So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.
Joshua 10:13
The sun and moon stood still in their habitation: at the light of thine arrows they went,
and at the shining of thy glittering spear.
Habakkuk 3:11
Celestial events are sometimes recorded in the Bible which defy explanation. The case of Joshua’s long day is one of them. As indicated in the last Praxis, in our quote from Habakkuk, details are in short supply.
In the biblical account, the Israelites have invaded the “land of Canaan” and in the course of one of the pivotal battles, the loss of daylight threatened their victory. They were winning, but nightfall would allow their enemies the opportunity to escape. Knowing this, Joshua commands the sun and the moon to stand still, and they do. They stop in the sky: the Sun “upon Gibeon” and the Moon “in the valley of vultures” (Ajahon) – 10:12.
For the faithful, this is yet another inspirational miracle but it is one full of problems for the natural philosopher. The effects of such a celestial event should have impacted the entire world. It would have required a cessation of Earth’s rotation – and its orbital procession through space.
All of nature is connected in a chain of cause and effect. We have discussed in previous issues what would happen should the Earth suddenly stop spinning. Let us review:
1) Should Earth stop spinning, it would initially be the crust only. The inertia of a body of water and of the atmosphere would initially continue at Earth’s current rotational speed of 1000 mph.
2) The lava of Earth’s mantle would continue to spin, thus creating stresses on the tectonic plates.
3) The loss of centrifugal force would cause the effects of gravity to immediately increase by 1%. This may seem to be insignificant, except that the centrifugal force of Earth’s spin holds the atmosphere in place at the equatorial bulge. Should it stop, the atmosphere would flow downhill, leaving the lower latitudes close to the equator experiencing the conditions of space.
4) Earth’s normal heating and cooling cycle would be disrupted, such that the hot areas would become hotter and the cold areas would become colder.
The biblical account does not offer us any clues as to these geophysical effects which should have resulted in massive tsunamis, crustal tearing, epochal windstorms and other devastations.
It does suggest that this was a part of a larger event, however. Earlier in the day in this account, God is said to have “discomfited” the enemies with “great stones” “cast down from heaven.” These “hailstones” killed more of the enemy than were killed by the Israelite soldiers. Why this heavenly bombardment should have selectively killed the Amorites and not the Israelites is never asked, nor answered, other than it was a deliberate miracle engineered by Jehovah.
Whatever we might think about this record – whether it was one of those typical “roll-your-eyes miracles” found in the Bible, or whether it was an opportunistic embellishment of ancient Jewish war propaganda – it remains that there was something that happened. We are just not sure what.
For 21st Century catastrophists of the persuasion presented by this website, Immanuel Velikovsky is the colossus upon whose shoulders we all stand. Almost every major theme associated with a planetary-scale disaster was explored in his writings. He, too, contemplated Joshua’s long day, beginning with the very first chapter of his now famous Worlds in Collision (Macmillan, 1950). Introducing it as “The Most Incredible Story,” and after reviewing the effects I have just inferred above, he asked the same question:
Would not a sudden stop by the earth, rotating at a little over one thousand miles an hour at its equator, mean a complete destruction of the world? p. 44
Throughout the chapter, he explores what might have happened by citing legends from the opposite side of the world, and we discover yet again, just as we did in the “Moses event” discussed in his Ages in Chaos, that the quaint little “miracle” which the Bible comforts us as a loving sign of the Almighty’s providential care, that the whole world was devastated. People who were not the “enemies” of the children of Israel – and who did not even know they existed – fell victim to this same calamity, beckoned by the battle stratagems of an insignificant war chief:
We could follow a path around the earth and inquire into the various traditions concerning the prolonged night and prolonged day, with sun and moon absent or tarrying at different points along the zodiac, while the earth underwent a bombardment of stones in a world ablaze.
ibid, p. 46
As for the Israelites, it is possible that this geographical area could have been “sheltered” from the most immediate effects.
We should be so lucky!
We think that bodies of water would have flowed “downhill” from the equator along with the atmosphere of the lower latitudes. The equator manifests a crustal bulge some 27 miles high because of the Earth’s oblateness.
Also, if Earth were spinning in a counter-clockwise direction as it does now, the much smaller Mediterranean Sea – which geologists say was once mostly an empty basin with rivers and lakes and probably inhabited – could have siphoned off the surge of the Atlantic before it struck the shores of tiny Palestine. There would have been no other body of water “uphill” from this geographical location. The Indian Ocean would have drained south not north.
1000 mph winds, however, would be a problem. But, again, if there was a gradual slowing of the rotation, say, over a period of one to two hours, the speeds could have been reduced by 80% or more. But not the oceanic surge as that would manifest mass with momentum, not necessarily speed.
If this battle occurred in the “Valley of Ajalon” and the Amorites were fleeing “uphill” toward the mountains of Azekah, the Amorites would have been exposed to wind and storm, while the Israelites in pursuit deep in the gorge, would have been sheltered from these temporary effects. Again, we should be so lucky!
The whole thing seems fantastical and we should be tempted to disbelieve that the Israelites were exempted from the maelstrom. Nevertheless, however bizarre and complex the factors, survivors survive because of them. And if the Israelites were receiving Divine assistance, this whole thing could have been choreographed to their advantage. It just depends upon your worldview.
Evidently, per Velikovsky’s research, crustal tearing, telluric lightning, massive tsunamis, atmospheric collapse, and a hailstorm of meteorites did occur elsewhere on the planet as a result of this event. Velikovsky thinks he has found just such accounts which prove that,
Mountains fell and others rose from level ground; the earth with its oceans and continents became heated; the sea boiled in many places, and rock liquefied; volcanoes ignited and forests burned. . .
ibid., p. 44
Perhaps, this was the time of the destruction of Atlantis, especially if it was in the Mediterranean Basin and then inundated by the Atlantic surge.
Velikovsky revisits Joshua’s long day in his Epilogue to challenge the scientific community with questions which have not been answered to this day, now some 75 years later:
Having discovered some historical facts and having solved a few problems, we are faced with more problems in almost all fields of science; we are not free to stop and rest on the road on which we started when we wondered whether Joshua’s miracle of stopping the sun was a natural phenomenon. Barriers between sciences serve to create the belief in a scientist in any particular field that other scientific fields are free from problems, and he trusts himself to borrow from them without questioning.
ibid., p. 389
As for an example of this lack of interdisciplinary science, celestial mechanics, which is premised upon the assumption that the sun “is as a whole an electrically neutral body”:
Fundamental principles in celestial mechanics including the law of gravitation, must come into question if the sun possesses a charge sufficient to influence the planets in their orbits or the comets in theirs. In the Newtonian celestial mechanics, based on the theory of gravitation, electricity and magnetism play no role.
p.387
James McCanney, of course, has answered the challenge to identify and measure the “electrical universe” component in celestial mechanics which we have discussed elsewhere. But he is not considered mainstream science. Most popular science today is about as real as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny: pat answers to satisfy the curiosity of the children.
In addition to tidal effects caused by gravity and angular velocity, we have discussed electrical effects and electromagnetic effects, but we have not yet discussed non-electrical magnetism.
What if celestial objects, such as Earth, manifest a permanent magnetic field because they have a solid, iron core? What if the Sun is a star with just such a solid magnetic core? What effects should we expect to see manifested in the orbits of the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets in a solar system with such a star at its center? How far would such a magnetic field reach out into space and what density of ferrous metals would be required for such a field to affect the Earth’s orbit and rotation?
These kinds of questions I propose to discuss in forthcoming issues.
JWS, 8/6/23
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