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ArishMell · 70-79, M
The Bible never attempted to do more than say "God did it" when considering the cosmos, or indeed anything natural.
It is an assortment of books writtten by people of whom we know no more than names and that they were among the early Jewish culture; expressing their religious beliefs mixed with an strange assortment of their version of their own society's history and various myths.
In total it might be mystical, theological and political, but scientific it is not and it never set out to be that, even if the word had existed 3000 years ago when its books started to be written. The Ancient Hebrews' priest-kings were too busy trying to forge a cohesive society from a rag-tag of Late Bronze Age tribes and lapsed Zoroastrians from Persia, to be concerned with how God's works, do work.
They left that to mainly to the contemporary Greeks, who mixed genuine attempts at knowledge with pure mysticism - even without considering their divine soap-opera pantheon.
It was these, the Greeks, who reckoned the Earth was at the centre of concentric spheres coated with lights; though the Mediaeval European, Christian church latched onto the geocentric idea with arrogant glee. A bit ironical since the Church would have regarded the Greeks and Romans as pagans, but it suited its dogma that Man (literally as well as figuratively) is God's supreme invention so needs a residence right at the centre.
I don't know if Joshua pre-dated, was a contemporary of or post-dated Ptolemy. If the latter he might have known of that philosopher's concept; but if you live in times that genuinely have no way to determine what really happens you could well posit that the Sun goes round the Earth.
Those ancient priests were wrong, we know now, but they were not stupid. They wrote as they saw and believed, for their contemporaries. Not for societies beyond their own, never mind ones they could never imagine, unknowable millenia into the future.
It is an assortment of books writtten by people of whom we know no more than names and that they were among the early Jewish culture; expressing their religious beliefs mixed with an strange assortment of their version of their own society's history and various myths.
In total it might be mystical, theological and political, but scientific it is not and it never set out to be that, even if the word had existed 3000 years ago when its books started to be written. The Ancient Hebrews' priest-kings were too busy trying to forge a cohesive society from a rag-tag of Late Bronze Age tribes and lapsed Zoroastrians from Persia, to be concerned with how God's works, do work.
They left that to mainly to the contemporary Greeks, who mixed genuine attempts at knowledge with pure mysticism - even without considering their divine soap-opera pantheon.
It was these, the Greeks, who reckoned the Earth was at the centre of concentric spheres coated with lights; though the Mediaeval European, Christian church latched onto the geocentric idea with arrogant glee. A bit ironical since the Church would have regarded the Greeks and Romans as pagans, but it suited its dogma that Man (literally as well as figuratively) is God's supreme invention so needs a residence right at the centre.
I don't know if Joshua pre-dated, was a contemporary of or post-dated Ptolemy. If the latter he might have known of that philosopher's concept; but if you live in times that genuinely have no way to determine what really happens you could well posit that the Sun goes round the Earth.
Those ancient priests were wrong, we know now, but they were not stupid. They wrote as they saw and believed, for their contemporaries. Not for societies beyond their own, never mind ones they could never imagine, unknowable millenia into the future.
