Could it be? And if so, what is the Talmud’s view on this?

This is the last time I’m answering. Please explain what the question is. As for the Talmud’s view, from several places it appears that it understood the world to indeed be flat.

Could it be that the world is flat even though scientists claim it is round?
And that contradicts the words of the Zohar…

With God’s help, 4 Nisan 5777

In the article “The Sages Knew That the Earth Revolves Around the Sun” (on the site “Secret of Torah”), the words of the Zohar are quoted (Part 3, 11): “In the book of Rav Hamnuna Sava it is explained further, for the whole inhabited world rolls like a ball, these are above and these are below…” See there at length.

I seem to recall that Moshe Atidya (who was the principal of the Ayanot agricultural school) brings in his book A Window to the World (Tel Aviv, 1967) a satellite photograph from a certain viewing angle in which all the continents appear located in the upper part of the globe in a kind of ‘griddle’ surrounded on all sides by ocean (which fits nicely with the researchers’ hypothesis that in the past all the continents were connected into a single continent).

In short: it depends from what angle you look at it!

Best regards, S. Tz. Levinger

To Daniel.
The world is truly spherical and not flat.
The Holy One, blessed be He, created everything with wisdom; the world is round like a ball so that the normal force will be perpendicular to everything on the earth, on the sphere we live on.

S. Tz. L.
Do an experiment: take a flat bowl and pour water onto it—what happens at the edges? The water should fall off the flat bowl, which is being compared to a flat Earth. The sea should have “fallen” off our flat earth.
And there wouldn’t be half a day light and half a day darkness if we were flat.
The moonlight should look different.
By the way, what shape do you give the moon and the sun? If they’re also flat, what’s their width? Why don’t you see thickness in satellites when photographing from the side?

In short, don’t be crackpots—do yourselves a favor.

S. Tz. Levinger, thank you for your response, rich with information as always 🙂

Moshe, I’m afraid you’re mistaken. The very fact that the Holy One, blessed be He, created everything with wisdom doesn’t require it to be a sphere. I can phrase your sentence like this: “The Holy One, blessed be He, created everything with wisdom—the world is flat so that…”
Normal force and perpendicularity come only after you’ve determined that the world is spherical and that there is gravitational force. I claim there is no gravity and no normal force, but this isn’t the place to elaborate.

As for the second half of your response: you have a whole picture and laws that you’ve accepted as self-evident, so you need to draw a completely new picture.
The world is flat and round… the sun revolves around the Earth, and so do the other stars and the moon.
Around the water there is a giant layer of ice called Antarctica. At a height of 10 meters.
Which prevents (like a dam) the water from passing through… and therefore nothing spills from the surface at the sides.
Half day and half night—do you mean twilight?
The moonlight should look different? Why?
There are no satellites… and no International Space Station. In Hollywood movies maybe there are…
They sent up a balloon with a GoPro camera above the earth and there are no satellites around the earth.

First of all, if we were flat then surely Antarctica at a height of 10 meters would melt.
I want you to take a GoPro camera and film from the edge of the iceberg into the abyss.
You really are living in a movie.

I don’t understand why it’s always either flat or a sphere.
After all, anyone with a bit of sense in his head knows the world is in the shape of a Möbius strip (and if I weren’t afraid, I would say a Klein bottle), and there is no need to elaborate.

It all depends on the eye of the beholder.

Yishai, in my humble opinion there is documentation of the shape of the earth. And it is round, but the question is whether it is spherical or flat.
As for the fact that it is round, there is no dispute. The secret of the letter Samekh.

A photograph from a balloon at high altitude also proves that the world is flat.
Source:

There are also videos on YouTube proving that bin Laden didn’t die, but shaved his beard and changed his name from Osama to Obama.
🙂

Meanwhile, according to everyone, planet Earth has become a warming ‘griddle’ because of the hole in the ozone 🙂

Best regards, Shim-Shon

The view of the sages of blessed memory in the Talmud is that the earth is flat.

The view of the taxi driver who drove me the day before yesterday is that the sun and moon are the same size.

With God’s help, 9 Cheshvan 5781

Professor Nathan Aviezer (in his book In the Beginning) points out that the apparent diameter, to an observer on Earth, of the “two great lights” is identical. Even though the sun is much larger than the moon, they appear the same size to an observer on Earth because the moon is closer.

