By T.C. Lo; March 10, 2020
I love tackling Bible difficulties. But there is one that really befuddles my mind. It is recorded in the Book of Joshua chapter 10. The text reads:
「On the day the Lord gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the Lord in the presence of Israel: “O sun, stand still over Gibeon, O moon, over the Valley of Aijalon.” So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the nation avenged itself on its enemies, as it is written in the Book of Jashar. The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. There has never been a day like it before or since, a day when the Lord listened to a man. Surely the Lord was fighting for Israel! (Joshua 10:12-14)」
“The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day.” This narrative is very hard to swallow especially for scientists and engineers. Had there ever been an event in human history that “the sun stays and the moon stops”? Since the Enlightenment, many people have asserted that science and Bible were not compatible, but I firmly believe that science presents no conflict to the Scripture. Galileo once said, “God gives humans two books, one is the Bible and the other is the Nature.” If these two books were from the same source, how could they contradict one another? If contradiction is said to arise, it must follow that either the interpretation to the scripture is wrong, or the scientific theory is erroneously formulated, or both are in error. The existence of science is based on the existence of the natural-law; the existence of the natural-law must posit a natural-law giver–God! So science originates from God. With this as a preamble, how do we understand the episode described in this passage?
If we must stick to (which I firmly do) the doctrines of “Bible inerrancy, i.e., Bible contains no wrong ” and “Bible infallibility, i.e., Bible cannot be wrong” , then how do we deal with this text? Reviewing existing explanations gleaned from several commentaries yields no convincing argument. Nevertheless, let me first briefly summarize the three known possibilities attempting to explain this passage. In light of lacking certainty, what we can do now is to analyse them comparatively on their relative strength of explanation powers. The three known interpretive options are:
- The first explanation is that the sun and the moon really stopped their normal trajectories as literal as the Bible described.
- The second explanation is that Joshua’s prayer was spoken in astrologists’ terms of the Canaanites of his time.
- The third explanation is that this prayer is merely a poetic expression or expressed in language of hyperbole.
The second explanation is impossible. Because from the beginning (crossing the Red Sea and spying the land of Canaan) all the way to entering the Promised Land (crossing the Jordan River, fighting Jericho, and other battles), Joshua was recognized to be faithful to Jehovah. It was also because of his loyalty that Moses had chosen him to be his successor. So it was impossible for him to pray in the pagan way utterly detestable to God.
The third explanation is weakly possible. Indeed, there are many places in the Bible written in poetic style. In particular, the text refers to the “book of Jashar” which is an “apocryphal book” mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, written in epic form. This episode may be interpreted as a poetic utterance referring to a long battle in hyperbolic language. Jashar appears twice in the Bible. The other place is in 2 Sam 1:17. Inserting a piece of poetry into the narrative has many precedents in the Bible, easily found in the Books of Prophets. Jesus loves the use hyperbole, “if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.” However possible, the biggest difficulty in interpreting Scripture is the classification of genres. Here, I dare not assert that the underlying text belongs to the genre of poetry or hyperbola. For the sake of playing safe, I temporarily refuse to accept the third explanation. Because once one accepts it, it is like “opening the Pandora’s box” allowing all kinds of fast-and-loose-interpretations to play out. The stake is very high, for next time when one encounters a hard problem, one may tend to wave his/her hand and casually say, “Yeah! This is just an expression of a poet! “ The problem is even greater. Besides, I believe Joshua was not a poet, he was more a soldier.
Then, by process of elimination, the best option is the first one. The argument supporting this interpretation goes like this: “God is omnipotent. God can create the universe. He can turn water into wine. He can separate the Red Sea and the Jordan River. He can raise the dead to life. Can he not able to stop the sun and the moon from their normal tracks?”
The response to this rhetoric argument is obvious, “Of course, God is absolutely possible to do that.” However, Able-to-do is one thing, Actually-Done is yet another. But the thing is that the above paragraph is NOT an “explanation” but just a theological declaration, saying, “God is omnipotent.” No Christians would deny this declaration but no explanation has been offered either. If we just stop here and overwhelm our questioners with a grand assertion, what else can the listener say? Discussion cannot go on and the listener simply walks away unsatisfied. This approach is not conducive to evangelism toward unbelievers, especially those with science background.
Joshua lived in an era when Geocentric Theory prevails. People believed that the earth was the center of the universe, and the sun went around the stationary earth. If Joshua wanted to get a longer daylight, it was natural for him to ask God to bring the sun and the moon to stand still. However, not until the sixteenth century, Copernicus discovered the Heliocentric Theory confirming that it is not the sun that moves, it is the earth that goes around the sun. God knows but Joshua did not. In this reality, a longer daylight can be achieved by one of the two ways: Stop the self-rotation or tilt of the rotation axis, and then return to the original state after 24 hours. Could God do that? Absolutely. If it was the case, one could not even imagine the magnitude of the tidal waves this cosmic shift might have caused. Set aside all other effects not mentioning here, just the gigantic tsunami alone was enough to destroy the whole planet. Putting in perspective, the devastation of the 2004 Indonesian tsunami during which more than 200,000 people died, stood no comparison with this cosmic catastrophe.
