Question of the Week: How can one refute the claim made by atheists, skeptics, and even some Christians that the Bible a flat-earth book?

My Answer: First of all, the idea that the Bible promotes a flat-earth doctrine presupposes that people living 2–3 thousand years ago lacked the capacity to determine the true shape of Earth. That presupposition is incorrect. The fact that at different locations on Earth different stellar constellations are seen and they are seen at different orientations was sufficient to persuade ancient peoples that they were living on a spherical body. Aristotle writing in the 4th century BC cited this evidence as proof that Earth is spherical. However, documented mentions of a spherical Earth by Greek philosophers date back to the 6th century BC. Erastosthenes in the 3rd century BC used the sunlight lines at summer solstice in wells at different latitudes to determine the diameter of Earth to 1 percent precision. Both ancient Greek and Egyptian astronomers pointed to the semi-circular shadow of Earth on the Moon during lunar eclipses as evidence for the sphericity of Earth.

The biblical texts most often cited in the claim that the Bible teaches a flat Earth are Job 38:5, 12-14, Isaiah 11:12, 40:22, and Revelation 7:1, 20:7. Of these passages, the most cited is Isaiah 40:22. The relevant part of Isaiah 40:22, referring to God, states, “He sits enthroned above the circle of the earth, and its people are like grasshoppers.” Whether the “circle of the earth” refers to a human on Earth or God looking down on Earth from above, in both cases the phrase would be consistent with a spherically shaped Earth. It is worth noting that only a sphere always looks like a circle when seen from above.

The Isaiah 11:12 and Revelation 7:1, 20:7 all refer to the “four corners of the earth.” However, even today, astronomers, physicists, and educated people around the world recognize and use the “four corners of the earth” as phenomenalogical language referring to the most distant parts of Earth from the standpoint of an observer at a specific location of Earth. It is clear from an examination of the context for all three of these passages that the most distant parts of Earth is the intent implied by the use of the idiom, the four corners of the earth. As the Theolological Wordbook of the Old Testament points out, the Hebrew word for “corners” used in Isaiah 11:12, kanap, in most of its appearances in the Old Testament is used figuratively.

The passage in Job 38:5 referring to Earth states, “Who fixed its dimensions? Certainly you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it?” The inference made by those claiming that the Bible is a flat-earth book is that the “measuring line” is a straight line which would be suitable for measuring a flat disk but not a sphere. This is an over-interpretation. Lines can be straight or curved. Also, it is customary to measure the diameter of a sphere with a straight-edge ruler.

Job 38:12-14 refers to the dawn seizing “the edges [or ends] of the earth” and earth taking “shape like clay under a seal.” What is interesting here is that for a spherical earth the arrival of dawn first shows up at the most distant horizon, end, or edge of the point of view of a human at a fixed point upon Earth’s surface. The taking shape like clay under a seal would apply to either a disk or a sphere and may be saying more about Earth’s rotation or its manufacture than its actual shape.

The irony of choosing Job 38:5, 12-14, Isaiah 11:12, 40:22, and Revelation 7:1, 20:7 to sustain the claim that the Bible is a flat Earth book is that these biblical texts better fit a spherical Earth than they do a flat Earth. While it would be an over-interpretation to conclude that these texts explicitly teach that Earth is a sphere, nowhere in the Bible do we find any text saying that Earth is flat. The Bible remains the only holy book for which we can say that it contains no provable errors or contradictions… (By Hugh Ross). 

JUDITH OF BETHULIA IN JUDEA.

Judith was a heroic woman who has long been admired by both Jews and Christians. Her story is found in the book that bears her name and is included in Roman Catholic and Orthodox Bibles. It was also included in early editions of the King James Bible until it began to be published without the apocryphal (or deuterocanonical) books. Since then, the memory of Judith’s exploits has faded among Protestant Christians.

Judith by August Riedel (1840).

The Book of Judith was written around 100 BCE and is part of our Judeo-Christian heritage. It is mentioned, for example, in the early Christian letter known as First Clement (1 Clem. 55). Judith is a work of fiction and contains several historical inaccuracies. But it is an interesting tale with echoes of stories of real women in the Hebrew Bible.

