So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day...Truth?

I have been reading a very interesting article and I wanted to share it,

After leaving Egypt and wandering in the Sinai wilderness for forty years, Israel entered the land of Canaan late March to mid- April, 1448 B.C.1 The Israelite leader, Joshua, had a clear-cut task set before him: to completely eradicate all the previous inhabitants of the land. The story is quite familiar to every Sunday school student: how the Israelites marched around Jericho until the city fell, the subsequent defeat at Ai followed by the judgment of Achan, the fall of Ai, and the ruse of the Gibeonites who tricked the Israelites into an unholy alliance. When the surrounding nations heard of that alliance, they attacked the Gibeonites who then sent to Joshua for help. The account of the battle that followed occupies about half of the tenth chapter of the book of Joshua where verses twelve through fourteen tell of the peculiar event which is commonly called Joshua’s long day


For the Egyptian account, we find that the French classical scholar, Fernand Crombette, translated some Egyptian hieroglyphics which tell of Joshua’s long day.25 The text starts out with an edict from the king to exempt from taxation those who had been victims of a flood some two weeks earlier. Evidently the flood had been caused by an unusually high tide. The cause, according to the Egyptian hieroglyphics, was: The sun, thrown into confusion, had remained low on the horizon, and by not rising had spread terror amongst the great doctors. Two days had been rolled into one. The morning was lengthened to
one-and-a-half times the normal period of effective daylight. A certain time after this divine phenomenon, the master had an image built to keep further
misfortune from the country. Hephaistos...grant protection to your worshipers. Prevent the words of these foreign travelers from having any effect. They are impostors. Let these enemies of the sacrifices to the images be destroyed in the temples of the great gods by the people of all classes. Make life harder for these cursed worshipers of the Eternal. Punish them. Increase the hardships of these shepherds. Reduce the size of their herds. Burn their dwellings. Rameses, our celestial ancestral chief; you who forced these wretched people to work, who ill-treated them, who gave them no help when they were in need: cast them into the sea. They made the moon stop in a small angle at the edge of the horizon. In a small angle on the edge of the horizon, the sun itself, which had just risen at the spot where the moon was going, instead of crossing the sky stayed where it was. Whilst the moon,
following a narrow path, reduced its speed and climbed slowly, the sun stopped moving and its intensity of light was reduced to the brightness at daybreak. The waves formed a wall of water against the boats that were in the harbor and those that had left it. Those fishermen that had ventured onto the deck to watch the waves were washed into the sea. The tide, which had risen high, overflowed into the plains where the herds were grazing. The cattle drowned represented half the herds of Lower Egypt. The remains of abandoned boats broken against the sides of the canals were piled up in places. Their anchors, which should have protected them, had been ground into them. Quite out of control, the sea had penetrated deep into the country. The expanding waters reached the fortified walls constructed by Rameses, the celestial ancestral chief. The sea swept around both sides of the region behind, sterilizing the gar dens as it went and causing openings in the dikes. A great country had been turned into a wilderness and brought into poverty. All the crops that had been planted had been destroyed and heaps of cereal shoots lay scattered on the ground.




The Chinese Account of Joshua’s Long Day The second secular source about Joshua’s long day, which was mentioned by Totten, is based on what seems to be a recently lost ancient Chinese manuscript. In 1810 Gill presents the account: In the Chinese history27 it is reported, that in the time of their seventh emperor, Yao, the sun did not set for ten days, and that men were afraid the world would be burnt, and there were great fires at that time; and
though the time of the sun’s standing still were enlarged beyond the bounds of truth, yet it seems to refer to this fact, and was manifestly about the same time; for this miracle was wrought in the year of the world 2554, which fell in the 75th, or, as some say, the 67th year of that emperor’s reign, who reigned 90 years.28 Now the year of the world 2554 is identical to Bouw’s
independently derived biblical chronology for the date of Joshua’s long day.29



