‘The Day the Sun Stood Still’

Last updated on: August 4, 2015 at 7:56 am by Fred Clark

‘The Day the Sun Stood Still’ 2015-08-04T07:56:20-04:00 Fred Clark

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The tenth chapter of Joshua gives us one of the weirdest stories in the Bible. Joshua is leading the Israelite army in a rout of the enemy and so, to keep the slaughter going, he commands the sun and moon to stand still in the sky, thereby making the day last longer and allowing his army to finish off the finishing-off of the enemy:

On the day when the Lord gave the Amorites over to the Israelites, Joshua spoke to the Lord; and he said in the sight of Israel,

“Sun, stand still at Gibeon,
and Moon, in the valley of Aijalon.”
And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped,
until the nation took vengeance on their enemies.

Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun stopped in midheaven, and did not hurry to set for about a whole day. There has been no day like it before or since, when the Lord heeded a human voice; for the Lord fought for Israel.

You may be familiar with this story due to the popular urban legend of “The Lost Day,” which invokes this story as “scientific” proof of the Bible. This legend — which is even less plausible than the Bible story it involves — has circulated in various forms for more than a century. Part of the version Snopes archives and debunks is worth quoting for the purpose of what I want to discuss here:

Joshua was concerned because he was surrounded by the enemy and if darkness fell they would overpower them. So Joshua asked the Lord to make the sun stand still! That’s right — “The sun stood still and the moon stayed — and hasted not to go down about a whole day!”

That’s wrong. That’s very similar to the version of this story that I was taught in Sunday school, but it is not at all what the actual story in Joshua 10 says. Joshua wasn’t surrounded by the enemy, fearing defeat if night fell. He was mopping up the slaughter that God had begun by raining giant hailstones on the Amorites. Joshua wanted more daylight so he could keep that slaughter going. And he didn’t ask the Lord anything — Joshua gave orders. This wasn’t a divine miracle or a case of divine intervention — it was Joshua himself performing a miracle.

Like I said, this is a weird story. I think of it as something like a biblical version of a tall tale about Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill — the kind of story it’s absurd to approach as though it were claiming historicity. That’s about like debating the historicity of Pecos Bill’s lassoing a tornado to dig the Rio Grande.

But it’s even weirder than that. Look closer at the details, and at how this story fits — or, rather, how it refuses to fit — with the surrounding text, and it gets even more bonkers.

Paul Davidson tackles all of this in “The Day the Sun Stood Still: Interpreting the Miracle of Joshua 10.”

Davidson’s discussion highlights the way this tall-tale legend clashes with and contradicts the surrounding text and the other versions of this story we get in the Bible. The book of Joshua piles together three different versions of this same story, and all those variations contradict one another with incompatible details, sequences, geography, etc. And then, for good measure, we get a fourth version in the opening chapter of Judges. Oh, and the Septuagint — the oldest Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures — also varies from and clashes with these multiple versions of the story, which doesn’t help sort this all out.

I’m not a biblical scholar, I’m an English major, and that’s how I approach weird and difficult passages like these. That’s my take on the Joshua legend we get in the first half of chapter 10, and why it’s followed by three other less-spectacular versions of the same story. “Is this not written in the Book of Jashar?” the authors/editors ask us. I can’t answer that rhetorical question because the Book of Jashar doesn’t seem to be in print these days. But I see that phrase as saying something like, “You know this story, right? You’ve heard the songs and the legends, let’s start with that version of the story. …”

But I first encountered this story, many times over, long before I became an English major. I first encountered this story in Sunday school, where we learned the legend from the first half of Joshua 10 and never touched the less outrageous version of the same story from the second half of the chapter, or the pithy version offered later in Joshua 15, or the summary of the same events and conquests (carried out by different people at a different time) in the book of Judges.

But I also know that I must have read all of these different versions of this story, several times, as I read the Bible cover to cover repeatedly. And in all those times I plowed through the book of Joshua and then on through Judges, I don’t ever remember noticing the several repetitions and incompatible iterations of this story.

That’s interesting. In my defense — and in defense of the many, many Christians like me who overlooked this too — this story, in all its variations, is convoluted, hard to follow, and filled with unfamiliar names of kings and cities. If one isn’t reading very carefully, a long list of names like “Adonizedek” can easily get turned into a mental shortcut like “Ad-something” or “Guy With Long Name That Starts With ‘A.'” And so it’s easy not to notice when Adonizedek switches to Adonibezek, or when some weirdly named king later turns out to be a city rather than a person.

But still, for all of that, the bottom line remains that I did not notice when the Bible gave me four different versions of the same story because I wasn’t expecting the Bible to do that. I came away thinking that I had read what I had expected to read rather than what was actually there, in the actual text.

This is similar to the way we Christians tend to read the New Testament, finding what we expect to find there, too, rather than what the text itself actually provides. We do this even though the New Testament explicitly alerts us to the fact that it is giving us four different versions of the same story — the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. We read those stories expecting them to be harmonious and wholly consistent, and so none of the incompatible details or chronologies registers until something forces us to recognize them. And even then we’re reluctant to accept what the text actually offers us — we get defensive, clinging to our harmonious reading and defending our expectation as somehow more accurate than the text that refuses to comply with it.

That’s interesting, but it’s more interesting for what it says about us, as readers, than what it says about the Bible itself as a text.

Our knack for reading these various versions of a single story without noticing the differences and contradictions can also lead us to make another foolish mistake. Once we do start to notice these variations and contradictions, we’re tempted to think that we’ve discovered something that the original compilers, editors, storytellers and audiences did not see. We arrogantly assume we’re the first readers to notice these contradictions, rather than the very last people to finally arrive on the same page as those who first wrote this all down.

That leads us astray into a whole other set of presumptions and expectations that can, again, cause us to miss the actual text in front of us. We start to presume that these ancient storytellers were trying to present several harmonious, wholly consistent versions of the same story and then miserably failing to do so. We start to presume they failed because they were stupid and artless — so stupid and artless that they didn’t even notice their own epic failure. Silly, foolish ancients.

A better presumption, I think, is to assume these storytellers recognized what they were doing and did it deliberately and that something else is going on other than an attempt to provide harmonious, wholly consistent stories that would satisfy the modern sensibilities of readers 2,500 years later. To understand the stories they told, we need to understand the choices they made in telling those stories. We can’t do that if we presume that they never made choices, only mistakes.

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