'Flat Earth': Matthew 4:8 has the devil take Jesus to 'a very high mountain' and show him 'all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor'; paired with Daniel 4:20 (a tree visible 'to the ends of the whole earth'). The implication is that seeing 'all the kingdoms of the world' from one mountaintop is only physically possible on a flat earth, so Scripture teaches (or presupposes) flat-earth cosmology.

This treats an idiomatic, visionary temptation narrative as a geodesic claim, which the text itself does not support. **Genre and idiom**: The parallel account in Luke 4:5 makes the visionary character explicit — Jesus is shown the kingdoms 'in a moment of time' (*en stigmē chronou*), language signaling a supernaturally compressed panoramic showing, not ordinary eyesight over distance. This matches a known biblical convention: Moses is shown 'all the land' — Gilead to Dan, Naphtali, Ephraim, Manasseh, Judah, the Negev, the plain — from Pisgah (Deut 34:1-3), an area no human eye can actually see in that geographic detail from one peak, and no one reads that as a flat-earth claim about the topography of Canaan; it is recognized as a symbolic/visionary showing. 'All the kingdoms of the world' (*pasas tas basileias tou kosmou*) is also the same kind of totalizing hyperbolic idiom found throughout Scripture without geographic literalism: 'the whole world has gone after him' (John 12:19), 'all the world' coming to Egypt to buy grain (Genesis 41:57), 'a decree went out... that all the world should be registered' (Luke 2:1, referring to the Roman world, not literally every kingdom on earth). No one takes these as false census or travel claims; the same idiom applies here. **Daniel 4:20-22** is court-tale/apocalyptic dream-vision material. The tree 'visible to the ends of the whole earth' is Daniel's own stated interpretation of a symbolic dream image representing the reach of Nebuchadnezzar's kingdom (a well-attested ANE motif — the cosmic tree symbolizing royal power, paralleled in Mesopotamian iconography) — not a claim about literal sightlines. **The honest, harder concession**: it is true that biblical authors, like all ancient (and most premodern) writers, use ordinary phenomenological and observational language to describe the cosmos — the 'raqia' or firmament/vault over the earth (Genesis 1:6-8) reflects the everyday visual idiom of the ancient audience, describing the sky as it appears rather than as modern astrophysics models it. John Walton's *The Lost World of Genesis One* argues Genesis 1 is making a functional/theological claim about the created order's purpose, not a scientific claim about material cosmology, and that its cosmological furniture (vault, waters above) is simply the ordinary phenomenological idiom shared across the ANE — the text is not asserting this idiom as revealed science any more than we assert flat-earth commitments when we say 'sunrise' or 'the four corners of the earth' today.

Scripture is not straightforwardly committed to ANE flat-earth cosmology even where it uses ANE phenomenological idiom: Job 26:7 states God 'hangs the earth on nothing' — a striking, non-mythological cosmological datum for its era — and Isaiah 40:22 describes God enthroned above 'the circle (*hug*) of the earth,' language some scholars note is at minimum non-committal to flat-earth cosmology in a way most contemporary ANE cosmogonies are not. The consistent pattern is that where Scripture does make a positive cosmological claim, it tends toward restraint and even correction of surrounding mythological cosmology (no cosmic battle needed to create order, as in Enuma Elish), while elsewhere using ordinary observational idiom without asserting it as scientific doctrine.