The Flat Earth, The Bible and a translation error that spawned a conspiracy that just won’t die

I’m thinking that Steemit has heard enough about my battle with dodgy knees, and even dodgier code, so I thought I’d give you something a little different today for the Challenge 30.

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This was kicked off by me (unfortunately) reading and commenting on this post.

If you have spent some time on YouTube recently you would have noticed the increase in content about the Flat Earth.

If you get into discussion with the Flat Earthers the argument for a flat earth always seems to originate from the Bible.

According to these well read and enlightened people, because the ‘four corners of the earth’ are mentioned in the bible, this means that we can’t be living on a sphere, and the globe earth model was created to drive people away from God.

So the earth is really a flat disk with a dome overhead.

Makes perfect sense right?

There are many problems with the Flat Earth model, but I want to focus on just the bible references today.

The Earth has four corners

There are a few references in the Bible that mention four corners. Here are some of them:

Isaiah 11:12
And He will lift up a standard for the nations And assemble the banished ones of Israel, And will gather the dispersed of Judah From the four corners of the earth.

Original Koine Greek translated from Hebrew: Isaiah 11:12
καὶ ἀρεῖ σημεῖον εἰς τὰ ἔθνη καὶ συνάξει τοὺς ἀπολομένους Ισραηλ καὶ τοὺς διεσπαρμένους τοῦ Ιουδα συνάξει ἐκ τῶν τεσσάρων πτερύγων τῆς γῆς

Revelation 7:1
After this I saw four angels standing at thefour corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth, so that no wind would blow on the earth or on the sea or on any tree.

Revelation 20:8
and will come out to deceive the nations which are in the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them together for the war; the number of them is like the sand of the seashore.

So let’s look at this.

The book of Isaiah actually comes from the Old Testament, so it was originally written in Hebrew. The Hebrew references translate to extremities - so the four extremities of the earth, which makes sense.

In Isaiah 11:12 the ‘four corners’ was actually translated into Greek as the four wings.

In this context think of a wing as in the wing of a building. So it means area – the four areas of the Earth, which would be North, South, East and West.

In the Revelations (which was originally written in Greek) the word used is actually ‘corners’, or perhaps more correctly, angles.

If you take the view of there being four angles, this also makes sense. Think of a cross with four 90 degree angles. These are the four angles of the earth – North, South, East and West.

In Revelations 7:1 it says:
After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth, so that no wind would blow on the earth or on the sea or on any tree.

If you change the text just slightly it makes much more sense.

After this I saw four angels standing at thefour points of the compass, holding back the four winds of the earth, so that no wind would blow on the earth or on the sea or on any tree.

But let’s say, for arguments sake, that I am wrong. Four corners means four corners

This still doesn’t work on a flat earth. The Flat Earth model is a disk with a dome overhead.

You still don’t get corners on a disk.

So the argument that because the bible uses the phrase four corners means the earth is flat, just doesn’t hold up.

In Rebuttal

So as I said in my comments on the post that got me into this in the first place, if you are going to use geography to support your argument, at least get the geography right.

In the video the chap points to flight paths and says they are going from Johannesburg, South Africa to Sydney, Australia. Except the flight paths indicated went to Brisbane instead. Not just a different city, it was a different STATE!

It’s the same with bible references. If you are going to use them, use them correctly. Find the original text, find out why this phrasing was used, find out what it meant at the time it was written.

Do your research and exercise due diligence.

It took less than 30 minutes for my wife to find and read the original Greek text of the bible. It took another 20 minutes of discussion about how the words were used and are used, and the meanings behind them to clarify what the phrase meant.

It turns out, my hypothesis was correct – the Flat Earth argument, using Bible references, comes from mis-translation and mis-understanding the meaning of the phrase four corners of the earth.

There are other scientific arguments made by Flat Earthers, but that’s fun for another day.

If you are a Flat Earther, please don’t feel that I am attacking you. That is not my intent.

I am attacking your argument based on bible references, as I find the argument to be flawed. If you have a better argument, by all means make it and let’s have an informed debate about it.

But please do your research first and don’t give me facts that I can dispute without leaving the comfort of my chair, or telling me that everything is fake and a conspiracy without telling me how it is fake and why it is fake, who faked it, when, where – you know, all the details that matter.

Here is a link to some references that you may find interesting.
http://www.christiananswers.net/q-eden/edn-c017.html

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