There are plenty of passages in the Bible which reflect the fact that the people of the time it was written believed the earth was flat. It is less clear whether the flat shape is a circle or square (the Isaiah passage refers to a circle, but other passages talk of the “four corners”).
I understand perfectly well what a simile is; it is perfectly clear in that Isaiah passage that the earth is literally described as a circle (*not* as a sphere or ball), while people are being compared to grasshoppers. You can look back at that post (#42) and see that I did not comment that the Bible states that people are grasshoppers.
I would disagree strongly that where the Bible mentions matters of science it is “always correct.” There are many examples of its scientific inaccuracy, beginning with Genesis and the description of God talking and causing animals to pop out of the dirt.
I think it is dangerous to teach kids that the Bible is inerrant in matters of science. Unless you teach them that the Bible descriptions of the world are metaphorical, you’re setting them up to reject *everything* in the Bible when they find it clashes with the real world. That means they reject the promise of redemption and salvation, as well.
But under you position that everything must be taken in its most literal possible sense this is the obvious conclusion. Further, it we go to the Hebrew for the word tranaslated as "circle" ("Hug") it can mean anything circular in nature. As to the earth being flat you still have failed to show anything in scripture that states the world is flat. You take a few metahpors in isolation which don't make that point in the slightest. I could go to any scientific work, including Newton's Principia Mathematic, and do the same thing to make outrageous, and similarly false, conclusions. "Four corners" is a metaphor used thoughout history to descripbe the complete expanse of something. We can also find the phrase "from one end of the earth to the other" and it never is used to mean the planet is a straight line. And it is much easier for me to believe that God created animals the earth than it is to believe that inert elements just magically combined themselves into something as complex as life. Or that complex information just magically creates itself through a vague undefined process called "mutation", something we never see in real world experience.