The Circle of the Earth

 


Flat-earth proponents tell us the Hebrew word chug (חוּג, pronounced "khoog") means a "flat, circular disk," that Isaiah 40:22 shows God enthroned above that disk, and that Isaiah would have used a different word if he had meant a ball. It sounds technical and plausible, as if based on the work of someone who has actually read Hebrew, but sounding "technical and plausible" doesn't make the claim true.

Chug is only used 4 times in the Bible, so we probably shouldn't be dogmatic about the limits of its meaning. The only thing that everyone seems to agree on is that it refers to something circular. Whether that can be a ball or a disk or only a hollow circle is debatable. However, we can learn a lot from the context of those 4 verses.

The Verses

Thick clouds veil him, so that he does not see, and he walks on the vault [chug] of heaven.
Job 22:14 ESV

In this verse, Eliphaz is accusing Job of thinking God is too far away to notice human behavior. God is behind the clouds, so he can't see what we do, and he walks on the chug of heaven (chug shamayim).

Several things follow from the context. The chug belongs to heaven, above or among the clouds, because the clouds are what hide God from our view and us from his. It is also something a person can imagine God walking on, which would imply a solid surface if we didn't already know that God can walk on water.

The verse doesn't tell us whether the chug is solid, how thick it is, or how it is shaped beyond being a circuit or arch above our heads. This is Eliphaz's caricature of Job's supposed view of God, and not meant to be a reliable description of anything. For all we know, Job held to a completely errant cosmology or Eliphaz misunderstood Job's views (more likely, since he claimed Job doesn't believe God can see what humans do). Eliphaz doesn't give any other details about this circle. He doesn't mention a firmament or God's throne room, and doesn't imply anything at all about the shape of either the heavens or the earth beyond their relative directions.

Whatever the word means here, it doesn't refer to the earth. It is a circle or arch or pathway of heaven, which might even be intended as a metaphorical description, not a literal description of a physical place.

He has inscribed [choq] a circle [chug] on the face of the waters at the boundary between light and darkness.
Job 26:10 ESV

Job is replying to Bildad who seems to have applied a Calvinist-like view of Utter Depravity to the entire world. In Job's view--not necessarily God's--the circle (chug) is something God draws on the surface of the waters, presumably the sea since the boundary between light and dark isn't likely to be seen on a river or lake.

Speaking from his own perspective, Job describes a line that divides light from darkness or at least marks the boundary between the two. I think Job could be describing one of three things:

1. The solar terminator where sunlight is blocked by the curvature of the earth. This is a perpetual circle around the entire earth dividing the dark side from the light. It moves across the surface as the earth rotates, creating the day/night cycle.

2. The edge of a disk-shaped earth that is ringed by oceans. This would seem to preclude the ice wall that most flat-earthers claim rings the earth to hold in the seas. I'm sure that Job understood that ice is frozen water, but he uses a different word for ice in 6:16. Elihu uses that same word for ice in 37:10, and God himself does in 38:29. Job didn't describe a circle on "the face of the ice wall" in 26:10, but on the face of the waters.

3. The visible horizon where the daylit sky seems to touch the dark surface of the sea. Since the depths of the seas and darkness are thematically linked throughout Scripture, and Job was perfectly capable of observing the horizon over the seas, I think this is the most likely meaning. 

The verse says nothing about the shape of the earth itself, only that God made a circle or arc on the surface of the water to divide light from dark.

When he established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the face of the deep...
Proverbs 8:27 ESV

This passage is a personified Wisdom establishing her authority as a companion and helper of God from before the creation of the physical world and instructing the reader to value and seek out wisdom for himself.

The Hebrew uses a verb (chaqaq) with the same root as used for "inscribed" in Job 26:10 (choq) and the same phrase "on the face of" with a body of water. In Job it is the face of the waters, and here it is the face of the deep, but I think they are meant to convey the same meaning of the deep darkness of the seas.