Because of the difference in their actual size, there is a distinction between “the greater light” and “the lesser light,” but because of the equality in diameter to the observer on Earth, the “two great lights” are equal.

Best regards, Arpakhshatz

Exactly. To the unaware observer, the earth too appears flat.

Was this discussion actually being held seriously? Obviously the Earth is round!
As for what the sages of blessed memory said, the words of Maimonides are well known: the scientific statements in the words of the sages of blessed memory were written according to the science of their time, so there is no difficulty here and obviously one follows the science of our time.

With God’s help, 9 Cheshvan 5781

Yishai — greetings,

In this case, the science that existed in the time of the sages of blessed memory knew that the Earth was round, and the proof is that a person looking at a ship sailing on the sea sees it sinking.

I don’t know of any place where the sages of blessed memory say that the Earth is flat. On the contrary, in the book of the Zohar it speaks of “the earth rolling like a ball.”

What was newly discovered is that in the lower part of the sphere as well, which people thought was entirely an “ocean” surrounding the dry land (the landmass of Asia-Europe-Africa), there is dry land “within the ocean.” The sages of blessed memory did not discover America, and left room for Columbus to do so 🙂

The implication of the conception that everything east of the “landmass” is sea affected the determination of the date line at a distance of ninety degrees east of Jerusalem, according to the view of Rabbi Zerahiah HaLevi.

Best regards, Arpakhshatz

It doesn’t matter whether the sages of blessed memory knew this or not. Maybe they did and maybe they didn’t.

http://daatemet.org.il/he/%D7%AA%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%94-%D7%9E%D7%93%D7%A2-%D7%95%D7%9E%D7%95%D7%A1%D7%A8/%D7%98%D7%A2%D7%95%D7%99%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%9E%D7%93%D7%A2%D7%99%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%91%D7%AA%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%94/%D7%99%D7%93%D7%99%D7%A2%D7%AA-%D7%97%D7%9B%D7%9E%D7%99%D7%9D-%D7%91%D7%93%D7%91%D7%A8-%D7%9B%D7%93%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%95%D7%AA-%D7%94%D7%90%D7%A8%D7%A5/

With God’s help, 9 Cheshvan 5781

And to Yossi he said —

In the material you linked to, they also added the words of the Jerusalem Talmud in chapter 3 of tractate Avodah Zarah (42c), which also says that the earth is like a sphere (as I noted from the Zohar).

What the Shevut Yaakov inferred from the words of the sages of blessed memory—that Adam’s height before the sin was like the distance between east and west, and therefore they did not see the earth as a sphere—is not compelling.

For Rabbi Zerahiah HaLevi says that the edge of the dry land in the east is “the end of the east,” whereas the edge of the dry land in the west is “the end of the west” (and as Rabbi Judah Halevi sang: “My heart is in the east, and I am at the far end of the west”).

So when the sages of blessed memory say that Adam’s height was “like the distance between east and west,” their plain meaning is: “like the distance from eastern China to the western Iberian Peninsula.”

In any case, the sages of blessed memory in their aggadic literature do not come to teach biology, but to say metaphorically that Adam was a universal personality connecting heaven and earth, or from the far east to the far west; that all human beings across the world were included in the personality of Adam, who is the root of them all.

Best regards, Arpakhshatz

The Maharal says that all human beings were created with the stamp of Adam. And what is the stamp of Adam, who was one of a kind, by which all human beings are similar to one another? That each person has his own unique personality, and no person is one hundred percent identical to his fellow.

I don’t understand at all why there is any need to try to reconcile the words of the sages of blessed memory with science. The sages of blessed memory were mistaken in science because they followed the scientists of that period. The Talmud did not descend from heaven, so there is no difficulty here, and all the scientific statements in the Talmud were written by human beings (holy and exalted, of course) who were scientifically mistaken.

People are telling you that specifically on this topic, the accepted assumption that the sages of blessed memory thought the earth was flat is doubtful. Sure, even if they thought that, it doesn’t damage anything. But it’s still interesting to know.

Every opinion has support in both directions.
In my opinion, in the end everyone goes and hears what he wants to hear according to his personality structure, and according to what interests him.

And maybe that’s part of the power of choice that was given to us?

