The Earth Hung Upon Nothing

This may be the most remarkable sentence about the physical world in the entire Bible, and it was written down between three and four thousand years ago.

Every culture around Job had an answer for what held the world up, and every one of them involved something underneath. The Egyptians and Babylonians had the earth resting on water. The Greeks would later say the Titan Atlas carried it on his shoulders. In Hindu tradition it rested on elephants standing on a turtle. Something always had to be under it — because everything else we know needs holding up.

Job says it hangs on *nothing.*

That is precisely, exactly what it does. The earth is suspended in empty space, held by gravity — a force with nothing solid about it — falling forever around the sun in a curve that never ends. Nobody could see that. Nobody would guess it. The first photographs from space, taken in the 1960s, showed the world what Job's readers had been told all along: a blue globe hanging in blackness, with nothing beneath it at all.