The Sun's Path at Night
As Ecclesiastes 1:5 says,
The sun rises and the sun goes down,
and hurries to the place where it rises
but where does it go as it hurries back during the night? This question was debated by Bible scholars before the victory of Heliocentrism, as documented by Rabbi Natan Slifkin (a.k.a. Nathan Slivkin), in the monograph The Sun's Path at Night – The Revolution in Rabbinic Perspectives on the Ptolemaic Revolution which arose from discussion here.
Rabbis disagreed as to whether it continues around after sunset from west to east under the earth, or does a U-turn and goes back during the night behind The Firmament to the east, where it does another U-turn, coming down below the firmament at dawn and becoming visible to us again.
This is a good example of Literal Reading.
A brief quotation from the paper:
Rabbeinu Tam’s[1] . . . position [was] that there are two stages of sunset. The first takes place when the sun stops moving downwards and instead moves horizontally to enter the firmament via a window. The second occurs when it has completed its journey through the four-mil thickness[2] of the firmament and begins to move up and around behind it.
It may seem remarkable that as late as the twelfth century, Rabbeinu Tam was still maintaining a view of the sun passing behind the sky at night, which suggests that he fully subscribed to Babylonian cosmology, including a flat earth. This attests to the lack of schooling in science by the Jews of northern France, who were entirely unaware of the Ptolemaic model that was standard elsewhere.
— Slifkin, N, The Sun's Path at Night – The Revolution in Rabbinic Perspectives on the Ptolemaic Revolution
