This title may seem trivial to you, but let us recall the story of Galileo who had a hard time with the Church for having affirmed that the Earth was round while Christianity affirmed that it was flat! Galileo had deduced that the Earth was round by observing, thanks to the astronomical telescope that he invented, the other planets that were all round. His misadventure with Rome took place in 1633 and, to avoid being sentenced by the Inquisition, he had to publicly retract his statement.
However, it is not widely known that the Bible itself affirmed that the Earth was round! This is written in the Book of Isaiah:
Do you not know? Have you not heard? Have you not been told this from the beginning? Do you not understand the foundations of the Earth? It is He (God) who sits above the circle of the Earth, whose inhabitants are to Him like grasshoppers; it is He who stretches out the heavens thinly, which He spreads out like a tent to dwell in. (Isaiah 40:21-22)
This text teaches us two things: firstly that the Earth is round and secondly that the heavens that surround the Earth are a thin layer like a cloth. This is exactly what we know about the thin atmospheric layer, protecting against the sun's dangerous rays, without which no life would be possible on Earth.
Now the prophet Isaiah, son of the prophet Amos, lived in the 8th century BCE, that is to say some 2400 years before Galilee.
It is true that the Greeks had also understood that the Earth was round and one of their scholars, Eratosthenes, had even correctly estimated the circumference of the Earth. But this happened around 200 BCE, some 550 years after Isaiah. And the Greeks had not known that the atmospheric layer (the heavens) was so very thin.
The Jerusalem Talmud, compiled before 400 CE, some 1200 years before Galileo, also quoted the following allegory:
Rabbi Jonah said: Alexander of Macedon, when he wished to rise into the air, rose higher and higher until he saw the world resemble a ball and the sea a dish. (Avoda Zarah tractate)
It is a pity that the Church condemned Galileo because the knowledge of Astronomy could have advanced more quickly. But those times were in obscurantism while, both among the Israelites and the Greeks, the knowledge of a round Earth was well established. Here again, the Bible was right but, as in many things, its text was taken only on an allegorical level.
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Albert Benhamou
Private tour guide in Israel
March 2025