Neil deGrasse Tyson: A Lunar Eclipse flat-Earthers have never seen.

[Nevernose]

34. There are echoes of earlier cosmology in bits and pieces

Probably extrapolated from a similar Egyptian worldview. Essentially, the people in the neighborhood of the eastern Mediterranean — including Hebrews, early Greeks, Canaanites, etc — believed the Earth was big and flat. Outside of the earth the universe was filled with fire, and separating us from the fires of chaos was a bronze dome. The stars are tiny holes that allow a little peek through the dome, and is blocked by the sun chariot during the day. Geb And Nut in Egypt, Gaea and Ouranos in Greece evolved their stories from this, the Hebrews eventually dropped it all together.

But all these things evolved and mixed over thousands of years, and at one pre-Biblical point they really DID believe it.

Artifacts of this prehistoric paradigm pop up here and there in the Bible. The four corners of the earth are mentioned twice. Most of us take that to be figurative, but some literalists take that to mean the earth is flat — because how does a sphere have corners? And how does God stop the sun for Joshua if it’s not the sun moving but the earth?

There’s a couple of other “hints” of a flat earth that I can’t remember off hand. There’s also unicorns and zombies, too. It’s best not to treat it as a science textbook.