Although she and Job both describe real actions by God, their language is clearly poetic and meant to convey information about God and Wisdom, not necessarily about the structure of the universe. I think the same three possible meanings of chug from Job 26:10 apply here, and the verse says nothing about the shape of the earth itself, only that God made a circle or arc on the surface of the sea.

It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in.
Isaiah 40:22 ESV

This is the only one of these four verses where the chug belongs to the earth (chug ha'aretz), as opposed to the heavens or the sea. The context is God looking down on his creation. God sits above the chug, and from there he stretches out the heavens and the inhabitants look like grasshoppers. The text isn't trying to describe the structure of the universe--let alone the earth--but to describe God's supremacy over his creation. The question is whether or not the verse uses a literal description of the earth to make its actual point.

Isaiah doesn't say "above the circular earth" or "above the global earth", but "above the circle of the earth". He only talks about a circle, which could be either a disk, a sphere, or a single line. It's even possible that "circle of the earth" doesn't refer to the outlines of the earth at all, but to some smaller part of the earth (remember that erets also means land), in which case the earth could be any shape at all and still have a circle which God could see from above.

The Bottom Line

Math, experimentation, and direct observation by an objective person all prove that the earth is a globe, but there is nothing in any of these verses that requires any particular shape of the earth. A cube earth fits just as well as a globe or a disk. None of these passages mentions an edge, an ice wall, an underside, or corners. One might object that the contexts of Proverbs 8 and Isaiah 40 strengthen the disk-earth interpretation when they mention "foundations", but that also works with any shape. Globe-earth proponents can speak of the foundations of the earth just as well as disk-earth proponents and everyone knows exactly what they mean. The disk and the globe both have to be inserted into these passages by the reader because it is missing from the text.

Chug denotes a circle, an arc, or a circuit of the heavens, on the sea, and of the earth. By itself, it asserts nothing about the shape of the earth. Reading it as "flat disk" imports a model into the verse, and neither the Hebrew nor the context requires it. If you want a flat earth, you'll have to bring it with you. The Hebrew didn't pack one.

Love is Love, man!

 By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. 

1 John 5:2 ESV






Trust me, bro

I encounter this claim all the time. People who make it must be seriously dedicated to their biases to find this "implication" anywhere in the Bible.



Like Enoch?

The only complete manuscripts of the first book of Enoch (the only one that has even the remotest claim to legitimacy) are in Ge'ez (Coptic), which Enoch definitely did not speak in 3000 BC. Only a handful of pre-Christian fragments exist in Aramaic (also not Enoch's language) and one or two very small fragments in Hebrew.

If First Enoch represents the actual words of Noah's great grandfather, it is--at best--a translation of a
translation: at least two layers of translator bias between us and Enoch.




Mistranslations in the ESV


I like the English Standard Version (ESV)--in fact, it's probably my favorite Bible translation--but no translation is perfect. No translation can ever be perfect, simply by the nature of translation, but they can always be better. I'm creating this post to track the mistranslations I find in the ESV. Maybe if enough people point these out to Crossway, they'll make the appropriate corrections.

The most common mistranslations are when the translators render the original Hebrew and Greek according to what they believe the author meant instead of what the author wrote, veering into dynamic equivalence, which is always dangerous. It predisposes the reader to the doctrinal biases of the translators instead of letting the text speak for itself.

Monogenes in John 1:14

μονογενής (monogenes) is translated as "only Son" instead of "only begotten". This is a very minor mistranslation, since Yeshua is clearly a son, and if the only begotten is male, then he is also the only son. However, a determined miscreant could misconstrue "only Son" to mean that there might be a divine daughter who was excluded from the text. The ESV should just stick to the literal meaning of "only begotten" or "only offspring".