Putting it all Together
When it is all put together, we know more about Joshua’s long day than we know of most other events recorded in the Bible. The best date seems to be within four or five days either side of May 12, 1448 B.C., sometime between 8:30 and 9:30 a.m. This we may conclude from plotting all of the long day, long night, and the long sunset accounts on a globe. Such extensive observations preclude the conclusion that the event was an optical illusion restricted to the land of Israel. It also disallows the notion that Joshua’s long day is fictitious, for the testimony of the peoples around the world is entirely
consistent with its reality. That some peoples have tales of a long night while others tell of a long day while none have both a long day and a long night tale signifies that Joshua’s long day is not one account, originating in the mid-East, which has migrated all over the world; for if such were the case, then all nations would tell of a long day and none would tell of a long night, let alone a perfectly-placed long sunset. So we must conclude that Joshua’s long day was a real,historical event and not some fiction.






JOSHUA’S LONG DAY


Is it real? Can Science explain it? was it an eclipse? Do other civilizations tell of this day?


Read on..........


12 Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.

13 And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day.

14 And there was no day like that before it or after it, that the LORD hearkened unto the voice of a man: for the LORD fought for Israel.




Joshua’s long day around the world: The solid black circles
show locations with tales of a long night; open circles plot tales of a
long day, and the half-white half-black circle in the Pacific shows the
location of a long sunrise tale. Recently, after this figure was made,
another long sunrise tale was reported in Hawaii.








Religious Urban Legends

NASA and the "Missing Day"
Have NASA scientists "confirmed" the Bible stories of Joshua's Long Day and Hezekiah's Sundial?


Overview of the claims of the legend

It is alleged that scientists at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center were bewildered one day to discover that a day was somehow "missing" in history. They had been running computer calculations on future and past positions of the sun, moon and planets. And the computer "locked up" at one point in the past, indicating that it could not continue its calculations because "a day was missing." Someone on the team of scientists remembers the Bible story about "Joshua's Long Day" from the Book of Joshua, and wonders if it may provide an explanation of this amazing find. A Bible is brought out and the story is examined. But the Joshua story would allegedly only account for "23 hours and 20 minutes" of the missing day. Then the religious member of the team remembers the Bible story about the sun dial in Hezekiah's time, and the retreat of the shadow of the sun backward 10 degrees, as recorded in the book of 2 Kings. They calculate this to represent 40 minutes of time, and thus the scientists are amazed that the Bible has "explained" the full 24 hour problem that they had encountered.

NASA and the "Missing Day"


Apparently that e-mail was not real or based upon events.......or was it?



Discuss your feelings on this 'event'.








[edit on 12-8-2005 by edsinger]

Actually I believe that snopes.com proved that the story that NASA found a missing day was false.

Snopes: Religion (The Lost Day)

Sorry for the short post but I figured that it was pretty much cut and dry.

``

this sentence i will use as the focus point,

...the sun stopped moving

and its intensity of light was reduced to the brightness at daybreak...

here's a possible explaination -> Aurora Borealis

a possible CME, coronal mass ejection, could have bathed the planet
for some 10 or more hours...the charged atmosphere glowed for those
24 + hours as the Joshua account states.
However, "the sun stopped moving" , might just be a faulty deduction
based on the observation that the whole day was as bright as the normally short time of daybreak hour....leading the unscientific mind to
reasonably conclude that "the sun stopped moving"

one might protest that the bright noonday sun would shine thru the
Aurora Borealis and one would still observe the transit of the
sun across the sky thru the day
...so the Joshua observation must be factual,
& normal physics(planet rotation) was somehow put-aside for a day.
but, if we are to accept that fantastic idea,
it would also be acceptable to consider that as the Aurora Borealis
was being viewed world wide, that a high altitude dust cloud or a regional
ash plume from Etna or another nearby volcano was in concert with the
northern lights display at Joshuas site....and the area or whole middle-east
region was under a glowing canopy (not unlike being under a sheet, perhaps dusky red or yellow in color)

just another view,

I dont have any links to support this, but in Charles Hapgood's book "Pole Shift" there is at one point a description of what an observer would see in the sky during a 'pole shift' or 'total crust displacement' and some would see continuous day and others continuous night until the planet finds its 'equilibrium' again. Your post (especially the map part) reminded me of it.

