Why did Noah think that the earth was flat?
Some of the things in the Bible don’t really line up with what we understand about the world around us because God uses what we believe about the world to teach us about Himself. Not only does He do that now with us, but Jesus did it in His day and God also used what Noah, Abraham and Moses believed in order to teach them about what is really important in life. Our understanding of science and the world around us has always been changing since the beginning, but God remains the same. Since the Bible is a book about God, there isn’t room in it to bother with science. Not only that but we’d never understand what God understands about the world anyway because our brains are way too small.
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Hi! I’m Miss Tyler and welcome to another episode of Context for Kids where I teach you guys stuff most adults don’t even know. If this is your first time hearing or if you have missed anything, you can find all the episodes archived at contextforkids.podbean.com, which has them downloadable, or at contextforkids.com, where I have transcripts for readers or on my Context for Kids YouTube channel.
(Parents, all Scripture comes from the CSB this week, the Christian Standard Bible)
Do you guys remember when I taught you what the Bible is and what it isn’t? What the Bible is, is God telling us about Himself. In it, He tells us about how He made the earth for us and for us to rule over—as opposed to the gods of the nations who made humans to be slaves so that they wouldn’t have to grow, harvest, and cook their own food. The Bible is how God tells us about His character, meaning what things He will and won’t do. When we talked about the Babylonian flood stories, we saw that the false, pretend gods of the nations aren’t very smart; they are very selfish and cruel. You could never trust gods like that because they only cared about how loud the humans were, how they couldn’t get any sleep at night, and they were willing to kill everyone just because they were annoying. Imagine if God was going to kill everyone who is noisy—no one would survive being a baby! And all the cities would be gone. Hold a rock concert and BAM—everyone would just be dead. How is our God different? Our God cares very deeply about when people hurt other people and when the world became too dangerous even for children to be safe anymore, God was forced to take action to start all over again. Our God isn’t like those false gods who would just kill everyone so they could take a nap in peace. God waited and waited and waited until everything was completely ruined and terrible, more terrible than we can even begin to imagine. And so, He had to start over again with people who wouldn’t live as long because when a person is living 900 years, and getting worse and worse all the time, there is just no end to the kinds of evil that person can come up with.
What isn’t the Bible? Well, the Bible isn’t a science book. It wasn’t written to teach us how things actually work. So, in the Bible, you will come across people talking about how people think with their hearts, and that feelings come from our intestines (our guts) and kidneys. But, I want you to understand why God allows that sort of thing—the people who lived then really thought that our brains were just useless wadding inside of our skulls, like squishy cotton balls or bubble wrap. In fact, when the Egyptians made mummies, they carefully kept the heart and stomach and other organs inside sealed jars but they threw out the brains! Now, God wanted to show them who He is, not teach people science that they never could have hoped to understand. I mean, even if He taught science that we could understand now, it would still have a lot wrong with it because we still don’t know much of anything. We’re just like kids playing with sticks and mud compared to what God understands and knows. So, He doesn’t bother taking up valuable Bible space with science stuff because what we think and can prove about the world changes all the time as we learn more and more. We can all be very grateful that God spent so much time teaching us about Himself, why He created us, what He wants for us and what He promises to do for us. So, He has always, and even now, let us be wrong about the world and the universe. Because that kind of stuff doesn’t really mean much of anything about how we are commanded to love God and each other, right?! There is no commandment that tells us, “You have to know every scientific truth in the universe,” but there are commandments telling us over and over again to love God and each other.
One of the things that we see that is different between Genesis, the first book in the Bible, and Exodus, the second book in the Bible, is that there are two different kinds of years that start at different times. And so, when we read the Bible and about the Creation story and the flood and all the talking about the different months, we learn two things. Noah and all the world back then, they had calendars that were very different from ours, calendars that focused on when the farming happened, and when animals were born, calendars that began and ended in the fall, and the calendar that Moses gave for celebrating the festivals. Moses even mentions Noah’s calendar when he talked about the fall feasts happening at the time of year when the new years began for the seven-year agricultural cycles and the Jubilee cycles. But that’s just a small difference—let’s talk about some huge differences.
