It's a standard flat-earth claim that rainbows are semicircles because the dome that they think is above the flat Earth is a hemisphere. In fact, rainbows are circular, but the bottom is only seen at high altitudes. See How to see a full circle rainbow, from which this photo is taken.
I was too busy to read it then, he identified it as coming from Bereshit Rabbah, I only replied that it is not a physics textbook. Tonight, I posted a longer response, which I'm slightly changing here because Blogger has more formatting options than Facebook. for example you can only have one image per post or comment and hyperlinks are harder to enter.
Only an עם הארץ (ignoramus) quotes a source without a מראה מקום (precise reference, how this is done varies depending on the source, in Midrash Rabba, of which Bereshit Rabbah is one, it's generally by chapter and paragraph). I don't know why you post images of text instead of text. Just in case you think it makes it hard to find the source that way, it doesn't, all I had to do was right-click, search in Google Lens, select some text, and found it Bereshit Rabbah 6:6 Of if you prefer your text vocalized, here
So let's see what it says. I'm working from the second copy and not comparing to see if there are variant readings, Sefaria doesn't have English translation for this yet, so I'm doing it myself.
In what sphere are the Sun and Moon located? In the second רקיע (the Hebrew word translated as "firmament" or "expanse" or just "sky". As it is written (Gen 1:17) "And God set them in the expanse of the sky ..." (Rashi, explains this to mean the expanse above the sky)
I'm going to paraphrase to attempt to make it a bit clearer, a similar derivation is made from (Nechemia 9:6) "... You (God) made the heavens and the heavens above the heavens, and all their hosts ..." and again, reading this as that there are at least two layers of heavens and the "hosts", e.g. the stars, are in the second one.
And from the Earth to the expanse is a journey of 500 years, and the thickness of the expanse is another 500 years, and from one expanse to the next is one more 500 years. None of the commentaries at Sefaria explain this distance, but I read it as, the distance it would take to walk (or perhaps ride) in 500 years,
How far is that? Well there's a unit of distance in Jewish law called a parsa (unrelated to parsec), whose name comes from the Persian parasang. Herodotus (source in link about parasang) said that an army could travel five parasangs per day and it's believed to be between 3 and 3.5 miles. In Jewish law it's 8,000 cubits (about 2-2/3 miles) and an average person can travel that far in 72 minutes. Well maybe an army moves slower than a pedestrian, or stops more often.
So let's say our traveler walks for 720*8 minutes or 9.6 hours a day, using 3 miles per parasang, that's 21.36 miles. Let's give our traveler a lunch break and round that to 20 miles. Note that I'm assuming that the 500 year journey is made of days' journeys and not how far a person could travel if they never stop. So 20 * 365 * 500 is 3.650,000 miles. And we need to triple it to get to the second expanse.
That's a bit of a problem for FE's "local" Sun and Moon. In reality, the Moon is an average of an average of 238,855 miles away and for the Sun it's 93 million.
Well back to the Midrash, on the first day of Tekufat Tammuz, the summer solstice, nothing has a shadow, as it is written (Psalm 19:7) and nothing is hidden from His Sun. This is true at noon on either Equinox and is dangerously close to how Eratosthenes measured the size of the globe.
And the sphere of the Sun has a sheath, as it is written (Psalm 19:5, four verses after the one on Werner von Braun's tombstone) "... He placed in them (the heavens) a tent for the Sun". And a channel of water is before it, when it goes forth, the Holy One blessed be He reduces its strength with water so that it does not burn the world, but in the future He will remove it from its sheath and burn the wicked as it is written (Malachai 3:19) "... and He will burn them, on the coming day".
I once saw, in a program of short Israeli animations, a Claymation where a rabbi was explaining this verse from a podium, adding a commentary that this will not hurt the righteous, and then the camera pans to the audience, who are all melting.
There is then a debate about the nature of Hell, is it only what will happen on that day, is it a place that already exists, or does fire emerge from the corpses of the wicked and burn them (rather than an external source)
The passage ends saying that had God placed the sun in the first heaven, no one would be able to withstand the heat of the day.
The same guy also provided another image, this time from a commentary, the Or Hachaim. This time it almost gives a reference, Verse 20.
It's about the creation of "birds that fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky" and this commentary explains that the odd wording "expanse of the sky" by referring to the previously discussed midrash. What's even the point? If you take Midrash literally (which according to Maimonides makes you a fool), how does it contribute that a commentary quoted the Midrash? Either you already believed it, or you didn't, but how does source 2 quoting source 1 help?
I asked him if his own private Torah study convinced him of FE, or he was taught it in a religious framework (yeshiva, shul, etc.) he ignored my question and just kept sending me more religious sources. Eventually he sent me a list of flat-earth videos in Hebrew, but it's still not clear if this is in answer to that question or he just did a search for "flat earth" in Hebrew on YouTube. I may watch and discuss them later. Meanwhile I'm just adding them to a private playlist (Flerf rabbis) and translating the titles.
In #4 and #5, the rabbi is referred to as "the gaon". In Modern Hebrew, this word means "genius" and comes from a Biblical root meaning "pride". Classically, it was used to refer to the heads of the two major yeshivas in Babylonia in the post-Talmudic period, Wikipedia says between 589–1040, and more recently was used to refer to a small number of exceptional figures such as The Vilna Gaon. More recently just about any rabbi can be called "gaon" and the title has been rendered meaningless.
And then there's this image that he posted.
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