Did the Bible anticipate modern science?
It is often claimed, to encourage faith in the Bible, that it displays supernatural prescience — a sort of implied prophecy, shown to be true by the discoveries of modern science. Leviticus 17:11, for example, says "the life of the flesh is in the blood" which is not false according to modern biology, though what the verse meant to ancient people may not have been factual.
Many of these arguments are based on misreadings of the Bible, however. For example:
- The Circle of the Earth in Isaiah 40:22 and Proverbs 8:27 are sometimes said to anticipate the discovery that the Earth is spherical
- Job 26:7 says that "the earth hangs on nothing", which is correct; but the context includes allusions to ancient beliefs that are definitely false.
See The Language of the Bible with Reference to Natural Things.
Bro Ken Gilmore writes about some of these claims that the Bible anticipates modern science on his blog, and quotes in detail from the essay Does the Bible Teach a Spherical Earth? by Robert J. Schneider, including this:
. . . a circle is no more a sphere in Scripture than it is in geometry. The preponderance of philological evidence and the translations of ancient scholars and modern experts alike provide overwhelming testimony that Isa 40:22a does not refer to a spherical earth. There is simply no warrant for Eastman, Sarfati, and Morris to declare, contrary to its plain sense and in violation of its semantic domain, that chûgh literally means sphericity. They have read the earth's sphericity into the text, not out of it. . . .