JOSHUA'S LONG DAY: JOSHUA 10:12-13

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? (Joshua 10:12-13)

This passage follows a literal account in verses 1-11 of the defeat of the Gibeonites aided by a hailstorm send from God. What are we to make of this passage?

1. Literal interpretation A literal reading would imply that God prolonged the daytime by temporarily slowing down or stopping the motion of the earth and/or the heavenly bodies. However, because of the disastrous worldwide consequences of such an action and the fact that no other culture at that time reported such an event, perhaps we should consider other interpretations.

2. Phenomenological explanation This says that God provided a miracle of refraction to prolong the daylight hours so that the sun appeared to cease moving, sort of like a mirage.

3. Poetic interpretation #1 Let's look at Joshua's words again. There are four reasons to believe that we are talking about figurative or poetic language here rather than literal language: 

    a. The command is written in typical poetic parallelism as you can see by the way most translations indent the phrases.

    b. It also comes from the Book of Jashar, which is a book of poetry as we know from another long quotation from it found in II Samuel 1.

    c. Obviously some of the language here is figurative since it contains a figure of speech known as an apostrophe (addressing inanimate objects or people who aren't present as if they can hear you and respond).

    d. And lastly, we have an almost exact parallel in the Book of Judges to guide us. There the literal account of a battle in Judges 4 explains that God miraculously sent a thunderstorm help the Jews to defeat the enemy. This account is re-told poetically in Judges 5 where Deborah says that the stars fought against the enemy. In the Joshua 10 case, God miraculously sends a hailstorm to aid the Jews according to the literal account in verses 1-11, but the following poetic account in verses 12-13 points to the heavenly bodies as the cause.

4. Poetic interpretation #2 If it is poetry, there is another way of understanding these verses. Joshua is calling on the heavenly bodies to freeze in shocked amazement over the great victory of Israel. Again, there is a parallel found elsewhere in the OT:

“The mountains saw you, and writhed; a torrent of water swept by; the deep gave forth its voice. The sun raised high its hands; the moon stood still in its exalted place at the light of your arrows speeding by, at the gleam of your flashing spear.” (Habakkuk. 3:10-11)

5. Different Translations Then there are those scholars who believe that the standard translations are misleading. According to one, Joshua's request for the troop's relief from the sun was granted through a thunderstorm, which refreshed the army so that they were able to accomplish a day's march in half a day. Therefore, the translation should read, “The sun ceased to shine.”

Or there is the possibility that Joshua is actually calling down a curse on the sun and moon gods of Gibeon to “cease” from helping the Gibeonites.

By the way, all of these explanations come from conservative Christian sources. They are not attempts to explain away the miracle, just to understand it properly.

In closing, you may happen to run across an account on the internet that says NASA scientists used their supercomputer to calculate the positions of all the stars and planets throughout the ages and came up with one day and a few hours missing in time, thus proving the literal interpretation of the two astronomical miracles (in Isaiah 38 and Joshua 10). Ignore it. It is an urban Christian legend that has been around for decades and thoroughly debunked many times by those who have investigated it.