"He stretches out the north over empty space and hangs the earth on nothing." - Job 26:7*"For millenniums, various theories of what supports the earth--elephants, giants, and other fantastic means--were accepted by mankind as truth. The Bible made no such absurd error. How could Job, more than 3,000 years ago, possibly have known that God "hangs the earth upon or over nothing," except by divine inspiration?" [*footnote in the AMP Bible]
This concept was utterly foreign to the thought of man during this time. No other ancient document describes the earth floating on nothing. The Bible doesn't stop there.
"It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in." - "Isaiah 40:22 (KJV).
The Duoay-Rheims translation (which comes from the Latin Vulgate) records it this way;
"It is he that sitteth upon the globe of the earth"
5 comments:
How can you think this doesn't show the bible to be wrong?
The North is not stretched out over empty space.
In the extreme North, it is empty. There is no land mass but there is ocean. The Hebrew word for 'empty place' is 'tohu' which is the exact Hebrew word used in Genesis 1:2 (without form and void which describes the earth as it stood entirely covered by water. Under the Northern Polar ice cap there is virtually nothing but water. The Polar ice cap literally is spread or stretched over the North, precisely as it says in Job. "Be not faithless but believe!" - Jesus
Actually the correct translation is he stretch the north out over DESOLATION. He hangeth the EARTH on empty space.
Mistranslations of the bible do more damage to credibility than anything else.
No matter where you go on the earth, empty space is above you. Above means away from the center of the earth, below means towards the center of the earth. So if "on" means on in the sense of "on the table", then the empty space must be below the surface of the earth, i.e. a hollow earth.
If otoh "on" means simply in contact with (the fly is on the ceiling) we have another problem because the earth is not in contact with the atmosphere, not empty space. This is no surprise because the discovery that air was a substance awaited the Greeks, and was unknown to the Hebrews.
The biggest flaw in the verse is the idea that the earth hangs motionless (wherever it is). Luther found over 40 bible verses that "proved" Galileo wrong about the motion of the earth. Job could have cleared up this confusion by saying that the earth moves through nothing. Or he could have said that nothingness surrounds the earth. But since his cosmology was flawed he said none of these things.
Fred Kohn wrote: "This is no surprise because the discovery that air was a substance awaited the Greeks, and was unknown to the Hebrews."
You should take a look at http://thefundidriveby.blogspot.com/2008/10/ancient-bible-passages-ahead-of-science.html
Also Fred, though I feel the blog's description of the scriptures in Job (which were also quoted by Galileo in defense of his own theory) are quite adequate. I invite you to look at Genesis 1:2, where the devastation was described as a water covered earth.
Then you go on to say: "The biggest flaw in the verse is the idea that the earth hangs motionless (wherever it is)."
That's your opinion. There is not any flaw in that verse since the verse deals with the shape of the earth (globe)as we observe it from space. The scriptures I quoted don't deal with the earth's rotation, tilt or orbit around the sun.
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