Ethnos in 1 Corinthians 5:1, 1 Corinthians 10:20, 1 Corinthians 12:2

ἔθνη (ethne, plural of ethnos) is translated as "pagans" instead of "nations" or "Gentiles". In almost every case, the ESV translates this word as Gentiles. They translate it as "pagan" when they believe Paul is specifically referring to religious practices instead of ethnic identity, but this is anachronistic in that Paul probably made no such distinction in his own mind, and it distorts Paul's meaning in these passages.

In the case of 1 Corinthians 12:2, I believe it definitely distorts Paul's meaning. The word pagan comes from a Latin word that essentially meant "country bumpkin", but in English it has come to mean "idol worshiper" or "idolater". Insert that, instead of pagan, into the text and you will start to see why it's a poor translation.

You know that when you were idolaters you were led astray to mute idols, however you were led.

Of course they were led astray to idols. That's the very definition of idolater. But Paul didn't use the word that he uses elsewhere in this same letter for idolater: εἰδωλολάτρης (eidolatres, 1 Corinthians 5:10-11, 6:9, 10:7). If he meant idolater, he would have written eidolatres, but he wrote ethnos, which means Gentiles, not idolaters. Here is how the ESV should read instead:

You know that when you were Gentiles you were led astray to mute idols, however you were led.

In other words, when the Corinthian believers gave up their idols and put their faith in Yeshua instead, they not only stopped being idolaters, but they stopped being Gentiles. As Paul wrote in Ephesians 2, they were made citizens of the Commonwealth of Israel. Not Jews, but Israelites. Former Gentiles.

Diatheke in Hebrews 9:16-17

διαθήκη (diatheke) is translated as "will" instead of "covenant". Diatheke really does mean "last will" in Koine Greek, but the Septuagint used this word instead of συνθήκη (suntheke, agreement or treaty) to translate the Hebrew brit because a covenant is much more than an agreement between two parties. A covenant is a formalized relationship that can only be ended by death and, unless explicitly stated otherwise, it is inherited by the descendants of the parties. In that it specifies blessings and curses for survivors, a covenant is very much like a last will, but a covenant is not the same as a last will.

The ESV doesn't translate diatheke as "will" anywhere else in the Bible and translates it as "covenant" seven times in Hebrews 9. Yet in verses 16-17 it suddenly switches to "will", an idea that is completely foreign to the author's intended meaning. Let me put the context into bullet points to illustrate what I mean:

  • v11-12 - Christ came as a new kind of high priest and shed his own blood to inaugurate his service into the Heavenly Tabernacle. 
  • v13-14 - The blood of goats and bulls cleanse the flesh, but Christ's blood cleanses the conscience.
  • v15 - Through his death, Christ became the mediator of a new covenant, which is inherited by all those who are redeemed by his death.
  • v16-17 - Every covenant (not "last will") is established by the death of a sacrificial victim and only takes effect at that death.
  • v18-20 - The Sinai covenant was inaugurated with the blood of calves and goats.
  • v21-22 - The same blood purified the Tabernacle, its vessels, and the people.
  • v23-24 - Christ's blood purifies the heavenly counterparts.

The mention of inheritance in v15 might put the translators in mind of last wills, but inserting that into this passage is bizarre and derails the text into an irrelevant tangent. It is completely unjustifiable. The entire passage is comparing the Sinai Covenant with the New Covenant. Verses 16-17 are talking about the inauguration of the New Covenant, not the activation of a last will. Verses 18-20 prove this by comparing it to how the all other covenants, especially Sinai, are established.

When the Bible describes a person dividing up his possessions among his descendants, it talks about blessings, not diatheke (e.g. Genesis 49:28). The Bible never talks about "last wills" in this way, but inherited covenants are on every other page. 

Sunagoge in James 2:2

συναγωγή (sunagoge) is translated as "assembly" instead of "synagogue". The word does mean assembly, so I would not call this a mistranslation if the ESV was consistent in translating συναγωγή as assembly. However, it uses synagogue in all of the other 55+ instances in the New Testament. They appear to have deliberately chosen "assembly" in James 2:2 in order to hide the fact that James describes Christians as meeting in synagogues.