[Avodah] mabul

[Zev Sero]

On 3/11/2011 4:13 PM, Micha Berger wrote:
> 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.

Again with the Romans.  Why them?  The intellectual world was Greek.
And why should they adopt every stupid idea that comes down the pike.
Some ideas made sense to them, especially the ones that were proven
by experiment, such as the shape and size of the earth, while others
seemed like nonsense to them, as indeed they turned out to be.


> 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?

For the same reason that hardly any scientists believed that until
quite recently.  Remember that in Galileo's day the scientific consensus
was *against* him.   Whereas there hasn't been a time for well over 2000
years when educated people thought the earth was flat.



> 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?

IIRC there's a Tosfos in Avoda Zara that explains the mishneh about the
orb, sceptre, and bird being signs of mastery over the world (the first
two eventually made their way into modern times as symbols of royalty).
The orb, says Tosfos, represents the earth, which is an orb, citing an
explicit Yerushalmi.  So the amoraim of the Y'mi knew, but so did the
tana'im.  And the only flat earth references we find are from Bavli
amora'im.  So it makes sense that they hadn't heard the news.


-- 
Zev Sero        If they use these guns against us once, at that moment
zev at sero.name   the Oslo Accord will be annulled and the IDF will
                 return to all the places that have been given to them.
		                            - Yitzchak Rabin