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Joshua’s long day
Did it really
happen — and how?
.
the Amorites were
sun and moon worshippers - for these ‘deities’ to have been forced to obey the
God of Israel must have been a devasting experience for the Amorites, and this
might well have been the reason why God performed this particular miracle at
that time
.
by Russell Grigg
The key question
in any discussion about the meaning of difficult Bible passages is: What did
the author intend to convey?
Joshua records in
great detail the occupation of Canaan by Israel and the allotment of the land
among the tribes, around 1400 BC, so the author is obviously writing a
historical account of what happened.
The occasion of
the long day was during a battle between the combined armies of the five
Amorite kings and the army of Israel, early in the campaign.
With the help of
God, the Israelites were winning the battle and needed more time on this day to
complete the victory.
Joshua 10:11–13 reads:
‘And it came to pass, as they fled from before Israel, and were in the
going down to Beth-horon, that the Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon
them unto Azekah, and they died … Then spake Joshua to the Lord in the day when
the Lord delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and He said
in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in
the valley of Ajalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the
people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the
book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted
not to go down about a whole day.’
It appears to
have been midday or after (Hebrew: sun in the midst of the sky).
And the author is
telling us that the sun did not proceed to set for a period of a completed day,
which many commentators take to be approximately a 24-hour period, rather than
just a daylight period.
And since Joshua 10 is historical, cultures on the opposite side of
the world should have legends of a long night.
In fact, the New
Zealand Maori people have a myth about how their hero Maui slowed the sun
before it rose, while the Mexican Annals of Cuauhtitlan (the
history of the empire of Culhuacan and Mexico) records a night that continued
for an extended time.
It should also be
noted that the Amorites were sun and moon worshippers.
For these
‘deities’ to have been forced to obey the God of Israel must have been a
devasting experience for the Amorites, and this might well have been the reason
why God performed this particular miracle at that time, i.e. near the beginning
of the occupation of the land of Canaan by the Israelites.
Geocentrism and the language of appearance
Joshua’s command
to the sun to stand still does not support geocentrism, i.e. the idea that the
sun moves around the Earth. The Bible uses the language of appearance and
observation.
Today people do
exactly the same thing. For example, scientists who prepare weather reports for
TV announce the times of ‘sunrise and sunset’.
In fact, the
mention of the moon also standing still seems to confirm both the divine
authorship of the account and the fact that it is the Earth which moves.
Since all Joshua
needed was extra sunlight, and most ancients believed the sun moves, not the
Earth, a human author of a fictitious account would only have needed to refer
to the sun stopping. (See also Answering Bible skeptics Q&A.)
NASA and the missing day
A rumour surfaces
from time to time that scientists ‘using computers’ at NASA to check planetary
positions discovered that a day was ‘missing’ from history.
This story is an
‘urban myth’. The alleged research seems never to have been published — no
wonder, because to make such a calculation one would need to know the planets’
positions before any missing day, as well as after. This is impossible.
Similar
considerations apply to the book Joshua’s Long Day, written in 1890
by Charles Totten, purporting to prove that a day went missing, without
reproducing his calculations.
All such
calculations can show only where the sun and moon should have been at any time
in the past (based on where they are now, assuming the rates of movements have
not changed), not where they actually were. (See also Astronomy and
Astrophysics Q&A.)
What actually happened?
Suggested answers
may be divided into three main categories:
1.
Some form of refraction (bending) of the light from
the sun and the moon.
According to this
view, God miraculously caused the sunlight and moonlight to continue in Canaan
for ‘about a whole day’.
Supporters of
this view point out:
a. It was light that
Joshua needed, not a slowing of the Earth.
b . God promised Noah that ‘while the Earth
remaineth … day and night shall not cease’ (Genesis 8:22).
This could be
seen to mean that God promised that the Earth would not stop rotating on its
axis until the end of human history.
(However, it
would not seem to preclude a temporary slowing down of the Earth’s rotation.)
c. Some form of
light refraction appears to have been what happened in the reign of Hezekiah
when the shadow on Ahaz’s sundial retreated ten degrees (2 Kings 20:11) — an event that
appears to have occurred only in the land of Palestine (2 Chronicles
32:31).
2.
A wobble in the direction of the Earth’s axis of
rotation.
