In that day, they thought that when the scripture spoke of the Sun being still in the sky on Joshua's long day that the scriptures were TEACHING that the Sun orbited the Earth. But we don't accept that today at all. We see that as simply a description that came from the author's observation coupled with what he thought (based on his culture) about why the sun travelled across the sky each day.
Now if ancient people misunderstood that (or if I’m misunderstanding it), it does not negate the possibility that whatever God meant with the word was absolutely true. The truth does not depend on correct interpretation, as you seem to admit.
But you permit the possibility that it just looked like the sun stood still for Joshua, while you say you can’t accept that what God made on day two just looked like a raqia’, whatever that is.
At the very least, it was a historical description of something that was actually seen and actually happened when the sun stood still for Joshua. But because you reject raqia’ as a descriptive term for the sky, you feel justified in rejecting the entire description of the six days of creation as having any correspondence to what actually happened or would have been seen if there were any people around to see it. To me, that’s like saying, since the sun didn’t actually stand still for Joshua in a scientifically precise sense, we can assume the whole battle never took place except as some sort of metaphor.
I really don’t want to get into an endless debate over the general issues of creationism vs theistic evolution (such as “evening and morning were the first day, the second day, the third day...” as being anything other than 24-hours, allowing not only for a thousand years but billions of years), which is what this seems to be trending toward.
I would grant that the terminology of Genesis was simplified to what ancient cultures could understand and that the actual creation was more complex than we can possibly understand. But both because Scriptures consistently treat Genesis as history and because of the consequences to Scriptural doctrines such as suffering and death being a consequence of sin, I will not yield and further debate is likely pointless. Unless something new is discussed pertinent to my general thesis, I'm probably done with this thread.
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