Maybe.
If the Bible talks about the earth being flat, that could be because that is how they thought at the time.
Bingo. In all likelihood the ancient Hebrew biblical writers shared a similar view of the earth as other ancient near-eastern bronze age people did. And when they wrote they expressed themselves using the words, ideas, and language of their time and culture.
That's why when Paul writes he writes in common Greek (well, more technically, he used scribes), and speaks as a first century Jew living in the Greco-Roman world; Paul additionally is intimately familiar with Greek and Roman customs, as he had Roman citizenship--something he inherited from his father who had been given citizenship. Paul speaks and writes as himself, from within his own experiences, in the language and culture he belonged to and was part of, the language of the circles in which he inhabited. We wouldn't, therefore, expect Paul to write like, say, a medieval European farmer, or a central Asian nomad, or a 21st century scientist. That isn't who Paul was, that isn't how Paul thought, that isn't how Paul spoke.
All of this is true for every writer from every point of history, including all the various biblical writers. And so the Old Testament if we come across people writing and speaking in ways that are fluent in the language, culture, and ideas of the ancient near east then we are finding exactly what we should expect to find. Biblical inspiration does not mean an abrogation of ordinary human speech and language, it means that through the ordinary human modes of speech, language, communication (etc) we--as a people of faith--believe we are hearing and receiving God's own Word. That Word is, indeed, according to Christian faith and confession, a Person, it's Jesus. Jesus is the Word that we are hearing and receiving in Scripture.
The kind of overly literal and wooden inerrancy presented so often only serves to distract from the whole point of Scripture. It's like focusing on a tiny smudge with a microscope on a massive, large, beautiful painting and acting like the microscopic smudge somehow is the thing we should be focusing on.
-CryptoLutheran
