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The key thing here is what you are trying to tell me in a single sentence. I'm concerned about what God is telling me not only in a sentence but in the text as a whole. The comparison isn't even close to fair or important.
The question that I was asking which you refuse to answer is how does the meaning that God is communicating change given a geocentric or heliocentric point of view. Your continued silence on this matter is rather telling.
Obviously that language hardly supports the notion of geocentrism. "Rise" apparently speaks only of the appearance of the sun on the horizon. The deeper you dig, if you dig, will not get you to the sun moving relative to the earth.
"Rising" has nothing inherently to do with geocentrism, even in the English. But, the word in Greek is even less associated with orbital movement.
You are repeating the TE mistake. You have to choose between two idioms. What dictates your choice to make on of the pair literal (assuming that the English word "stood" is the proper meaning) and the other to be metaphorical?
Even if the sun stands still, how does that necessarily imply a change in the movement of the sun, as opposed to a change in the rotation of the earth? It simply says "stands", it doesnt say that its orbit stops.
You again have a to choose one of several meanings for the word translated as "stand." Not only is stand not an express statement of orbital mechanics, but that is only one nuance of many possible meanings. When paired with "habitation", the necessity of an orbital reference is just demanding too much of the text.
Another classic mistake, similar to the misuse of Jesus being teleported to a high mountain and shown the whole world. You have a supernatural event expressed in the text. A unique event, and yet it is assumed that the writer nonchalantly accepts a supernatural event as juxtaposed as against a naturally impossible event, and the latter is used to indict the writer's orientation to reality. Somehow this is supposed to tell us what the writer thinks of the normal course of things. Even if one of the celestial bodies is standing still, as a unique and supernatural event, how does something out of the ordinary dicate how ordinary things are to happen?
And look at the language, the moon doesnt literally go down in valleys. Taken literally, this is not a statement of orbital mechanics, but a celestial catastrophe in which the moon collides with earth. But, of course, it only goes down in valleys in the ways that all people understand, it appears to go down in valleys. The context is telling you how to use the idiom.
Again, a supernatural event is not a prescription for the natural course of things.
And in any event, go down, as relative motion, is only one of several meanings of the word. Disappear is as good or better as a translation. It seems obviously the translators, fully conversant with heliocentrism, chose go down for the same reasons we choose the phrase.
Well you might be getting somewhere, I'm certainly not! Before checking out, however, I will answer your question. In isolation and if asked the question as stated, and if it were significant to the text then yes, I could conclude that it supports a geocentric universe. Thankfully neither Scripture nor God leads me to do that. I am led to pray that my approach to Scripture should keep me humble enough not to override its meaning by interjecting my own theories or ideas into or over it. In addition, my prayer is that I thereby know the will of God and His intent/meaning on what He said. Everything else is just plain rubbish and an impediment to knowledge and wisdom. I have enough impediments in my life without seeking others.
Frustrating is certainly a way to describe this. My hand was shown at the beginning, for reasons I don't know nor at this point care to know, you've decided to hold back yours. I've only asked the question what seems like a dozen times and yet I've still yet to receive a direct answer, but instead I keep getting questions posed to me. At this point I'm no longer interested in participating in whatever game you are playing.We need to see whether we can agree on that first, before moving on to the context. Because (to show my hand here) this is exactly the procedure by which any YEC obtains YECism from the Bible, and to me it is a fallible procedure. But let's see what your reply is to the above question.
By the way, I hope you're getting a feel for how frustrating the conversation about creationism can be for a TE!
Didn't the church spend 1500 years looking at the language of both Genesis and the geocentric passages. Yet in all that time church fathers and bible scholars only found problems with the literal interpretation of Genesis.
I think it is very important to understand scripture in the context it was written in and try to understand how someone at the time would have read it instead of approaching it as if it was written to 21st century readers. Of course that is how we approach scripture when we meet it first, and God does speak to us through it, but we need to grow in our understand of God's word too.
Isaiah 40:22 It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in. It is a simile. The heavens are like a curtain spread over the circle of the earth. Every night God stretches the night sky over the earth like a tent.
Do you mean every time some translation of the bible goes for an obscure and unusual rendering of the text, we can declare it 'a matter language which no one seems to be able to resolve' and ignore the whole thing? I am sure we could throw out most of scripture that way if we wanted to.
What reason is there to doubt it? It is the plain reading of the text. It make perfect sense too. Unless you approach scripture with the preconceived notion God could not speak that way.
So, the above is taken from the "Bible of Jadis"? -written by Jadis and inspired by whom?
In God's Word, stars are not balls of gas, but YHWH'S hosts of heaven; with names, duties, and meanings; who worship, obey and serve, the Creator of all.
