The turtle, of course. Didn’t they teach you anything in science class?
However, this particular Forum is intended to provide factual answers to questions. Regardless of the quality of the beliefs under discussion (whether they be silly or sincere or borrowed or invented), there is a factual answer to the actual question presented: Did the documents collected into the book we call the Bible ever express a geocentric view of the world? A demand to know “who cares?” does not provide that factual answer. Given that no one is debating anyone’s faith, there is no need to force this thread into Great Debates, (much less The BBQ Pit).
Yeah, sure, dtilque, and I’ll bet I can guess what the turtle stood on.
You can’t fool us… It’s turtles all the way down. 
Right. So if the quoted passages are metaphorical, then where are literal descriptions of their cosmology? Also, why just the one “metaphor,” over and over again?
The Lord is our shepherd, the Lord is our father, the Lord is the creator of heaven and earth, the Lord is a voice out of a whirlwind, the Lord is the Lord your God, etc.
But the earth is always spoken of as being flat, and being built upon something (pillars, a foundation) and is never described as anything but flat. There aren’t any passages that say that God formed the earth into a ball and set it spinning on its axis, or that God placed the earth on the back of an elephant, or that God made the earth to float upon the waters. I’m not just talking about heliocentrism–there are even many variations on flat-earth geocentrism, only one of which is ever mentioned in the Bible.
Any particular passage could be metaphorical, but when the Bible consistently describes the earth in a certain way, and when that happens to also be congruent with cosmological beliefs of most cultures in the area where, and the time when, the Bible was written, why would we think that the biblical authors were just using metaphor, rather than describing the earth as they understood it?
Taking another tack on the OP here - theologians of Copernicus’ day had basically co-opted Aristotle. Aristotle’s ideas had essentially become the standard Church “line” on matters of philosophy and the natural world. Refuting Aristotelian world views was just about as risky as refuting scripture.
I am not an expert on ancient texts, but a more appropriate way to phrase your question might be, “did the ancient preliterate mind automatically understand symbolic thought as equal to truth, or, given their level of development of logical thinking, can we expect to find any literal descriptions? Did the metaphors come along first and the logical interpretation later? Does the disparity we speak of evolve from four thousand years of development of human thinking skills and an evolution away from oral recitation and metaphor = truth? Did the ancients know the difference? Did later thinkers add the interpretation we know today, and if so, how and when? Do other similarly ancient texts show similar abundance of metaphor in place of specificity?”
I’m not sure simple Bible citation will do here because there’s at least four centuries of difference between what we think the words mean and what they thought the words meant at the time (and why they wrote them the way they did).
For what it’s worth, I don’t think the true ancients thought about it much, but their oral traditions in metaphor were handed down as stories and taken as fact by slightly more logic-and-evidence-grounded thinkers, until finally they came down to us, who can’t make head or tail of it. That’s only an unsupported opinion, of course.
FISH
Good post, Fish. There is reason to believe that over time there was a degradation in the understanding of religious-poetic metaphor; Galileo’s persecutors are an example.
I’m truly surprised that their aren’t a chorus of voices in this post saying what yabob is saying.
That (The Aristotilian worldview’s dominance.) is what I’ve always heard/believed was the case.