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haus, thanks... probably right.
but just out of curiosity, i just did what i ought to have done earlier - googled it - and i found this:
[the 'morris' noted is the author of a book called The Biblical Basis for Modern Science (1984) and the site i took this from tries to discredit him, accusing him of reading modern science back into biblical texts and this purports to be an exegisis of terms morris wrote on...]
Isaiah 11:12 - "The four corners of the earth"
Morris (p.248) goes through the trouble of trying to show that the earth really does have four corners:
55 N, 10 W (near Ireland)
50 S, 48 E (near South Africa)
15 N, 140 E (near the Philippines)
18 S, 80 W (near Peru)
Isaiah was not thinking about these locations when he penned the book of Isaiah (Meyers 1989, 80-2). Morris seems to be bound and determined to force some scientific truth out of literal words that were meant to be taken figuratively.
In Isaiah 11:12 the Hebrew word for "corners" is knp which BDB lexicon translates as "the extremities of the earth." The root of the word means "winged" which the Septuagint translates as pterygon which is used in the New Testament in Matthew 4:5, "the pinnacle of the temple."
The four corners of the earth are also mentioned in Revelation 7:1 and 20:8. The Greek word is gonia. Thayer’s Lexicon says this word means "the four extreme limits of the earth" (Thayer 1962, 123). This word can also mean "angle" or "corner." The Vulgate translates this word with angulos. The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia says, "The four corners of the earth or land are therefore simply the extremities of land in the four cardinal directions" (Orr 1939, 887). When gonia refers to a building it means corner, but when it refers to land it means the extremity. For example in the Catalogue of the Greek Papyri in the John Rylands Library (II 130,9) it says, "in the area of Euhemeria in the division of Themistes at the corner" (Moulton and Milligan 1976, 134). The phrase "the four corners of the earth" is a common ancient expression (Grayson 1972, 105). One example of this is found in the legend of Keret which says, (3) sb. Lqsm. `ars. (4) lksm. M`iyt, meaning "they go around to the edges of the earth, to the limits of the watery region" (Gibson 1978, 98; Herdner 16:3,3-4). I do not think these ancient writings meant the four compass points that Morris mentioned above.
Cosmas Indicopleustes wrote a book called Christian topography around 547 AD (McCrindle 1987). One of the basic purposes of his book was to refute from scripture and common sense, the impious pagan belief that the earth was a sphere. Cosmas believed the earth was rectangular in shape because he took literally the verses that say the earth has four corners. He saw the Hebrew tabernacle as a microcosm of the universe. The table of show-bread with its waved border represented the earth surrounded by the ocean. Since the table was twice as long as it was wide, and was placed lenghtwise from East to West twice as long as it is wide. From Isaiah which says that the heaven is His throne, and the earth is His footstool, he deduced that the earth must be at the bottom of the Universe. Just as Cosmas’ deductions look silly today so also does Morris’ scientific deductions from figurative language.
for interest, here is the site
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