So, let’s talk about how Noah would have seen the world around him. And you might ask me how I know about all this and the answer is archaeology! One of my favorite biblical scholars is named John Walton and he is a professor at Wheaton College and, parents, he has written some materials to help parents teach kids about the Bible and he teaches Sunday School for sixth graders too. He’s a really cool guy. But you might ask what a biblical scholar is. Well, a biblical scholar isn’t a person like me. I study all the time and I read books written by scholars but I am not one myself. A biblical scholar is someone who is an expert in a certain area of the Bible. Professor Walton is an expert on the Book of Genesis and about how people back then thought and believed and wrote about their world. And he became an expert by reading what people back in those days wrote on cuneiform tablets—clay tablets that were inscribed with words and then baked and preserved for thousands of years until archaeologists began to find them in the 19th century, so within about the last one hundred and fifty years. And it wasn’t easy figuring out how to translate them either! But Professor Walton started studying the translations and he noticed that a lot of things in the Bible that folks used to think were just fancy and poetic were actually totally serious and what people believed. So, we’ll talk about that.
But first, I want to ask you something and I want you to think very carefully about it because sometimes we really don’t think about how much we know that we take for granted as being totally obvious. If you remember the very first broadcast, we talked about the word context, which means all the stuff that you know about your world and life that you assume everyone else knows too. You know a lot even if you don’t think you do. But, what would you think about the weather if you didn’t know about the rain cycle and clouds and high and low-pressure systems? What would you think was causing all that? What would you think about earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes? Probably every answer you thought of required you to know a whole lot of stuff that they didn’t know. And you wouldn’t know it either if a whole lot of people before you hadn’t discovered the answers to those questions. But once, a long time ago, nobody knew those answers. We only know what they really did think about all of that because of the things they left behind!
How about questions like, why are the sun and the moon the same size but one is out at night and the other one is out during the day? Why do they always come up in the same direction? Why do the stars move around in the same exact way every year? Why don’t the waves come up any higher on the shore—why do they always stop? Although we answer those questions today with science, in the ancient world they mostly explained all of this by having someone, a god or an angel or a spirit, in charge of it. They couldn’t imagine a God so powerful as to make a world that could take care of itself through the forces that we call physics, chemistry, and biology. Science is the modern word we use to describe the patterns of the universe that God created because the one thing we absolutely can’t do is understand exactly how He did it. I mean, we can’t create anything new. All we can do is work with the stuff He has already made and do new things with it. But we can’t make new stuff out of nothing. So, let’s look at the world from Noah’s point of view.
Noah looked around and he couldn’t see any further than the trees or the mountains if there were any, or past the water or deserts of plains. He saw a blue sky above him and points of light at night. He noticed that the sun and the moon looked like they were the exact same size and seemed to be underneath the blue of the sky. He saw that the sun seemed to come up out of the ground in the east every single day and went back down into the ground at night in the west. Now, Noah wasn’t stupid. Noah looked around and like everyone else in the world, he made some logical guesses based on his assumptions about how things are—just like scientists do today. But Noah couldn’t test what he thought as well as we can and when you guys grow up your generation will definitely know a whole lot more than we do now. And so, people who lived when Noah lived made some really interesting guesses that were very clever for their time. The sky was blue and so they believed it must be solid with water trapped above it. And the water came through at some times but not at others and so there must have been doors that could open and shut to let the water through. And someone had to be up there opening the doors and closing them back up again. Noah didn’t understand about rainclouds and evaporation and that the water up above used to be down on the ground. In fact, when we read the Bible, usually when clouds are mentioned, people thought that God was either blessing them or cursing them. It wasn’t until the time that Judges was written, much later, that we see they believed that clouds were full of water.
