Page Content (OCR)
309 tale of the battle in the valley of Gibeon, when—according to the Book of Joshua chapter 10—the Sun and the Moon stood still for a day: And the Sun stood still, and the Moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves of the enemies. Indeed it is all written in the Book of Jashar: The Sun stood still in the midst of the skies and it hastened not to go down, about a whole day. What could have caused the Earth's rotation to stop, so that the Sun rising in the east and the Moon setting in the west seemed to stand still, for the better part ("about a whole") of a day (of twenty-four hours)? To those who take the Bible on faith, it is just one more divine intervention in behalf of God's Chosen People. At the other extreme there are those who discount the whole tale as mere fiction, a myth. In between are those who, as for the ten plagues that befell Egypt and the parting of the waters of the Sea of Reeds (associating the events with the volcanic explosion on the Mediterranean island of Thera/Santorini), seek a natural phe- nomenon or calamity as the cause. Some have suggested an extraordinarily long eclipse; but the Bible states that the Sun was seen, and there was daylight for a prolonged daytime, not that the Sun was obscured. Because the long day began with "great stones" falling from the skies, some have sug- gested as an explanation the close passage of a large comet (Immanuel Velikovsky, in Worlds of Collision, postulated that such a comet was caught into a solar orbit and became the planet Venus). Both Sumerian and Old Babylonian texts speak of celestial upheavals that were observed in the skies and that called for incantations against the celestial "demons." Treated as "magical texts" (e.g. Charles Fossey, Textes Magique; Mor- ris Jastrow, Die Religion Babyloniens und Assyriens; and Eric Ebeling, Tod und Leben) such texts described an "evil seven, born in the vast skies, unknown in heaven, unknown on Earth" who "attacked Sin and Shamash"—the Moon and the Sun, upsetting at the same time Ishtar (Venus) and Adad The Greatest Theophany