Ezekiel calling Jerusalem/Eden the 'center of the earth' or 'navel of the earth' means the Bible teaches it's the literal geographic midpoint of the planet

Ezekiel 38:12 calls Jerusalem "the navel of the earth" and Ezekiel 5:5 has God say, "This is Jerusalem; I have set her in the center of the nations." Read flat, that sounds like a claim about physical geography: the kind of thing old Jerusalem-centered T-O maps tried to depict literally. Heiser's material never goes there, and it explains why the language exists in the first place.

The Unseen Realm builds this out at length in chapter 6, "Gardens and Mountains." Ancient Near Eastern peoples pictured their gods' dwelling as a lush garden or a remote mountain: often both, described as the same place two ways. Heiser draws the parallel from Ugaritic texts, where the god El's council met at "the source of the two rivers," in a well-watered abode in the far north. Eden gets described the same way in Genesis 2 (a well-watered garden), and Ezekiel 28:13-14 goes further and explicitly calls the garden of Eden "God's holy mountain." That same garden-mountain idiom then gets transferred onto Sinai and onto Zion: Psalm 48:1-2 locates Jerusalem in "the heights of the north," the identical directional language (tsaphon) used for the divine council's meeting place. The point of all this vocabulary, across every one of these texts, is to mark a location as the place where God's throne room touches earth, not to plot coordinates.

The direct extension to Ezekiel 5:5 and 38:12 comes from Heiser's Unseen Realm 101 course-companion teaching built on this same chapter, where he states it plainly: "Not literal geography (Google Earth won't put Jerusalem at the planet's center) but theological geography: this is the place where the whole cosmos connects and is maintained, because it's God's dwelling." That's a natural continuation of the book's own sacred-space argument, not a stretch past it. The irony, which Heiser's framing brings out, is that the literalizing reading actually shrinks the claim: reading these verses as ANE sacred-space language makes Eden/Zion's significance bigger than a map pin ever could.