With this last option being rejected, let me offer a simple hypothetical explanation: God supernaturally created a special luminous body for Joshua to illuminate his battlefield so he could keep on attacking the enemies in one breath until victory was proclaimed. This luminous body, to Joshua, as an observer, was his “sun” which existed for 24 hours and disappeared. Of course, I cannot be 100% certain that this was indeed the case, but it does, to my mind, offer a strong explanation acceptable to most people comparing with other alternatives. Many thoughts can be drawn to sustain this claim:
First, we still can ask, “God is omnipotent. God can create the universe. He can turn water into wine. He can separate the Red Sea and Jordan River. He can raise the dead to life. Can’t He create a light-bearer (or just light) at the right time and in the right place so the observers may perceive it as a sun?” Now this statement is no longer merely a theological declaration—it still is, but offers a reasonable explanation to this otherwise difficult text.
Second, If the earth’s self-rotation had really altered abruptly, or the sun and the moon had really stopped as perceived by Joshua, one would expect that there would have impacted everywhere on the earth and large amount of records/stories would have been emerged, but there was none. But the proposed explanation does not require information outside the Bible to validate it. Scripture alone is sufficient. This explanation finds precedence in biblical redemptive history. When the Israelite army (and people) were pursued by Pharaoh, it was difficult for them to flee at night simply because they could not see the path so God created the pillar of fire at night. This phenomenon of God’s special creation is accepted by all Christians. The pillar of fire was not only for illumination, but also served as a fire-wall to block for the Egyptian soldiers and horses from advancing.
Third, this explanation helps to understand other difficult episodes, such as these:
(1) When Jesus was born, a moving star appeared on the sky, guiding the Magi of the East on their journey to visit the Christ-child. What was that star? As many might have thought of it as a complex concourse of astronomical phenomena, but there was no record outside the Bible making mention about it. It must be supernatural. Now, let us ask, who can prevent God from creating a special low-altitude “star” just for the Magi and thus providing a simple interpretive possibility? In addition, stars high up in space cannot be used for navigation without the aid of instruments, only low altitude moving object can. And I think God did it.
(2) In 2 Kings 20: 8-11, the Bible records this interesting story:
(v. 8) And Hezekiah said to Isaiah, “What is the sign that the Lord will heal me, and that I shall go up to the house of the Lord the third day?”
(v. 9) Then Isaiah said, “This is the sign to you from the Lord, that the Lord will do the thing which He has spoken: shall the shadow go forward ten degrees or go backward ten degrees?”
(v. 10) And Hezekiah answered, “It is an easy thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees; no, but let the shadow go backward ten degrees.”
(v. 11) So Isaiah the prophet cried out to the Lord, and He brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down on the sundial of Ahaz.
Following the same flow of thought, this episode can be interpreted as God created a strong light placed in an appropriate position to make the sundial shadow recede by ten degrees, meeting the demand of Hezekiah. Who could argue such possibility was not possible?
These explanations in no way minimize God’s omnipotence. They are not only supported by historic precedence (Exodus) but are also undergirded by the prehistoric event (Creation) as declared in Genesis. “And God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them serve as signs to mark seasons and days and years, and let them be lights in the expanse of the sky to give light on the earth’ (Gen 1: 14-15)”. If God could create big lights for the cosmos, He certainly could create lesser lights for Joshua, Magi, and Hezekiah.
One question remains: Did God really listen to Joshua’s prayer? What Joshua asked for was that God stops the motions of the sun and the moon, but the sun and the moon continued to operate. Yet the Bible says, “Jehovah God answers his prayers”.
Let me share with you my personal story: Many years ago, I worked in Silicon Valley, California, as an engineer during the rudimentary stage of the semiconductor industry . By the grace of God, I made some progress in designing DRAM. It should be a pleasant time for me, but I always felt dissatisfied with my situation because what I really wanted to do was Basic Research in which I had fervent Interest. So I attempted to change job and think about it every day. I started by applying Bell Lab, the most prestigious research center in the United States at the time. Despite my many prayers and many efforts, this wish seemed going nowhere. One day, I unexpectedly received a phone call from IBM in the office. An interview was setup, I went to New York to talk to the managers. Once I got off the airplane on my first interview trip, I saw many green trees, mountains and rivers. I fell in love with New York. I decided to accept the IBM offer and happily worked there for decades. Looking back, I asked God for Bell Lab, but God gave me IBM. Who can say that God did not answer my prayers? Joshua asked for more sunlight, but God did not give him the sunlight the way he wanted. Didn’t Joshua ’s prayer get answered? The Bible tells us, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isa 55: 9).” Amen!
