Originally posted by Paul33:
No I'm not, because you just admitted that verse one is about the universe, stating that Hebrew didn't have a word for universe and used "heavens and earth" to describe the universe.
They used it to describe all that existed. This is different than saying they used it to describe the modern view of the universe. They did not have the modern view of the universe.
If that is the case, the Hebrews certainly understood the distinctin between the universe way out there and the sky that birds fly in.
Why would that follow? All it means is that they understood the distinction between the earth (ground) and the heavens (the sky). They didn't know that after sky ended, there was the vacuum of space where the stars were. Their idea of sky was more all-encompassing than our idea.
Moses was no idiot. He was trained in all of the wisdom of the Egyptians.
Exactly. The Egyptians didn't know everything either. Neither do we. Someone is not an idiot because they don't know something that they had no means to discover.
As a side note, we know from Egyptian mummification procedures that ancient Egyptians did not know what the brain was for. While they carefully preserved the other organs, the brain was discarded during mummification. Ancient Hebrews also did not know what the brain was for (biblical Hebrew doesn't even have a word for "brain"), and God didn't reveal this scientific detail. There was no need for God to do so. He communicated the concepts of thinking and reasoning using their own terms, such as thinking with one's heart or kidneys. We now treat these expressions as figures of speech, but at one point they were taken at face value.
Before "modern science" many cultures understood that stars were "out there" and birds were "close by."
Certainly they would realize that the stars were higher than the birds flew. That would not lead them to being able to tell that the birds were within the atmosphere while the stars were in outer space. They had no way to make that distinction.
Anyway, I think you're reading your modern ideas about the universe into Hebrew terms like heaven and earth. The Hebrews divided the world into three components: heaven, earth and sea. That in itself shows that they had a different conception of earth than planet Earth, because in that case a separate division for the sea would be redundant. Here's just some of the verses that refer to this three-fold division of the world:
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- Exodus 20:11a: "For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day."</font>
- Nehemiah 9:6: "You are the LORD, you alone. You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them; and you preserve all of them; and the host of heaven worships you."</font>
- Psalm 69:34: "Let heaven and earth praise him, the seas and everything that moves in them."</font>
- Psalm 96:11: "Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; let the sea roar, and all that fills it..."</font>
- Psalm 135:6: "Whatever the LORD pleases, he does, in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps."</font>
- Psalm 146:6: "[The LORD his God] who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever..."</font>
- Acts 4:24: "And when they heard it, they lifted their voices together to God and said, "Sovereign Lord, who made the heaven and the earth and the sea and everything in them..."</font>
- Revelation 10:2,5-6: "He had a little scroll open in his hand. And he set his right foot on the sea, and his left foot on the land... And the angel whom I saw standing on the sea and on the land raised his right hand to heaven and swore by him who lives forever and ever, who created heaven and what is in it, the earth and what is in it, and the sea and what is in it..."</font>
- Revelation 21:1: "Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more."</font>
In the Bible, these three components are deeply related, in contrast to your view of the rest of the universe being separate from Earth. When God shakes the earth, the heavens rattle too (Joel 3:16; Haggai 2:6,21).
I don't see it as any fault of Scripture that it describes things according to the science of the day. And, I think it's a mistake to try and reinterpret the words of Scripture to make it seem as though the ancients shared our scientific knowledge.