Sort of, but I think I mean a little more than that. I don't just mean the literal meaning of a single sentence, I mean the obvious inference to draw from all the descriptions taken together. If I write, once, that "the curtain of night fell across the city," it'd make sense to take it as a metaphor. But if I write in several places that the lights switched on in the roof of the sky, and the rain fell through holes in the sky, and the sky covered the earth like a tent, you might conclude that I actually thought the sky was solid.
Especially if I never wrote anything to make you think otherwise. Is there anyplace that the Bible describes the earth, unequivocally, as a ball or sphere, or the celestial objects as not attached to anything but moving freely in vast space?
Evidently there is a shared aspect of wings, ends of the earth, or as “kanaph” is translated in the AV at Ezek. 7:2, “four corners” of the earth.
Yes. They're flat things with edges.
As for fountains or gouts of water from under ground sources, the Ogallala aquifer covers thousands of square miles and is estimated to have as much water in it as Lake Huron. That's enough water to do a lot of gouting and fountaining.
So now you're arguing that the fountains are actual fountains? I thought they were a metaphor. If the fountains are real, then, what are the sluices?
Evidently you do, evidently those persons attacking the veracity of the Scriptures do, evidently I do or I wouldn't comment on it.
I "care" mainly out of historical curiosity. I'm not trying to prove anything about the value of the Bible. I think the fact that the people who actually set the words down thought they lived on a flat surface under a dome, and so passed what they were inspired to write through that filter, has little to do with the essential truth of what they wrote. A child, learning that the earth was a ball and people lived on the other side, might think they must be standing upside down. That mistake doesn't change the essential truth that they learned.
BTW, "who cares" is a common idiom to express the fact that the speaker himself doesn't care.
For example, “..the sky covered the earth like a tent...”
In this phrase it is the COVERING aspect of the sky that is being compared with the COVERING aspect of the tent, not the solidness of either.
“roof of the sky, holes in the sky”? If you wrote in English I might well conclude you wanted to be understood in the most literal way unless the context indicated otherwise, but if you were writing in Hebrew, especially when used in the Bible, I would know that metaphor and poetical usage is far more common than in English.
The way the word used elsewhere by others and the context would be the next things I would look at.
“Especially if I never wrote anything to make you think otherwise”.
I might never know for certain what you believe the reality is if you wrote in metaphor but it be wrong of me to assumed’ without foundation that the literal and the metaphorical were one and the same in your mind.
“Is there anyplace that the Bible describes the earth, unequivocally, as a ball or sphere, or the celestial objects as not attached to anything but moving freely in vast space?”
Is there any unequivocal description contrary?
There's no indication that the distances and composition of the heavenly bodies was something the Biblical writers pondered over to any great degree so as a subject it would not be discussed except peripherally in the Bible.
At Job 26:7 Job says God ‘stretches the north out over an empty space and hangs the earth on nothing. And Abraham certainly understood there were far more stars than he could see as the stars of the heavens and the sands of the seashore were compared for number in Genesis 22:17.
Evidently there is a shared aspect of wings, ends of the earth, or as “kanaph” is translated in the AV at Ezek. 7:2, “four corners” of the earth.
“Yes. They're flat things with edges.”
As the reference in the lexicon pointed it was the meaning, “extremeity” as in the outermost part not something like the edge of a table and flatness doesn't enter into it, despite your efforts to put it there. As you say, you think the writers believed they lived on a flat earth.
“So now you're arguing that the fountains are actual fountains? I thought they were a metaphor. If the fountains are real, then, what are the sluices?”
Are you serious? My comment was ever so obviously about the QUANTITY of water available.