The setting of the narrative is the siege of a town in Judea named Bethulia. The Assyrian army, led by Holofernes, has cut off the town’s water supply and the Jews of Bethulia appear to be doomed. So Judith, a beautiful, wealthy and respected widow, takes matters into her own hands. With her female servant, she goes to the enemy’s camp where she pretends to defect to the Assyrian side.

Judith asks to see Holofernes and, as planned, the general is charmed by her beauty and wants to have sex with her. Judith waits a few days and at an opportune moment, when Holofernes is dead drunk, she stabs at his neck and cuts off his head. She and her servant then escape back to Bethulia with the severed head of the general, and with Judith’s virtue intact. The assassination of Holofernes marks a turning point in the siege and the people of Judea triumph over their enemy.

Throughout the story, Judith is portrayed as a formidable and pious woman who knows her own mind. The people around her, including the high priest and elders of Judea, respect her, listen to her, and do what she says. The Book of Judith also contains several of Judith’s prayers and her song of praise and victory. It’s a worthwhile read and can be read here.

https://margmowczko.com/judith-thecla-catherine-of-alexand …/

A Holocaust exhibit raises disturbing questions. The answers still matter today.

The entrance of the former Nazi death camp complex of Auschwitz in Poland. (Alik Keplicz/AP).

IF THE point of history is to learn from it, there are lessons galore to be found in a new special exhibition at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, one of the most important since the museum opened a quarter-century ago. The exhibit, “Americans and the Holocaust,” raises disturbing and complex questions about the years leading up to the killing of 6 million Jews and others in the Nazi camps. The answers resonate today.

A persistent myth is that Americans lacked information about the Nazi concentration camps. The exhibit shows otherwise, illustrating how news about the Nazi persecution of the Jews was reported in local, as well as national, newspapers and magazines, and in newsreels in the 1930s. On Time magazine’s July 10, 1933 cover, Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels appeared over the caption, “Say it in your dreams, ‘THE JEWS ARE TO BLAME’ ”.

True, there was a dearth of visual information about Hitler’s “Final Solution.” The devastating photographs only came later. Still, a sizable gap existed between what was known and what was done. Without offering excuses, the exhibit probes the explanations for this lacuna, including the impact the Great Depression had on the American people, and powerful currents of xenophobia and isolationism. After the dreadful Nazi riot against Jews in Germany and Austria on Nov. 9 and 10, 1938, known as Kristallnacht, polls showed that Americans overwhelmingly disapproved of Nazi treatment of the Jews, but also showed that they did not want to allow more Jewish refugees to enter the United States. The numbers of refugees admitted were a fraction of those who applied.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt took the nation to war, but he did not take the lead on a rescue of the Jews, a decision still much debated. The exhibit does not alter the known facts of Mr. Roosevelt’s logic. The president met at the White House with the Polish underground member Jan Karski in 1943, who told him of the horrors suffered by Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto and in a transit camp. But the president remained focused on war-winning, not rescue.

The exhibit recounts some shocking government blunders, including the State Department’s inexcusable refusal in 1942 to pass on information from Gerhart Riegner, the World Jewish Congress’s representative in Switzerland, about a plan being formulated in Hitler’s headquarters to eliminate 3.5 million to 4 million Jews. “Do not send” is scrawled on the document. More can and should have been done to raise the alarm during the war. By the time of the D-Day landing, 5 million Jews had already perished.

The exhibit notes that on Dec. 3, 1944, on this editorial page, The Post first introduced to readers a new word, “genocide,” coined by a Polish Jewish immigrant lawyer, Raphael Lemkin. Today, we have vastly improved tools to discover violence against a whole people; witness the telling satellite photographs of burned-out Rohingya villages in Burma or of the concentration camps in North Korea. To cite those examples, unfortunately, is to acknowledge that our response mechanism has not improved along with our technology.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-holocaust-exhibit-raises-disturbing-questions-the-answers-matter-today/2018/05/03/95bc6454-4e49-11e8-af46-b1d6dc0d9bfe_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.2c297f7867b5