As I am currently on vacation, i dont have the book with me or id point out what pages and such.

Originally posted by The_Final
Actually I believe that snopes.com proved that the story that NASA found a missing day was false.

Snopes: Religion (The Lost Day)

Sorry for the short post but I figured that it was pretty much cut and dry.

Apparently you missed the fact EdSinger was screaming at you in BOLD and quoting scripture in GIANT TEXT, so no that's not going to cut it.

Here's the pertinent sledgehammer Ed was looking for in response to his question.

Status: FALSE!

Conversely the Maya of the time reported a night with no sunrise. Because naturally if it were daytime in one place it has to be night elsewhere.

And no St Udio, these people were brilliant atronomers whether its Egyptian, Chinese, Mayan, Incan etc.

Any moron Knows if the sun has risen or set after a particular length of time, you don't have to be a scientist to report something like that.

And since it was out of the ordinary it was recorded in their version of historical documentation. I don't think any of these groups of people would arbitrarily make up the same story at the same moment in time, especially when none of them had contact with one another. The odds are astronomically against such a coincidence.

The "Egyptian" material is bunk.

Originally posted by edsinger
For the Egyptian account, we find that the French classical scholar, Fernand Crombette,

No dispute here. He exists and was an interesting polymath:
www.chez.com...

translated some Egyptian hieroglyphics which tell of Joshua’s long day.

Yes... and no. He was sort of a latter day Sitchin. He decided to ignore the Rosetta stone and the fact that there WAS an Egyptian language and decided that the individual hieroglyphs were actually pictures for words in Coptic (note -- individual hieroglyphs can represent single letters, a phrase, or several syllables.) But when he put his "translated" hieroglyphs into text, he came to the conclusion that (naturally) they didn't make sense.

However, this didn't discourage him. He then decided that (against all other information) that the hieroglyphs were a "rebus" or puzzle.

He also decided that the original language of the Bible (contrary to other evidence) was Coptic. And he retranslated the Bible in his own terms to give "new understanding" which ... doesn't... match up to other translations.

The text starts out with an edict from the king to exempt from taxation those who had been victims of a flood some two weeks earlier. Evidently the flood had been caused by an unusually high tide. The cause, according to the Egyptian hieroglyphics, was: The sun, thrown into confusion, had remained low on the horizon, and by not rising had spread terror amongst the great doctors. Two days had been rolled into one. The morning was lengthened to one-and-a-half times the normal period of effective daylight. A certain time after this divine phenomenon, the master had an image built to keep furthermisfortune from the country.

But... only if you forget that the Egyptian language is Egyptian, try to make the Egyptian language into Coptic Greek at a time before the Greeks existed as a nation, if you ignore the Rosetta stone and come up with your own words, and then treat the thing as a giant word-hunt puzzle (instead of straightforward text)...

...and if you ignore the illustrations standing at the top and around the text (remember, the Egyptians wrote "illustrated texts" where there are usually images of some sort associated with the texts and the texts explain what's going on in the images. This is how scholars check some of their translations and verify it on new material.)

Hephaistos...grant protection to your worshipers.

THIS is the key that the whole thing is complete bunk.

Hephaistos = Vulcan = Greek god. There's no equivalent deity in the Egyptian pantheon. No follower of the Egyptian religion every prayed to Vulcan.

Prevent the words of these foreign travelers from having any effect. They are impostors. Let these enemies of the sacrifices to the images be destroyed in the temples of the great gods by the people of all classes. Make life harder for these cursed worshipers of the Eternal.

Yes, it is Gibberish. And it's not the sort of cursing formula used by the ancient Egyptians.

Punish them. Increase the hardships of these shepherds. Reduce the size of their herds. Burn their dwellings.

Ancient Egyptians usually prayed for crocodiles and other such things to come, not abstract "punish them." They liked to be pretty specific.

Rameses, our celestial ancestral chief;

He also sadly neglected his chronologies. Rameses I was circa 1295 BC, Joshua and the destruction of Jericho is dated to circa 1500-1400 BC.
vvv.com...

It's difficult to be an ancestor when you won't be born for another 200-300 years.

