Flat Earth

The most common response, and it depends on the word.

Chug denotes a circle or arc — a two-dimensional figure. The related verb describes drawing a circle with a compass (Proverbs 8:27), and the noun mechugah at Isaiah 44:13 is the compass itself.

Hebrew has a word for a sphere. Dur appears at Isaiah 22:18, where someone is wound up "like a ball" and thrown. The author of Isaiah 40 had that word available and used a different one.

The Greek translators read it the same way, rendering chug as gyros, a ring or circle, rather than sphaira.

Largely correct. The phrase functions idiomatically in several passages, much as "the four corners of the world" does in English today.

An idiom of that kind still originates in a physical picture, and English speakers who use it inherited it from a period when the picture was literal.

The argument also cannot be applied to the whole set. Pillars that tremble, foundations that are laid, waters held above a dome, and a tree visible from everywhere on earth are not idioms for compass directions.

Job 26:7: "He stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth on nothing."

The most cited verse in this discussion, and the strongest case for the position it is used to support.

Two considerations weigh against reading it as modern cosmology. The same book says the earth has pillars that tremble (Job 9:6) and foundations with sunken bases (Job 38:4-6). A reading that makes 26:7 a statement of gravitation has to explain the other two.

The immediate context is also poetic rather than descriptive: the surrounding verses have the pillars of heaven trembling and God's breath making the heavens fair. The line most plausibly asserts that God requires no support for his work, which is the chapter's subject.

A sound principle in general. Modern speakers say "sunrise" without asserting geocentrism.

It applies well to some passages here, particularly the sun's daily movement.

It applies poorly to others. Pillars, foundations, and waters above a solid dome are not appearances — nobody looking at the sky sees a reservoir behind it. Genesis 1 narrates the construction of an object with a stated function, which is not a description of how something looks.

Some Greeks did. Pythagoras is credited with the idea in the sixth century BCE, Aristotle argued for it from evidence in the fourth, and Eratosthenes measured the circumference around 240 BCE.

There is no evidence the Hebrew writers held it. The relevant texts predate or run parallel to the Greek discussion and show no awareness of it, and their cosmology matches Mesopotamian and Egyptian sources rather than Greek astronomy.

Later Jewish and Christian writers who did know Greek astronomy had to reinterpret these passages, which is itself evidence about how they read on their own terms.