You can never know.

Saadia Gaon writes in his commentary on Sefer Yetzirah that the sages of blessed memory thought the world was flat and that this is not correct.
Even if the sages of blessed memory did not literally think the world was flat, they did not know the structure of the solar system, because they claim that the sun heats the springs at night.

The Zohar, as is known, was not written in the period of the sages of blessed memory, and its innovation is only that it arrived at the idea that the changes of day and night result from the Earth’s rotating on its own axis.
Maimonides of course knew that the world was round; he simply did not know that the sun does not revolve around it. For some reason the questioner mixed up the issues.

Stop with the nonsense. Nothing was hidden from the sages of blessed memory; we are far too small to understand the secret of the work of creation. Everything the sages of blessed memory write is all wrapped up so that we won’t understand anything. They knew very well how the world works and what it looks like. And where they disagree with one another, it’s about very deep things that even a billion scientists will never understand.
Everything was known to the sages of the Mishnah and the Talmud, everything was transmitted from generation to generation.

Yes, that’s well known.
The only question troubling me is why they wrote things that nobody can understand. And maybe beyond that, why they didn’t use their ultimate knowledge to cure all diseases and create an atomic bomb against the evil Greeks and Romans. Or maybe they actually did create one, but in disguise. We just didn’t notice.
Please, this site is intended for users over the age of 6.

For all the heretics trying to understand

מהודו ועד כוש: כדור הארץ עגול

There is none like the Creator of the world

The world is not a sphere but flat, and above us is a dome. There are lots of contradictions in the supposedly scientific theories explaining the round world, and it’s all one big staged performance by NASA. There are no satellites outside the dome. The stars do not change but remain in their place. If we were revolving around the sun then our planets would also change, including the North Star. You can see objects on the horizon; if the world were round we wouldn’t be able to see beyond the curve. If we have crazy technology and fabricated research showing us stars millions of light-years away, why don’t they fly to the nearest star, or to the moon—if we were there, then why aren’t there millions of astronauts going out and exploring? And there are many more unresolved questions. I tend to believe the words of the sages of blessed memory as they are; they knew more than we do, no question.

Indeed, there is no doubt at all. I’m actually amazed that you bother presenting these conclusive proofs. Was there really any initial assumption otherwise?

If the Earth were flat then how is there lava inside the Earth, and how are there deep oceans, or when you dig a lot into the ground you don’t fall into space?
Someone answer that.

According to the flat-earth view, the earth stands on pillars; in fact there is no space, or there is support for this in the Torah—I haven’t researched enough. As for all the data about depths below the surface, we know it only from science. The question is whom do we believe: God and our Torah, or science, which is a collection of opinions of scientists, flesh-and-blood people from the material world. According to the account of the creation of the world in the Torah, which is the most famous book in the entire world, with no goal of material gain and money, and there is support in quite a few verses and accepted commentators, the shape of the earth is round but flat. All our lives we learned different things, and therefore we need to decide whether to believe scientists or our Torah.

The words of the author of Havot Yair regarding the shape of the world … the end of his words, after he investigated and inquired; I’ll attach a link for whoever wants to read some of his perplexities until he withdrew from this matter.

“These are the edges of my perplexities, little from much. Therefore do not continue to seek my face with investigations and inquiries in this wisdom, for it was with me, and because of their great toil and little attainment I sent it away from my soul, and you do the same, and turn and go to the essential bodies of Torah: turn it over and turn it over, and from it you will not sweat. And Samuel Yarhinai, to whom the paths of the heavens were illuminated, and who said that he could set right the whole exile, would not direct his heart except to a corpse that had gone to its needs, as in the Jerusalem Talmud.
And may you be at peace, and your house at peace, as your honored soul and the soul of your afflicted friend who loves you, the troubled one.
Yair Hayyim Bacharach.”

https://www.sefaria.org.il/Havot_Yair.218.2?vhe=Chavot_Yair,_Lemberg,_1896&lang=he&sbsq=%D7%A6%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%AA%20%D7%94%D7%A2%D7%95%D7%9C%D7%9D&with=SidebarSearch&lang2=he

Is there an information sheet of quotations from the Torah on the topic of the flat earth?
I would be happy for a reply via my email: rhbmatch@gmail.com
English is also possible.