Moses describes in the next book as floating in the sky over
the camp of Israel, or are "pillars of smoke," such as ascend out of the
wilderness--whether they are those "pillars of the earth which tremble"
when God shakes it, or "the pillars of heaven which are astonished at
his reproof"--whether they are the pillars of the earth and its
anarchical inhabitants, which Asaph bore up, or are composed of the same
materials as Paul's "pillar and basis of the truth," or the pillars of
victory which Christ erects "in the temple of God"[241]--they have not
yet decided. Whether the Hebrews understood these pillars to be arranged
on the outside of the metal hemisphere, and if so, to imagine any use
for them there; or in the inside, and in that case whether they kept the
sky from falling upon the earth, or only supported the earth from
falling into the sky, these learned men are by no means agreed. Having
trampled the pearl into fragments, their attempts to combine them into
another shape are more amusing than successful; and it is hard to say
which of the seven opinions ascribed to the Bible by Infidel
commentators is least probable. That opinion, however, will, doubtless,
after more vigorous and protracted rooting, be discovered and greedily
swallowed amid grunts of satisfaction; an appropriate reward of such
laborious stupidity.

The absurdities of the Greek philosophers were not drawn from the Bible.
Had the Greeks read the Bible more, they would have preserved the common
sense God gave them a great deal longer, and would not, while professing
themselves to be wise, have become such fools as to adore blocks and
stones, and dream of metal firmaments. But they turned away their ears
from the truth, and were turned unto such fables as Infidels falsely
ascribe to the Bible. A thousand years before the cycles and epicycles
of the Ptolemaic astronomy were invented, and before learned Greeks had
learned to talk nonsense about crystal spheres, and trap-doors in the
bottom of celestial oceans, the writers of the Bible were recording
those conversations of pious philosophers concerning stars, and clouds,
and rain, from which Galileo derived the first hints of the causes of
barometrical phenomena. The origin of rain, its proportion to the amount
of evaporation, and the mode of its distribution by condensation, could
not be propounded by Humboldt himself with more brevity and perspicuity
than they are expressed by the Idumean philosopher: