Scientific Knowledge in the Bible

The Bible mentions many scientific concepts, many of which had not yet been theorized by scientists at the time that the scriptures were written.  In this blog, I will discuss a few of the scientific concepts that I am referring to.  In the next blog entry I will discuss the implications of the Bible showing scientific knowledge before the ideas were theorized by scientists and the common rebuttals to these implications.

The first of these scientific concepts are is that the earth is not flat.  In Isaiah 40:22, it says, “It is He who sits above the circle of the earth…” (NKJV).  Chung, the Hebrew word that is translated in Isaiah 40:22 as circle, can be also be translated as circuit and compass (Brown, Briggs, Driver, Gesenius, Robinson & Rödiger, 1906).  According to dictionary.com, the word compass, in English, means “forming a curve or an arc”.  This indicates that the earth is not flat, but is indeed round.  The Book of Isaiah was written by Isaiah, a prophet who was born somewhere between 770 B.C. and 760 B.C. (Gilbert, 2009, p.100).  The first person outside of the Bible known to have stated that the Earth is not flat, but spherical is Pythagorean (Garwood, 2007, p. 19).   Pythagorean was born in approximately 569 B.C. and died between 500 and 475 B.C. (Douglass, 2005).  He was born almost 200 years after Isaiah was born.  Therefore, Isaiah knew that the earth was not flat many years before the first Greek scientists knew that the earth was a sphere.  This knowledge was most likely of divine origin.

Job 8 compares a plant’s dependence on environmental factors to a man’s dependence on God.  It states that I plant cannot grow without sunlight.  This is a scientific concept way before the times of scientists.  It is hypothesized that Job was written between 1000 and 800 B.C. (Gilbert, 2009, p. 126).  According to the Science Encyclopedia, Jan Ingenhousz (who lived from 1730-1799 A.D.) was the first to hypothesize that plant growth was dependent on light.  This could be evidence of divine origin of the Bible.

The Bible also correctly estimates the number of pi.  This cannot be seen in the English versions of the Bible, but rather it can be seen in the Hebrew version of the Bible.  In 1 King 7:23 (NKJV), the Bible says, “And he made the Sea of cast bronze, ten cubits from one brim to the other; it was completely round. Its height was five cubits, and a line of thirty cubits measured its circumference”, but the numbers are not accurate to the original text as there is a problem within the translation.  In Hebrew, the alphabet has numerical values.  When translated properly into English numbers, the value of pi is 15 times better than the estimated value of pi commonly used in schools (22/7).  For more information about the value of pi in the Bible, please visit this website, where I got my information on this topic.

As you can see, the Bible is accurate on many scientific concepts known today.  Next time I will discuss the implications related to this knowledge.

References:

Brown, F., Briggs, C. A., Driver, S. R., Gesenius, W., Robinson, E., & Rödiger, E. (1906). The brown-driver-briggs hebrew and english lexicon with an appendix containing the biblical aramaic. 

Douglass, C. (2005). Retrieved from http://www.mathopenref.com/pythagoras.html

Garwood, C. (2007). Flat earth: The history of an infamous idea. New York, New York: St. Martin's Press.

Gilbert, C. (2009). A complete introduction to the bible. New York, New York: Paulist Press.