Did the sun really stand still?

Question 60056.

Whether the sun stood still over Gibeon is one of those questions that separates a reader from the text before he has begun. Joshua 10 records that Joshua spoke to the LORD in front of Israel and said, Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the Valley of Aijalon, and that the sun stopped in the midst of heaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day. It is one of the passages sceptics reach for first, and one that believers often skip past quickly.

I do not think we should skip past it. The question of whether the sun stood still at Gibeon is really a question about whether God acts in the physical world, and once that is settled the mechanics become a secondary matter. Let me look at what the text says, what the objections are, and what options honest readers have taken.

What the text says about the day the sun stood still

The setting is the Gibeonite crisis. Five Amorite kings have attacked Gibeon because the city made peace with Israel, and Joshua marches all night from Gilgal to relieve them. God has already promised that not a man will stand before him. During the rout the LORD throws down great stones from heaven, and more die from the hailstones than from the sword.

Then comes the poetry. The account quotes the Book of Jashar, an ancient collection of Israelite verse that has not survived, and the language of the request is elevated and rhythmical. That matters for interpretation, because Hebrew poetry describes real events in figurative language quite normally, in the same way that a modern report of a hard fought match may speak of time standing still without anyone thinking a clock stopped.

The narrator then adds a comment in prose: there has been no day like it before or since, when the LORD heeded the voice of a man. You can read the whole passage at Joshua 10:12 to 14. Whatever happened, the writer regarded it as unique and as an answer to prayer rather than as a natural curiosity.

The objection and the question underneath it

The standard objection to the claim that the sun stood still is astronomical. The sun does not move around the earth, so stopping it is meaningless, and stopping the earth’s rotation would produce catastrophic consequences for everything not bolted down. The claim that the sun stood still is read as a claim about celestial mechanics, and that objection assumes the text is offering a mechanism, which it is not. Scripture regularly uses observational language, as we all do when we speak of sunrise, and nobody accuses the weather forecaster of ancient cosmology. The wider issue is one I have taken up in whether science can contradict the Bible.

Underneath the astronomy sits the real question. Can God intervene in the created order, or is the universe a closed system? If it is closed, then the sun stood still nowhere and at no time, and neither did anything else in Scripture happen, including the resurrection, and the discussion about Joshua 10 is a side issue.

If God made the physical order, then adjusting it is not a difficulty for Him. The problem people have with this passage is rarely arithmetical. It is a prior conviction that miracles do not happen, brought to the text rather than derived from it.

What about the Book of Jashar?

Some readers get nervous when Scripture quotes a source we do not possess, as though this compromised inspiration. It does not. Luke tells us he consulted eyewitnesses and earlier accounts, and Paul quotes pagan poets. Inspiration governs what the biblical author writes, not the origin of every piece of material he uses.

The Book of Jashar is mentioned again in 2 Samuel, where David’s lament over Saul and Jonathan is drawn from it, so it appears to have been a collection of national poetry. The volumes circulating today under that title are later forgeries, one of them an eighteenth century fabrication, and they have nothing to do with the ancient work. I have written more on this in what the Book of Jasher is.

The quotation actually helps the case for antiquity. The account of Gibeon was preserved in Israel’s poetry long before Joshua reached its final written form, which is not what you would expect of a legend invented later to embellish a national hero.

The main interpretive options

Honest conservative readers have taken this several ways, and I do not think fellowship should be broken over which one you prefer. The first holds that God slowed or halted the earth’s rotation directly, sustaining everything through the event, since the God who made the physical laws is not bound by them. That reading takes the language at face value.

The second suggests a local optical phenomenon, some refraction or prolongation of light over the battlefield, so that the fighting could continue in daylight without any change to the planet. That preserves the miracle while confining its effects to the region concerned.

