Hi fairchild,
: First of all, I am shocked to hear that Noah's ark was not discovered.
Back in the 60s, the JWs gave a talk about Noah's Flood in which they claimed that some guy had actually brought back pieces of wood from Noah's ark. I always meant to investigate, but never found the time (as usual, the talk gave no references, so it would have been difficult to find the right ones). When I started carefully looking at such claims in 1991, I soon found that the Watchtower's reference had been to one Fernand Navarra, who turns out to have been a bit of a crackpot. He brought back some wood alright, but it was eventually carbon dated to about 800 A.D. This is reasonable, since until a massive earthquake around 1850 destroyed a huge section of Mount Ararat, a monastery dating a long way back existed way up on the mountain. It stands to reason that the monks, or any number of others, might have left wood lying around that gullible and all-too-willing-to-believe people like Navarra would assign to Noah's ark. Many books have been written on the subject, and to date no one has found any real evidence whatsoever that there's anything up there besides rock and snow.
: I swear I saw a documentary about that on TV a few years ago, where they had dug up the whole thing right on the mountain, and they had built a restaurant that overlooked 'the ark'. Grrrrrr
You're probably talking about the 1993 CBS presentation by Sun Pictures "The Incredible Discovery of Noah's Ark". I saw it back then (my then JW wife was quite irritated at my critical comments) and have a video of it now. It presented a lot of nonsense, to be perfectly frank. The young-earth creationists who sponsored the show (like John Morris of the Institute for Creation Research) were particularly fooled by one George Jammal, a member of a skeptics society, who went to some lengths to concoct a story about his going to Ararat with a friend, hacking a piece of wood off the ark, and his friend falling off a cliff and dying. Sun Pictures had quite a bit of footage with this guy telling his story. Turns out he took a piece of scrap wood from his woodpile, soaked it in teriyaki sauce and such, and presented it to Morris along with his story. Some months after the show aired, Jammal announced his hoax at a local skeptics meeting and they all had a good laugh. Morris and company were extremely embarrassed. I helped a philosophy student I knew from the Net, one Jim Lippard, who was himself a member of a skeptics society, write a humorous piece about the hoax called "Sun Goes Down in Flames: the Jammal Ark Hoax" ( http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/ark-hoax/jammal.html ). You ought to read this for a good look at how easy it is to fool willing believers.
: Okay, the link. I don't mean to be a pain in your butt,
I wouldn't have it any other way!
: but even after reading it carefully, I am not convinced. For one thing, none of us speaks Hebrew (at least I don't think so). All we have is a translation.
Not at all. We have plenty of good Hebrew language references. Hebrew has a word for "circle" (chuwg) and another for "ball". There's not a single place in the OT where "chuwg" is used in a sense other than what the context obviously shows means "circle", so there's no reason (other than a desire to believe) to think that "chuwg" means "sphere" in Isaiah 40:22. If you still disagree, then you have a nice research project.
Furthermore, look at what the text actually says (I'll use the language of the NWT). It says that "there is One who is dwelling above the circle of the earth." If "circle" literally means "sphere", then the rest of the phrase must be literal. That means that God literally lives "above" the earth. Where is "above the earth" literally? All of outer space! Does God live in outer space? I don't think so. The Bible seems to indicate that God lives outside our material universe. What do you think?
The text also says that God "is stretching out the heavens just as a fine gauze, who spreads them out like a tent in which to dwell." Obviously this is not literal, but metaphorical. If this is not literal, then it cannot be claimed that other questionable parts of the text are literal.
The point is that texts that are at best ambiguous cannot be used to prove anything. Therefore you can't use Isaiah 40:22 to prove anything about what the Jews thought about the shape of the earth. But I still say that the weight of evidence is that this passage describes a flat, circular earth rather than a spherical one.
: I speak several languages, and have actually read the bible in 3 different languages. Having been between different languages all my life, I know how hard it is to translate. To give you one example, I know that there are a few people from the Netherlands on this site, so they can confirm my statement here. In the bible, when the Israelites left Egypt, it says that they went through the 'wilderness'. If you read that in Dutch, the word 'desert' is used instead of wilderness. I always thought that they actually went through miles and miles of desert, and was kind of shocked to see the word 'wilderness' in an English translation. This is only one small example of how translations differ.
I understand all that. But a careful study would clear up the problems of meaning. You demonstrated that yourself.
: So, the word 'circle' has been translated as round, sphere, etc.. in Isaiah.
Right, but without any real justification. And the bible translators who have done so are few, because the careful ones all know that they're going out on a limb by doing it. By all means do your own study and you'll see for yourself.
: Furthermore, as I was reading through that site, before I ever cam to the word 'poetic', it was the word that I already had stuck in my head. I teach poetry and have been studying this art since I was very young. Reading the bible from a poetci viewpoint, I have to say that it does contain a large amount of writings that can definitely be defined as poetry, which does not make the reading any easier.
That it does, and your observation confirms my point that you can't use possibly poetic language to prove anything literal. Isaiah 40 certainly seems largely poetic to me.
: I don't know what to say about the scripture in Matthew, other than that it could be a figure of speech. For example, John Glen could have said "I took a look through the shuttle window and saw the whole world". Wrong, he could not have seen every country all at once.
True enough, but ambiguity rears its head yet again. Yet, as the piece you read makes clear, such a figure of speech would make little sense to people who didn't already think of the earth as a large, flat place with a circular rim. The description in Daniel is even more telling in this sense, with a large tree said to sit "in the center of the earth", which could be observed from every point of the earth. Imagine giving such a word picture to an audience today -- they'd think you were nuts, or at least, borrowing from the biblical literary tradition. But it would be perfectly reasonable to give such a word picture to the Flat Earth Society.
Like I said, fairchild, you obviously have a good head on your shoulders and really ought to be thinking outside the old box.
AlanF