The Ahmoses, Thutmoses, one of the Amenhoteps, and that fierce old lady, Hatshepsut were the Pharoahs during that 100 year time period.

In a small angle on the edge of the horizon, the sun itself, which had just risen at the spot where the moon was going, instead of crossing the sky stayed where it was. Whilst the moon, following a narrow path, reduced its speed and climbed slowly, the sun stopped moving and its intensity of light was reduced to the brightness at daybreak.

...and apparently thought that the sun and the moon moved around the Earth. Notice that the sun stands still, while the moon (which moves around the Earth at 1/30th of its orbital path every single day) keeps on truckin' across the sky. If the Earth had miraculously stood still (and the physics had been prevented from tearing everything off the face of the Earth and shattering the planet), then the observers would have seen it move only a finger's width from its place in the sky.

The expanding waters reached the fortified walls constructed by Rameses, the celestial ancestral chief.

...much to the surprise of Rameses, who wasn't into constructing walled towns. Whicever Rameses this was (there were 11 pharoahs with that name.)

The sea swept around both sides of the region behind, sterilizing the gardens as it went and causing openings in the dikes.

Surprising the Egyptians further, as they didn't have ocean dike technology.

A great country had been turned into a wilderness and brought into poverty.

Which the Egyptians then forgot to mention. Of course, they were forgetting to mention it in the Egyptian language in their temples and tombs and papyri. Unless you say that Egyptian hieroglyphics are actually Coptic words and it's a gigantic word-search puzzle. Then, undoubtedly, they mention it somewhere.

So the piece is real, but the "scholarship" relies on the hieroglypics (written, presumably, sometime about 1280 BC) being interpreted in a form of the language that wouldn't exist for another 1500 years (Coptic develops from the Egyptian language about 200 AD), ignoring the King List (compiled and checked from many, many sources), people praying to an ancestor who wouldn't actually be born for another 200 - 400 years, and praying for protection to a Greek deity that wouldn't be actively worshipped until around 800 BC.
www.cartage.org.lb...


Pure baloney.

Originally posted by Byrd
The "Egyptian" material is bunk.



www.cartage.org.lb...


Pure baloney.

And you made a damn good case of showing that

Still, does that mean that you do not believe the legend then? I do find it intriguing that this 'legend' was seen by many cultures around the same time in history. Sure some might be bogus but some might not be. I personally think it did happen and I don't need science to confirm it, those without faith need that.

Originally posted by The_Final
Actually I believe that snopes.com proved that the story that NASA found a missing day was false.

Snopes: Religion (The Lost Day)

Sorry for the short post but I figured that it was pretty much cut and dry.

Actually if you would have noticed and read what I put down you would have seen that I posted it as a suspected urban myth, notice the

'Religious Urban Legends ' reference.


What I was getting at is maybe it wasn't a myth in the sense as we think of it because the first link makes a pretty decent case imho.


attack away....

Originally posted by RANT
Apparently you missed the fact EdSinger was screaming at you in BOLD and quoting scripture in GIANT TEXT, so no that's not going to cut it.

Here's the pertinent sledgehammer Ed was looking for in response to his question.Status: FALSE!

No RANT I was not. I used larger letters so as maybe to grab attention so some would actually READ the Word as it was written, if you then read the firrst article it will make better sense....


Again Attack away RANT....

Well I have foound some more information on this subject, a VERY interesting one indeed. I am looking into this more as it keeps poping up in things I don't expect....

Velikovsky's book brought about quite a bit of discussion on this topic. "The Day The Sun Stood Still," by Eric Larabee was published in Harper's in January of 1950. It was reprinted in the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune on February 5 of that year, with the comment that "The article on this page--`The Day the Sun Stood Still'--will quite probably become the most discussed magazine piece of 1950. It was published in the current issue of Harper's Magazine, and the Tribune is the first newspaper to reprint it. The account is based on a book, Worlds in Collision, by Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky. The article has created such interest in publishing circles that, the Tribune has learned, the editors of Collier's and of The Reader's Digest have other presentations of the same idea in preparation. This Week magazine, which is a section of the Sunday Tribune and twenty- five other Sunday newspapers, is preparing a pictorial presentation of some of Velikovsky's unusual theories which lace together elements of religious beliefs and scientific events and try to explain that once--within the recorded history of man--the sun stood still."5

