What shape does the Bible give the earth?

The Bible nowhere sets out to teach the shape of the earth, and neither passage does so. Isaiah 40 is a poem on the greatness of God. He sits enthroned above the “circle” of the earth; its people look like grasshoppers to him; he spreads out the heavens “as a curtain” and “as a tent to dwell in”. These are pictures of God’s height and ease, not geometry; no one takes the sky to be made of cloth. The Hebrew chug (H2329) means a circle, a circuit or a vault. It is used of the “circuit of heaven” (Job 22:14) and of the “compass” God set on the face of the deep (Proverbs 8:27): the round of the sky, or the circle of the horizon that anyone can see. Keil and Delitzsch render Isaiah 40:22 as ‘the vault of the earth’. Justin Rogers, writing for Apologetics Press, makes the fair point that the verse does not have to mean a sphere, but neither does it imply a flat earth.

In Matthew 4:8 the mountain is the setting, but the sight was not ordinary eyesight. Luke says that the devil showed Jesus all the kingdoms “in a moment of time” (Luke 4:5). As Gill notes, there is no mountain in the world from which a single kingdom can be seen, still less all of them and “the glory of them”. That would be just as true on a flat earth, since distance and haze limit the view from any height. The passage describes a vision or a display beyond natural sight, and says nothing about the earth’s shape.

It is honest to add that Isaiah 40:22 does not teach a round earth either, and Christians should not claim that it does. The Bible speaks of the world as it looks to someone standing on it, as we still do.

A hint of a globe

Gill, among others, read ‘circle’ in Isaiah 40:22 as ‘globe’, and some modern writers see a hint of a round earth in it, or in Job 26:10, which speaks of God marking a boundary on the waters “at the boundary between light and darkness” (as the BSB words it). Others think the wording too general to bear this weight. Hebrew had no word for ‘sphere’.

A real view and a vision together

Some think that Jesus saw the lands around him from a real mountain, and that the rest of the kingdoms of the world were shown to him in a vision. Either way the account does not depend on what can be seen from a height.

Scholars differ over what chug means in Isaiah 40:22: the circle of the horizon, the vault of the sky above the earth, or the round face of the earth itself.