Wednesday, December 9, 2020

HEZEKIAH'S LONG DAY: II KINGS 20; ISAIAH 38

This miracle is recordied in two places in the Bible, using almost identical language. Isaiah tells King Hezekiah that he will be cured of an illness and live for another 15 years. We know when Hezekiah died, and so we can date the event to about 702 BC. Isaiah tells him, “This is the sign to you from the LORD, that the LORD will do this thing that he has promised: See, I will make the shadow cast by the declining sun on the stairs ("sundial") of Ahaz turn back ten steps.” So the sun turned back on the stairs the ten steps by which it had declined.

In the first place, even a literal understanding of this event does not require that you have to believe that the sun moves around the earth just because it says that the sun declined, or was setting, in the sky. It is obviously phenomenological language. This is how the Bible often describes events, not in terms of their ultimate scientific explanation (which sometimes changes with time) but in terms of how the event was viewed by the spectators. 

Now, you can choose to believe that God reversed the rotation of the earth to accomplish the sign. Although God could have certainly done it in this manner, He would have had to simultaneously disrupt most of the laws of physics in order not to destroy everyone on the earth in the process. So it is probably wise to at least consider alternative interpretations. And at least one of them is very plausible.

There is the known fact that during a total eclipse of the sun (one of which was visible in the Near East in that same year, according to astronomers) shadows will momentarily move backwards as the moon goes in front of the sun. Ahaz was in bed in an interior room so that he couldn't observe the eclipse, but he could see the shadow on the steps of Ahaz from his bedroom. According to this second explanation, God millennia earlier set the planets, sun and moon in motion so that this sign would appear just when Ahaz needed it. Either way, it is a true miracle.

 

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