Gordon A. Atwater, curator of the Hayden Planetarium, wrote at the time, "The theories presented by Dr. Velikovsky are unique and should be presented to the world of science in order that the underpinning of modern science can be re-examined . . . I believe the author has done an outstanding job."6

Another indication of the trustworthiness of Joshua 10:13 can be found in astronomical data. It appears that one full day is missing in our astronomical calculations. On different occasions, Sir Edwin Ball, the great British astronomer, and Professors Pickering of the Harvard Observatory, Maunders of Greenwich, and Totten of Yale have traced this back to the time of Joshua. If we disregard calendar changes and deal only with a chronology based upon solar motion, and go back to the earliest available records, and trace the calendar through to the time of Joshua, the day of Joshua's battle was on a Tuesday, whereas if we compute backwards to the time of Joshua from the present day, the day of the battle would have been on a Wednesday. The day of the month is the same, but it is a different day of the week.

THE LONG DAY OF JOSHUA

Physics requires that something must cause the Earth to spin faster
on its axis if the days are to be 8 hours shorter. The Earth must get
a 500 mph increase in rotation at the Equator. The impact of an object
big enough to do this would kill every living thing on the planet. We
had formerly considered this option, but it is clearly unacceptable.

That leaves only one other possible mechanism: Gravitational tidal
attraction from a massive PLANET-SIZED OBJECT moving rapidly by Earth
at close distance. The long day of Joshua, as Velikovsky showed, came
about when a planet came near the Earth. It could happen again. But
there is really only one candidate object that could fulfill the days-
shortening prophecies: Mars.

The object cannot be too large, or it would destroy the Earth. It
must be in an orbit OUTSIDE ours in order to FALL past us at a speed
which would spin up our rotation. It must either be in an unstable
orbit, or be easily disturbed out of its current orbit, or both. Yet
it must have enough mass to spin up the Earth.

When MARS comes by.

Like Cuvier, Velikovsky 'uses the Bible as a single source among many of equal merit as he searches for clues to unravel the Earth's history." The charge brought by Sagan against Velikovsky's aims and motives is precisely the same as that he used to describe the early catastrophists and is described by Gould of the attack upon Cuvier.

Velikovsky had become reacquainted with Professor Albert Einstein while both lived at Princeton, and Einstein did read Worlds in Collision, which he often discussed with Velikovsky. What was Einstein's opinion? He stated, 'not once and not twice but also in the presence of his secretary: 'The scientists make a grave mistake in not studying your book [Worlds in Collision] because of the exceedingly important material it contains.' (23) Was Albert Einstein so naive as to believe that Velikovsky was presenting his book, Worlds in Collision, to validate religion, astrology and the supernatural? The week of Einstein's death he was rereading Worlds in Collision because evidence from Jupiter had confirmed one of Velikovsky's predictions.

R.F. Shaw writes in Nature (June 13, 1985, page 536) "Critics have made much of Velikovsky's alleged appeal to the ignorant and also to his supposed religious motivation, something never documented and which I do not find in his books." (emphasis added)

The week of Einstein's death he was rereading Worlds in Collision

[edit on 27-8-2005 by edsinger]

If you have a heliocentric viewpoint Joshua 10 doesn't make sense.

The truth is, the sun, moon, stars, etc go around the earth. The earth is the center, not the sun. (And yes the earth is round.)

God created the earth before He created the sun (just go to Genesis and read carefully).

The sun did stay--it did not set until it was given the okay. Some people say, "Oh, that's God's way of simplifying it."

Nonsense. It would have been no harder to say that the earth did not turn had that been the case. In fact, Job declared that God "hangeth the earth on nothing." It hangs there--it doesn't swing around.

Nimrod, according to some sources like "The Two Babylons" by Alexander Hislop, was the one who founded astrology. So they had a very good idea of how the universe works way back then--before Joshua's time.

The Biblical Astronomer