A third reading, argued from the vocabulary, notes that the Hebrew verb damam can mean to be still or to cease rather than to stop moving, and that the parallel request may be for the sun’s heat to be withheld from exhausted soldiers who had marched all night. On that view Joshua asked for shade, and got it, along with the hailstorm.

Weighing them fairly

My own inclination, on the question of whether the sun stood still, is towards a reading that takes the plain sense seriously without insisting on a mechanism the text never supplies. The narrator’s point is not astronomy. It is that the LORD fought for Israel and that He heeded the voice of a man, which is a startling statement about prayer.

What I would resist is the instinct to reach for whichever explanation feels least embarrassing in front of a sceptic. If we only accept the miracles we can domesticate, we have not defended Scripture, we have quietly rewritten it. The same God who parted a sea and raised the dead is perfectly able to give Joshua the daylight he asked for, and I have argued the general point in whether God still does miracles today.

It is worth noticing that the ancient world took the account seriously enough that traces of a long day appear in several unrelated traditions. That is suggestive rather than probative, and I would not build much on it, but it is not nothing.

Why it matters

The day the sun stood still is doing more than reporting a battle. It sits in a book about a God who keeps promises made centuries earlier to Abraham about a land, and the point of the day at Gibeon is that the conquest was His work rather than Israel’s military achievement. The hailstones killed more than the swords did, which is the narrator’s way of saying so.

There is also a lesson about prayer that we would rather not face. Joshua asked for something outrageous, publicly, in front of the whole army, and God did it. Most of us pray carefully hedged prayers that require no divine action to fulfil. The study notes on Joshua 10 bring out the covenant setting of the episode well.

Reading Hebrew narrative fairly

One reason this passage causes trouble is that modern readers arrive with expectations formed by scientific prose. We assume that a true account must be a technically precise one, and that figurative language signals fiction. Hebrew narrative does not work that way, and neither, if we are honest, does most of our own speech.

When the Psalms say that the mountains skipped like rams, nobody supposes geology is being described. When Deborah sings that the stars fought from heaven against Sisera, we understand that a real battle is being celebrated in exalted language. The question at Gibeon is not whether poetry can be true but what this particular poem is claiming, and that has to be settled by careful reading rather than by reflex.

What the surrounding prose insists on is that something extraordinary happened, that it was unrepeated, and that it came in answer to a request. Any reading which leaves those three things standing is within the bounds of faithful interpretation, whatever it concludes about the mechanism.

The God who fights for His people

Step back from the astronomy for a moment and look at the shape of the chapter. Israel is fighting on behalf of a city that had deceived them into a treaty, and Joshua is honouring an agreement he should never have made, because he had made it. God does not abandon him for it. He sends hailstones, and then He holds the light.

That is worth sitting with. The covenant faithfulness on display at Gibeon is not a reward for good judgement. Joshua had been taken in by the Gibeonites precisely because, as the text says earlier, he did not ask counsel from the LORD. God still fought for him, and the day the sun stood still is a monument to grace as much as to power.

That pattern runs right through Scripture and reaches its fullest expression at the cross, where God acts decisively for people who had no claim on Him whatever.

Notice, finally, how the narrator frames it. He does not say that the sun stood still and leave us to be impressed by the physics. He says that the LORD heeded the voice of a man, and then that the LORD fought for Israel. The wonder he wants us to feel is not astronomical but relational, and if we spend all our energy on the mechanism we shall miss the sentence he actually wrote.

So, now what?

Do not let this passage sit in your mind as an embarrassment. Whether the sun stood still through a change in the earth’s motion, by an effect of light, or by the withholding of its heat, the writer’s claim is that God answered a man’s prayer on a battlefield and gave His people the victory He had promised.

And let the harder application land. What have you stopped praying for because it seemed too large? Joshua had no precedent for the request he made. He simply believed that the God who had promised the land was able to hold the light long enough to finish the job.

There has been no day like it before or since, when the LORD heeded the voice of a man, for the LORD fought for Israel.

Joshua 10:14, ESV