“There is amazing modern scientific insight in the Bible.”
We should interpret the Bible as the author originally intended, and as the
intended readership would have understood it. Therefore we should be cautious in
reading modern science into passages if the original readers would not have seen
it. This applies especially to poetic books like Job and Psalms. For example,
Job’s readers would not have understood Job 38:31 to be teaching anything about the gravitational
potential energy of Orion and Pleiades. Rather, the original readers would have
seen it as a poetic illustration of God’s might—that God, unlike Job, could
create the Pleiades in a tightly-knit cluster, which is what it looks like,
while God created Orion as a well spread-out constellation, again something well
beyond Job’s ability. Similarly, Job 38:14 is not advanced scientific insight into the
earth’s rotation, because the earth is not being compared to the turning
seal, but to the clay turning from one shape into another under
the seal.
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