What about the ground they walked on? They knew that the land was surrounded by water and so they thought that water was underneath all the land too and that the land was floating on top of the water—and that water was where everyone who was dead ended up. They believed that there was only one continent and that it was pretty round and surrounded by a big donut of water. Remember I told you that they thought the sky was solid and holding back the water above the earth? Well, they thought it was actually a solid dome, like a half of a ball that was held up at the edges by huge mountains or held up at the very center by a ginormous tree or a giant mountain. It all depended on where they were living and if they were surrounded by mountains or were in the desert. And not only Noah but everyone believed it because that’s what it looked like from the ground or even from the tallest place that they were able to climb. They had no idea that our planet was so huge that it only appeared to be flat. They also thought that underneath the flat world that there were huge pillars or columns holding it up, like you would see on ancient buildings and even on some modern ones. Today we know that the planet is shaped like a ball and that we have a north and south pole and a real east and west that we can find with a compass—which no one had until the Chinese invented them not too long before Jesus was born. Noah lived thousands of years before a compass was available.
Noah thought that the sun and moon were the same exact size. He had no idea that the sun was so far away that it actually only looked the same size—like people up close versus people far away. They might be the same height but one looks teeny and the other looks normal. They believed that the sun and the moon were being driven across the sky by a person in a chariot or in a boat and that at night, it went down under the earth and in the morning popped back up again. They couldn’t even begin to imagine the amazing universe that God made! They thought the sun and the moon went over and under the earth instead of the earth going around the sun. Well, they were right about the moon going around the earth but the way they thought it was happening really wasn’t right at all. They believed that snow and lightning and hail and wind were all kept stored away in storage rooms. But now we know how they work because of science and because we know it, the weatherman knew there would be a blizzard here today. This means I have to go out and shovel soon before my husband drives over it and it sticks and becomes icy and someone slips and breaks something. If they were really stored away in rooms above the sky then no one could ever make accurate weather predictions. But because we can explain it by better understanding the physics that God created, we can make predictions that are much better now than when I was a kid for sure!
Noah also would have believed in a universe with at least three levels. One was under the earth, then the earth and sky, and another was above the earth. Under the earth was what the ancient Hebrews called Sheol and they believed that the souls of the dead people were there. As far as the earth goes, I already talked about how they thought it was a disk on top of the water and all the different nations pretty much thought they were at the center. They believed there was either a mountain reaching from earth to the heavens above or a world tree with its roots down in the water beneath the earth and with its top up to the heavens. Above the dome, they believed their gods or God lived there. They didn’t think there was a whole universe with planets and stars out there. They thought that the stars and the planets we can see were carved on the underside of the skydome and that they ran on tracks so that they rotated around every year. And it is very helpful to know that when you are reading the Bible because we might see it as just fancy language but God was talking to them about Himself by speaking to them through all the things they already believed. And we see that their understanding changes as time goes by! And God always keeps up with what they believed, as long as what they believed in wasn’t actually dangerous.
And so, when we read through the Bible, we will see people talking about this because that was exactly how they understood the world they lived in and if God had told them something different instead of allowing us to slowly discover it, they would have been incredibly confused. Today, a lot of people think of that kind of talk as just being pretty and poetic, which means like a poem and you know how poems can make things sound very amazing and fantastical. But we would be wrong. They actually believed it was true. But, until we started to find documents from the ancient world, we had no idea that they really believed this was true. And that’s okay because God used what they were thinking to teach them things that are true. If He had been accurate, they wouldn’t have been able to understand what was true because it wouldn’t have made any sense to them. Neither would we, for that matter because we still don’t know everything. God could never tell us how things really are as He knows them to be because our brains are just way too small. I think He likes it when we figure things out though. That’s why He made us curious.