This involves a precession of
the axis of the Earth, wobbling slowly so as to trace an ‘s’-shaped or circular
path in the sky.
Such an event could have made
it appear to an observer that the sun and the moon were standing still, but
need not have involved any actual slowing of the rotation of the Earth.
One suggestion was that this
was caused by the orbits of the Earth and Mars being close together on this
date.
One problem is that these
authors postulate an ancient orbit for Mars different from its present one, and
there is no proof that this ever happened.
Other suggested causes have
included impacts of asteroids on the Earth.
3. A slowing of the
Earth’s rotation.
According to this
view, God caused the rotation of the Earth to slow down so that it made one
full revolution in about 48 hours rather than 24.
Simultaneously
God stopped the cataclysmic effects that would have naturally occurred, such as
monstrous tidal waves.
Some people have
objected to this on the erroneous assumption that, if the Earth slowed down,
people and loose objects would fly off into space.
In fact, the
apparent centrifugal force (tending to throw things off the Earth) is only
about one-three-hundredth of the gravitational force.
If the Earth
stopped rotating (whether suddenly or not), this outward ‘force’ would cease
and we would actually be held more firmly by gravity.
The Earth at the
equator moves at about 1,600 km/h (1,000 mph). The velocity needed to escape
from the Earth’s gravity is about 40,000 km/h (25,000 mph).
If the Earth was
spinning as fast as this, we would all fly off into space anyway, regardless of
whether the Earth stopped suddenly or not!
What about the
momentum of people and objects travelling at 1,600 km/h on the Earth?
Answer: A car
travelling at 100 km/h can be stopped comfortably for the occupants in a few
seconds; something travelling at 1,600 km/h could stop comfortably for
passengers in a few minutes.
This scenario
need only imply that God slowed the rotation of the atmosphere, oceans, and
Earth simultaneously to prevent any tidal-wave effect, and any heat build-up
inside the Earth due to friction from still-rotating liquid layers of the
Earth’s core. And after the long day was over, the whole process would need to
start up again.
It is certainly
not impossible for God to have done all this, despite representing a major
interruption of the natural order of things with respect to the Earth set up by
God in Genesis 1.
Conclusion
Christianity is a
religion of the miraculous — from God’s creative acts of Genesis 1 to the wonderful events of Revelation 22.
He may use
(intensify) some existing natural law (as in Noah’s Flood), or all
participation of nature may be excluded (as in the Resurrection).
Often the
miraculous effect lies in the providential timing of natural events (as in
God’s partition of the Red Sea by a strong wind that blew all night — Exodus 14:21).
Miracles rest on
testimony, not on scientific analyses.
While it is
interesting to speculate on how God might have performed any particular
Biblical miracle, including Joshua’s long day, ultimately those claiming to be
disciples of Jesus Christ (who authenticated the divine record of the Bible)
must accept them, by faith.
There is not one
logical, scientific reason to claim that, given a God powerful enough to create
a universe in six days, Joshua’s long day ‘could not have happened’.
Those who balk at
this account are almost invariably those who have already rejected 6-day
creation through compromise with evolution’s fictitious long ages, and have
thus rejected the authority of the Bible.
Russell M. Grigg M.Sc. (Hons.)
Creationist Chemist and Missionary
CMI–Australia
Biography
Russell Grigg was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1927.
He received his schooling and university education in that country. He studied
chemistry at Victoria University College, Wellington (now known as Victoria
University of Wellington), graduating in 1948. He then worked for a number of
years as an industrial chemist and then as a manager in the paint manufacturing
industry in Wellington and Christchurch.
After theological studies at the New Zealand Bible
Training Institute (later known as the Bible College of New Zealand, and now as
Laidlaw College), he joined the Overseas Missionary Fellowship in 1959. He
served for 12 years, heading up OMF’s publishing program in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Here he met and married Miss Merle Cornelius, another member of OMF, from
Adelaide, Australia. Merle went to be with the Lord in January 2009. Russell
has three adult children and nine grandchildren.
In 1971, the family settled in Adelaide and Russell worked
for 10 years with Rigby Ltd., an Australian publishing company, rising to be
one of the Senior Editors. Here he wrote two books, Australian Trains and Death
in the Family: What to Do, both published by Rigby Ltd.
In 1982, Russell rejoined OMF and served on the home staff
for eight years. He was State Director for South Australia.
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