From "The Talmudic View of the Universe"...
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They weren't theorizing, they seemed to firmly believe it. Indeed the flat idea seems to be held by most of the talmud rabbis. It's the more fanciful stuff, the demons and pillars and changing in movement of sun according to sin, that seems to be in doubt by the later ones.
The Talmud has a strong influence on people even today, as does Kaballah, despite being archaic and failings in logic, reason and decency etc. Even in complex ways that are not immediately obvious. For example, Louis Pasteur may not have "discovered" his "principals of vaccination" had he, though not a Jew, not been introduced to the Talmud; wherein the rabbis recommend, to prevent onset of illness if a person is bitten by a rabid dog, to kill the dog and cut it open and cut off the tip of it's liver and feed it to that person. This set him off on the idea that injecting a person with a small amount of what he believed would make them sick, would make them immune to that particular sickness. Follow the science!
People can get very attached to the ideas of those old rabbis, or mystic ideas of Kaballah. Are you aware of the red string bracelet worn by students of Kaballah? You might be surprised at some of the people who have been photographed wearing one. If the parties attached to these ideas are people in positions of power, the ideas can filter down into society, naturally or by force, to such a degree that even reason can't seem to shift them.
Of course they were theorizing; they were uneducated "mystics" with no concrete understanding of astronomy. As I'm sure a scholar such as yourself must know, the Talmud is a series of written debates and disagreements with many different opinions entangled.
Zohar Vayikra 10a unambiguously states that:
So, to suggest that this idea was held by "most of the Talmudic rabbis" is both false and irrelevant. Scientific matters recorded in the Talmud are not necessarily concrete religious traditions meant to be upheld by future generations, but merely a reflection of the contemporary beliefs of the time. Additionally, like all religious texts, much of the language is couched in metaphor, which leaves it open to a deeper, poetic intepretation.
As for your other irrelevant insinuations, I'm not particularly interested in following those superstitions down into some discursive wormhole.
The quote you found is from The Zohar, not the Talmud.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zohar
My mistake, got my religious texts mixed up. My point still stands and this site provides a clear and interesting breakdown of the differing opinions of the time.