Who named our Planet *Earth* if not for GOD?

Question

Although GOD named everything in the beginning..Earth from what I can reasearch was named by GOD and him only in the Book of Genesis..

001:010 And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together
of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

Answer 1

I thought God had Adam name everything.
He called the little blue planet Earth.

Answer 2

It is just a name. There is nothing special about it. Earth is the ground under our feet and special stars in the sky that moved from constellation to constellation were gods, as far as ancient people were concerned. After modern science found that those stars were planets orbiting the Sun, and Earth was just like them orbiting the Sun too, only then did it become reasonable to think about the ground under our feet and those special stars in the sky in the same way, but by then all people in the world had been using these names this way for thousands of years. Forcing people to change that would have been a million times more controversial than the recent demoting of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet. Just imagine the uproar if every one of the 6 billion people in the world was told that they could not call our home planet Earth any more, but had to start calling it by the name of some Roman god to satisfy some astronomers who thought Earth was not a name that fit the pattern of all the other planet's names! You should not complain about answers that mention etymology, because that is really the basis of names. It is WHY the names are what they are. And you DID ask WHY the name is what it is. The name is all about language and not about planets or science. Names are a language thing, not a science thing.

Answer 3

Unfortunately, I think it's pretty impossible to say exactly who first named the planet 'Earth'. Actually, I really doubt one person really named it intentionally; rather it developed over time as part of the English language. Earth is Old English and German in origin, related to the Old Saxon 'ertha', the Dutch 'aerde', and the German 'erda'. Terra is a French and Latin word, and so isn't part of the 'Earth' etymology. I'm not really an expert on words and word origins, but it seems likely that people used Earth to mean 'land' and then it was the natural thing to refer to all the land and the planet.

So, as with the names of the other planets that have been known throughout human history (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn), it's difficult to say who first thought of the planet as Earth. The names were part of culture even before we really understood the significance of what planets are and where they are in space.

Answer 4

It's not like God wrote the bible, you know. The people who actually gave it the name "Earth" would be whoever it is that wrote the book of Genesis. Think what you will, but even you must acknowledge that at no point did God sit down at a desk with a pen and paper and write Genesis--some human being did that. That person is the one who came up with the name Earth.

Answer 5

There have been countless names for Earth, by many cultures -
Gaia, Terra, the World.

The Ancient Greeks, Chinese and Japanese all coined the term 'earth' and recognised it as a basic element. It is from them that we have come to name Planet Earth.

Since these civilisation outdates even the first bible, it is more than likely the name Earth stemmed from them than it. Even the word earth in the bible may have been influenced by these cultures (especially by Greek culture).

Better luck next time.

Answer 6

I'm becoming more convinced that you are a troll. This reminds me of the Bible belt community that petitioned to have French removed from the local school curriculum on the grounds that if English was good enough for God to use for the Bible, it was all that was needed in school. Like you, they didn't appear to know that the Pentateuch was written in ancient Hebrew. So if you were following your own logic, you should be only speaking in the language of the Jews of 6,000 years ago.

Answer 7

The problem with your definition is that Earth is not actually called Earth in all the languages just English.

Russian - Zemlya
Ancient Greeks called it Gaia
And here is the link to the word Earth in Hebrew (in which the Bible was originally written) http://www.dictionary.co.il/h32/h3201007.gif

So i can honestly say i am not sure where the names came from for all the other languages :P

Answer 8

It is, of course, a well known fact that God is an Englishman. Thus he speaks English and, as the English-speaking peoples are invariably loathe to learn other languages, he used English to name everything of importance.

Answer 9

What twisted logic. I doubt that there is the word "Earth" in Aramaic. We are called terrestrials because the Latin word for earth is Terra. Does that mean that we should call the planet Terra because the original Christians spoke Latin?

Answer 10

Child, language changes constatly. Names change constantly. They are merely symbols. I could call our planet Terra or Gaea, and it wouldn't make a difference. The truth is, humans named it, just like we named everything else.