{"id":28869,"date":"2015-08-04T07:56:20","date_gmt":"2015-08-04T11:56:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=28869"},"modified":"2015-08-04T07:56:20","modified_gmt":"2015-08-04T11:56:20","slug":"the-day-the-sun-stood-still","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2015\/08\/04\/the-day-the-sun-stood-still\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Day the Sun Stood Still’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

The tenth chapter of Joshua gives us one of the weirdest stories in the Bible<\/a>. 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:<\/p>\n

\n

On the day when the\u00a0Lord<\/span>\u00a0gave the Amorites over to the Israelites, Joshua spoke to the\u00a0Lord<\/span>; and he said in the sight of Israel,<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

\u201cSun, stand still at Gibeon,<\/span>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>and Moon, in the valley of Aijalon.\u201d<\/span><\/span>
\nAnd the sun stood still, and the moon stopped,<\/span>
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>until the nation took vengeance on their enemies.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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.\u00a0<\/span>There has been no day like it before or since, when the\u00a0Lord<\/span>\u00a0heeded a human voice; for the\u00a0Lord<\/span>\u00a0fought for Israel.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

You may be familiar with this story due to the popular urban legend of \u201cThe Lost Day,\u201d<\/a> which invokes this story as \u201cscientific\u201d proof of the Bible. This legend \u2014 which is even less plausible than the Bible story it involves \u2014 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:<\/p>\n

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\u2019s right \u2014 \u201cThe sun stood still and the moon stayed \u2014 and hasted not to go down about a whole day!\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That\u2019s wrong. That\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019t ask<\/em> the Lord anything \u2014 Joshua gave orders. This wasn\u2019t a divine miracle or a case of divine intervention \u2014 it was Joshua himself<\/em> performing a miracle.<\/p>\n

\"p1xtc\"<\/a>Like I said, this is a weird<\/em> story. I think of it as something like a biblical version of a tall tale about Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill \u2014 the kind of story it\u2019s absurd to approach as though it were claiming historicity.\u00a0That\u2019s about like debating the historicity of Pecos Bill\u2019s lassoing a tornado to dig the Rio Grande.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s even weirder than that. Look closer at the details, and at how this story fits \u2014 or, rather, how it refuses<\/em> to fit \u2014 with the surrounding text, and it gets even more bonkers.<\/p>\n

Paul Davidson tackles all of this in \u201cThe Day the Sun Stood Still: Interpreting the Miracle of Joshua 10<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Davidson\u2019s 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 \u2014 the oldest Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures \u2014 also varies from and clashes with these multiple versions of the story, which doesn\u2019t help sort this all out.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not a biblical scholar, I\u2019m an English major, and that\u2019s how I approach weird and difficult passages like these. That\u2019s my take on the Joshua legend we get in the first half of chapter 10, and why it\u2019s followed by three other less-spectacular versions of the same story. \u201cIs this not written in the Book of Jashar?\u201d the authors\/editors ask us. I can\u2019t answer that rhetorical question because the Book of Jashar doesn\u2019t seem to be in print these days. But I see that phrase as saying something like, \u201cYou know this story, right? You\u2019ve heard the songs and the legends, let\u2019s start<\/em> with that version of the story. \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t ever remember noticing the several repetitions and incompatible iterations of this story.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s interesting. In my defense \u2014 and in defense of the many, many Christians like me who overlooked this too \u2014 this story, in all its variations, is convoluted, hard to follow, and filled with unfamiliar names of kings and cities. If one isn\u2019t reading very carefully, a long list of names like \u201cAdonizedek\u201d can easily get turned into a mental shortcut like \u201cAd-something\u201d or \u201cGuy With Long Name That Starts With \u2018A.'\u201d And so it\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 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\u2019re reluctant to accept what the text actually offers us \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s interesting, but it\u2019s more interesting for what it says about us, as readers, than what it says about the Bible itself as a text.<\/p>\n

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\u2019re tempted to think that we\u2019ve discovered something that the original compilers, editors, storytellers and audiences did not see. We arrogantly assume we\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/em> 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 \u2014 so stupid and artless that they didn\u2019t even notice their own epic failure. Silly, foolish ancients.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t do that if we presume that they never made choices, only mistakes.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[11,207],"class_list":["post-28869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bible","tag-joshua"],"yoast_head":"\n'The Day the Sun Stood Still'<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"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. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"'The Day the Sun Stood Still'","description":"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. 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A former managing editor of Prism magazine, Fred worked in the parachurch nonprofit world for a decade and then for a decade in the newspaper biz. He began blogging in 2002. In 2003 he began writing a review of the best-selling Left Behind series. Eight years later he still hasn\u2019t finished reviewing the second book of that series and the experience has left him a broken shell of a man. Fred knows the difference between the possessive \u201cits\u201d and the contraction \u201cit\u2019s,\u201d and he is acutely bothered when others mistakenly confuse the two, yet he himself just kind of instinctively types the apostrophe whether or not it belongs there. Some feel this is his greatest hypocrisy, but those who know him better know better. He\u2019s guilty of much greater hypocrisies. Jesus loves Fred far more than Fred loves Jesus, but he at least has the decency to recognize the unfairness of that lopsided relationship and he has long wished that he were better at maybe kind of sort of doing something more to correct that some day. A Baptist, an amateur, a Gen-Xer, a Gemini and a Mets fan, Fred lives in Southeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and two teenage daughters. You can reach him via email at slacktivist at hotmail dot com.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/author\/fredclark1\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/141"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28869"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28869\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}