Paul,
I certainly agree that the ancient Hebrews believed in a geocentric
universe, and I have never found anything in the scriptures that argued
against geocentrism. Even today we normally use terminology about motion
to mean motion relative to the earth, the motion that we sense. Thus I
don't interpret a statement about the sun rising or setting or the earth
not moving as being an assertion that our computations of the orbits of
the planets are wrong. It was in order to make such computations that we
moderns have decided sometimes to use motion terminology to refer to
motion relative to something other than the earth.
Gordon Brown
Department of Mathematics
University of Colorado
Boulder, CO 80309-0395
On Thu, 13 Apr 2000 PHSEELY@aol.com wrote:
> I agree with your point in Daniel, especially since "seven times hotter" is
> probably figurative for "as hot as possible." But, I do not understand your
> saying that my interpretation of the passages in Psalms and Eccl is a modern
> interpretation. In fact, I see my interpretation as resisting the temptation
> to modernize. In the ANE, as illustrated in Eccl 1:5, people believed that
> the sun literally moved around a stationary earth. The universe was not
> heliocentric, but geocentric. One would not be interpreting these passages in
> their historical context but rather in a modern context if the language is
> interpeted as anything less than literally geocentric.
>
> Paul S.
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