‘The end of the earth’
Like most other ancient cultures, the ancient Israelites thought it obvious that since the earth was flat it must have limits. ‘The ends of the earth’ therefore appears repeatedly in the Old Testament as a way to describe the furthest reaches of the then-known world. When, in the Book of Job, God is said to ‘direct his lightning to the ends of the earth,’ it’s just a poetic way of saying that God is in charge everywhere.
Of course, it wasn’t long before the ancient Greeks discovered that the earth is in fact not flat but spherical. Not everyone, however, is convinced of the earth’s inconvenient roundness. Daniel Shenton, head of the modern Flat Earth Society, gives the Scottish verdict: ‘Not proven.’
According to him and his fellow ‘flat-earthers,’ the world is a flat disc, centered on the North Pole, surrounded at its Antarctic rim by a wall of ice. The moon landings, he says, and photos showing the round earth hanging in space, were faked. If any ship or aircraft really did fly past the ends of the earth, he says, it would simply fall off the edge and into the infinite abyss below.
