Scripture: Isaiah 40:22; Isaiah 22:18; Proverbs 8:27; Job 26:10
Isaiah 40:22 says God "sits above the circle of the earth". A popular claim says this shows the Bible knew the Earth is a sphere long before science.
The Hebrew word is chug, meaning a circle, a circuit or a vault. The same root describes God drawing a circle on the face of the deep (Proverbs 8:27; Job 26:10), the horizon line. Hebrew has a different word for a ball, dur, which Isaiah himself uses (Isaiah 22:18: "he will whirl you around and throw you like a ball"). The rest of the verse pictures God stretching out the heavens like a tent over people who look like grasshoppers, which fits the ancient Near Eastern picture of a round, flat Earth under a dome. Greek thinkers had shown the Earth was a sphere by the 4th century BCE, and Eratosthenes measured it around 240 BCE.