Just imagine if God told them they were thinking with their brains—they wouldn’t have believed it because when we get nervous, we feel it in our guts, right? Sometimes, we even want to throw up. And when we are scared or excited, we feel it in our hearts as they start beating really hard. So, it seemed obvious to them that that’s where they were thinking from. It was actually very smart. It wasn’t until five hundred years before Jesus was born that the Greeks figured out that thoughts came from our brains. And we see that when Jesus talked about loving God, He changed the wording of an Old Testament Bible verse to include their change in how they understood the world. Let me show you—
Moses said, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength” (Deut 6:5). But he said it a thousand years before the Greeks figured out what our brains did. Jesus was born five hundred years after the Greeks made their discovery and so when He said it, He changed the wording to better reflect what they all knew was true: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30). Was Moses lying? Nope. Was God lying? Nope. But God knows that it doesn’t do any good to confuse people, just like your own family knows that there is stuff that you can and can’t understand yet. And the exact same thing is true for me. God has always talked to me based on what I know and not based on what I don’t know. God uses what I think about things in order to teach me more about Himself and what He wants from me. It wouldn’t have served any good purpose for God to teach them scientific facts. The Bible is about things that are more important than science. I mean, I got my university degree in Chemistry but I gave all that up so that I could teach about something much more important—God! God is very loving and compassionate and I want you to know about who He is and why you can trust Him. And one of the reasons you can trust Him is that He isn’t going to try and confuse you by getting fancy or by telling you things that would require you to have to understand things that you won’t learn for many years. And so, by talking to them in terms of what they already believed about how the world works and how it was built, God could use it to teach them the stuff that actually is very important to know. I don’t make fun of them and neither does God—I am impressed that they were thinking about it based on what they could see and feel around them. That’s what science is all about—looking and hearing and touching and then experimenting with things in order to find out if what we think is true, actually is true. But, we don’t start out with the truth in science. We make a guess and we test and observe over time to see if it is true or not. And we keep fixing it. And that’s how we learn!
But, I am going to tell you something very, very important. No matter if someone believes the earth is flat or like a ball, or thinks with their brain or their heart—guess what? That doesn’t change even the smallest thing about who God is, why He created us, what His promises are to us and what He wants from us. Why did He create us? To be His image-bearers and to rule wisely over His creation like He would if He was here. That doesn’t change just because you think one thing or another about the shape of the earth—so why would God bother to worry about that? What did He promise us? He promised us that one day, He would send someone who would undo all of the curses that came upon people because of the lies of the Serpent. And it really doesn’t matter whether you believe that you are thinking about that with your heart or your brain because it is still true and it came true when Jesus was here on earth! What does He want from us? He wants us to become more and more like Jesus. And you can do that whether or not you think that a mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds (which it isn’t, and they knew it but it was just a saying—we’ve talked about hyperbole before).
Sometimes, we grown-ups forget what the Bible is for. The Bible teaches us about God and about ourselves. And God did whatever He could to teach us as much as possible about Him before coming up with the best way of all. He sent His Son Jesus so that we could see what He is like in person, up close, and in living color. How did Jesus respond when a person in the synagogue was suffering with a demon? Jesus got rid of it. What did Jesus do when someone was sick with a fever or paralyzed? He healed them! What did Jesus do when people who had followed Him around were hungry? He made bread and fish for them. What happened when His disciples were out on the Sea of Galilee in a storm? He told the storm to stop and it did! What did Jesus do when the widow lost her only son? He raised him from the dead! And He did the same thing when the synagogue leader’s only daughter died too. Jesus gave sight to the blind and made it so that deaf people could hear and mute people could talk and disabled people could walk. When people were outcasts because of leprosy and bleeding, He healed them so they could go back home to their families. Jesus gave teachings and told stories that made everyone know how serious God is about our needing to take care of people who are sick, poor, abandoned, in prison for things they didn’t do, and suffering. Jesus told people that they shouldn’t be violent or go after the people who hurt them. Jesus told people to forgive and pray for and bless the people who were mean to them. And Jesus did more than just say it—Jesus did it. When Jesus died for all of us, who never did anything for Him, and for people like me who actually did a lot of terrible things, He was showing us who God is up close and personal. And because God is the kind of God who does these things for us in real life, now we know what He wants from us—to become the exact same kind of people. Of course, it won’t happen overnight, and we will never be as perfect as Jesus, but we never stop trying and doing better.
I love you. I am praying for you. I hope you have a wonderful week learning about God with the people who love you.