Consider these facts: Herod's palace was called the
Herodion. He built it by enhancing a natural hill.
It is 7 miles SSE of Bethlehem. So when the 3 Wise Men stepped out of Herod's palace in the evening they saw the star moving NORTH. Also it stopped still in a location identifiably over one part of the town.
Now clear yourself of all your knowledge and look at the sky as you did when you were 4 or 5. It ain't no infinite distance. It is a dome. Sure Mommy says it's an op-tackle illusion but you can see it's a dome. All the stars are at the same distance. If you see a cloud at night it's only a slight distance below.
How high is it? You don't know. I read an article by Willy Ley once who said that by calculating geometry and allowing for refraction, when a 6' man stands on at the water's edge of the ocean the horizon is 4 miles away which Ley thought was the origin of the old 4 mile limit. There are bridges over the river here and when I'm standing on the height of one and looking at the one to the north the horizon is half again as far. National law means the bridge has 70' clearance so my head is about 80' up. The bridge to the north is 3.3 miles. So the horizon is 5 or 6 miles away.
Now when you look at the dome of the sky, is it as far as the horizon? To me it seems 1/2 or maybe 1/4 as far up as it does to the side.
Here's another oddity of the planet Earth. It is well known that the moon and sun subtend the same angle, that is, they appear to have the same size. But here's another coincidence. If you stand at the ocean's edge and look at someone of equal height, the horizon behind is exactly at their eye level. The atheistic pagan Greeks say that Earth is a sphere but if that were true, the horizon would be below your eye level. Quite clearly the Earth is flat. You have the witness of your own eyes as to that. Either that or the refraction of the Earth's atmosphere caused by the difference in pressure foot by foot causes a slight lenticular effect that exactly cancels it out so we appear to be standing on a flat Earth.
And that is the basis of the Biblical universe. Everything is extrapolated from those visible evidences. It is depressing that despite the educated people of the civilized world knowing for centuries the world was round and Israel having been a Hellenistic province, that most of the New Testament writers still held to the old Bronze Age cosmology.
So the stars are moving -- by the will of the Almighty -- across the sky in formation every night. The stars are conscious beings, sort of a class of angels.
Job 38:7 When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?
You probably misread that as poetry. It is but it is also intended literally.
Some people think the Bible means the dome is transparent. I disagree from my knowledge of early modern telescopes. (This will be a long explanation.) Again from Job:
Job 37:18 Hast thou with him spread out the sky, which is strong, and as a molten looking glass?
The KJV translators have anachronistically referred to a mirror as a "looking glass".
Those were first made in the 1st century CE. Before that the best material was an alloy the Bible calls bronze but has the more correct name
speculum metal. It is tin with some copper to harden it. It is a shiny silvery mirror. It was used for the parabolic mirrors of telescopes up till the 19th century when a simple method was made which any amateur could use for depositing silver on the front of a mirror.
Such mirrors had to be repolished every now and then.
Since it's only 2, maybe 4 miles up as you can have the Christmas star over one location, you can have:
Joshua 10:12 Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.
10:13 And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the
midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.
(There is bull--- by people who try to make real world sense of this by saying it was an eclipse but eclipses don't cause 24 hours of daylight. It's like trying to prove that an extinct breed of bears in Germany might have existed who grunted and growled in a way the that sounded like "Who's been eating my porridge" in archaic German.)
Those locations are about 10 miles apart. For the sun to be over one and the moon over another means the Sun and Moon to be only a couple miles up.
Think about it. Them atheists say the Sun is the cause of daylight. But if so then why is the sky blue? Why does light come from every direction? Why does the sky light up before dawn and at evening when the sun is gone? Think logically. It's because a lot of the daylight is
backlighting from the horizon reflecting off the shiny metal dome.
Have you been wondering how you could have evenings and mornings during the Creation before the Sun was made? Now you know. Backlighting.
No ancient could cut a hole in a piece of glass to make a door. Yet the Old Testament says there are trapdoors in the dome of the sky. That implies a metal dome. Glass is breakable. It shatters. Metal does not shatter.
But sheet metal can be cut and when sheets of tin are cut in a couple places it can be peeled back. Now we come to a final reference:
Revelations 6:13 And the stars of heaven fell unto the earth, even as a fig tree casteth her untimely figs, when she is shaken of a mighty wind.
6:14 And the heaven departed as a scroll when it is rolled together; and every mountain and island were moved out of their places.
See? The sky is a sheet metal dome. Made of tin alloy.
