groovy if the Bible’s earth were a globe. That would make biblical authors the first people ever to have proposed the idea. Alas, one cannot simply read off a globe from these texts. The Hebrew hûg can mean curve, circle, or dome. The Proverbs text is ambiguous—“a circle/curve/dome on the face of the deep” could pick up on the common ancient Near Eastern notion of the land as a flat disc in the midst of a sea. However, the Job text seems to play with the same notion as Proverbs and it clarifies the meaning somewhat. The circle on the waters is located at the boundary between light and darkness and is thus not to be identified with the edge of a disc-shaped land but with the furthest horizon. This lay upon the oceans at the point where the sky connected with the earth. Why a curve/circle? Perhaps it referred to the belief, common in the ancient world, of a vast circular sea that surrounded the dry land. Some Egyptian and Babylonian texts associate the edge of this circular sea with the place that the sun rises and sets. This seems to fit Job. Presumably the slight curve of the horizon was thought of as a glimpse of the complete circle inscribed by the sky-dome at its intersection with the sea (imagine an inverted glass bowl lowered until its rim touches a body of water).19

Isaiah’s “circle of the earth” may also allude to the idea of a roughly circular land mass in the midst of an ocea...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Joining the Flat Earth Society
• Chapter 2: Here Be Dragons!
• Chapter 3: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea
• Chapter 4: A Land Down Under
• Chapter 5: Eyes in Their Stars
• Chapter 6: Brighter than a Thousand Suns
• Chapter 7: God’s in the House
• Chapter 8: Christ’s in the House
• Chapter 9: How Can We Inhabit the Biblical Cosmos Today?
• Chapter 10: The Cosmic Temple Today
• Chapter 11: The Biblical Heavens Today
• Chapter 12: The Biblical Earth Today
• Modern Books Quoted or Referenced