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Monday, February 17, 2020

Earth and sea in Gen 1

Since the sky is usually thought by pre-scientific peoples to be a solid hemisphere literally touching the earth (or sea) at the horizon, the earth must necessarily be thought of as flat. It is impossible to conceive of the sky as a hemisphere touching the earth at the horizon, and yet conceive of the earth as a globe. If the earth were a globe but the sky just a hemisphere touching the earth, half of the earth would have no sky. The shape of the earth is accordingly explicitly or implicitly described by all pre-scientific peoples as being flat, and usually circular--a single disc-shaped continent. Paul H. Seely, "The Geographical Meaning of 'Earth' and 'Seas' in Genesis 1:10." WTJ 59 (1997), 232.

Even if, for argument's sake, we bracket the inspiration of Scripture, there are problems with Seely's generalizations:

i) He fails to distinguish between landlocked countries and coastal countries with maritime activities. 

ii) Apropos (i), the horizon is relative to the position of the viewer. It's not a fixed point but extends forward or backward as the viewer moves towards it. 

iii) Ancient mariners were aware of the North and South poles. That's hard to square with belief in a single disc-shaped contingent or celestial solid dome resting on the horizon. Empiriccal observation belies Seely's rigid schema. 

iv) Presumably, Seely believes the Pentateuch was compiled/redacted around the time of the Babylonian captivity. That raises the question of when Arctica and Antarctica were discovered and knowledge of their existence was popularized (e.g. Virgil, Ovid, Diogenes Laërtius). 

Bk I:32-51 The earth and sea. The five zones.

When whichever god it was had ordered and divided the mass, and collected it into separate parts, he first gathered the earth into a great ball so that it was uniform on all sides. Then he ordered the seas to spread and rise in waves in the flowing winds and pour around the coasts of the encircled land. He added springs and standing pools and lakes, and contained in shelving banks the widely separated rivers, some of which are swallowed by the earth itself, others of which reach the sea and entering the expanse of open waters beat against coastlines instead of riverbanks. He ordered the plains to extend, the valleys to subside, leaves to hide the trees, stony mountains to rise: and just as the heavens are divided into two zones to the north and two to the south, with a fifth and hotter between them, so the god carefully marked out the enclosed matter with the same number, and described as many regions on the earth. The equatorial zone is too hot to be habitable; the two poles are covered by deep snow; and he placed two regions between and gave them a temperate climate mixing heat and cold. 


To this end the golden Sun rules his circuit, portioned out in fixed divisions, through the world’s twelve constellations. Five zones comprise the heavens; whereof one is ever glowing with the flashing sun, ever scorched by his flames. Round this, at the world’s ends, two stretch darling to right and left, set fast in ice and black storms. Between these and the idle zone, two by grace of the gods have been vouchsafed to feeble mortals; and a path is cut between the two, wherein the slanting array of the Signs may turn. As our globe rises steep to Scythia and the Riphaean crags, so its slopes downward to Libya’s southland. One pole is ever high above us, while the other, beneath our feet, is seen of black Styx and shades infernal. 


156  And there are five terrestrial zones: first, the northern zone which is beyond the arctic circle, uninhabitable because of the cold; second, a temperate zone; a third, uninhabitable because of great heats, called the torrid zone; fourth, a counter-temperate zone; fifth, the southern zone, uninhabitable because of its cold.

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