[Avodah] mabul

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, Nov 03, 2011 at 03:32:42PM -0400, Zev Sero wrote:
>                              Those are the sort of discoveries that
> would have eventually reached the tana'im in EY, but would have taken
> a while longer to get to the amora'im of Bavel.

But again, the Romans had a model of the universe. Ptolemy comibined ideas
from Apollonius, Plato, Erastothenes, etc... to produce a single theory,
and that was the system Roman philosophers bought. The pieces, though,
are nearly all Greek. Plato has the sun going adounf the earth (moon,
sun, mercury, venus); Ptlomey moved mercury and venus lower down than the
sun. But little else. Apollonius of perga introduced epicycles. It's all
from the early bayis sheini. Ptolemy gets credit for picking variants
that he could glue all together to make one picture. And in doing so,
his Amalgest convinced the empire.

But if it's compelling that the tannaim believed in a round earth
because the Romans did, why didn't that compell them to believe
in the sun orbiting the earth?

Why are you assuming the tannaim had a cosmos no philosophical school
every produced when there is no evidence for it? And why wasn't their
model passed down to the amoraim who thought the world was flat and
floated atop the tehom or rested above it on pillars? Is there any
tanna who actually mentions the globe?

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             Man can aspire to spiritual-moral greatness
micha at aishdas.org        which is seldom fully achieved and easily lost
http://www.aishdas.org   again. Fulfillment lies not in a final goal,
Fax: (270) 514-1507      but in an eternal striving for perfection. -RSRH