The Astronomy of the Bible / An Elementary Commentary on the Astronomical References of Holy Scripture

by E. Walter Maunder

"And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed,
Until the nation had avenged themselves of their enemies,"

but with no more expectation that the stay of the moon would be accepted literally, than the singers, who welcomed David after the slaying of Goliath, imagined that any one would seriously suppose that Saul had actually with his own hand killed two thousand Philistines, and David twenty thousand. But, say they, the later prose chronicler, quoting from the ballad, and accepting a piece of poetic hyperbole as actual fact, reproduced the statement in his own words, and added, "the sun stayed in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day."

Not so. The poem and the prose chronicle make one coherent whole. Working from the poem alone, treating the expressions in the first two lines merely as astronomical indications of time and place, and without the slightest reference to any miraculous interpretation, they lead to the inevitable conclusion that the time was noonday. This result certainly does not lie on the surface of the poem, and it was wholly beyond the power of the prose chronicler to have computed it, yet it is just in the supposed stupid gloss of the prose chronicler, and nowhere else, that we find this fact definitely stated: whilst the "miracle" recorded both by poem and prose narrative completely accords with the extraordinary distance traversed between noon and sunset.

Any man, however ignorant of science, if he be but careful and conscientious, can truthfully record an observation without any difficulty. But to successfully invent even the simplest astronomical observation requires very full knowledge, and is difficult even then. Every astronomer knows that there is hardly a single novelist, no matter how learned or painstaking, who can at this present day introduce a simple astronomical relation into his story, without falling into egregious error.

We are therefore quite sure that Joshua did use the words attributed to him; that the "moon" and "the valley of Ajalon" were not merely inserted in order to complete the parallelism by a bard putting a legend into poetic form. Nor was the prose narrative the result of an editor combining two or three narratives all written much after the date. The original records must have been made at the time.

All astronomers know well how absolutely essential it is to commit an observation to writing on the spot. Illustrations of this necessity could be made to any extent. One may suffice. In vol. ii. of the Life of Sir Richard Burton, by his wife, p. 244, Lady Burton says:—

"On the 6th December, 1882 . . . we were walking on the Karso (Opçona) alone; the sky was clear, and all of a sudden my niece said to me, 'Oh, look up, there is a star walking into the moon!' 'Glorious!' I answered. 'We are looking at the Transit of Venus, which crowds of scientists have gone to the end of the world to see.'"

The Transit of Venus did take place on December 6, 1882; and though Venus could have been seen without telescopic aid as a black spot on the sun's disc, nothing can be more unlike Venus in transit than "a star walking into the moon." The moon was not visible on that evening, and Venus was only visible when on the sun's disc, and appeared then, not as a star, but as a black dot.

No doubt Lady Burton's niece did make the exclamation attributed to her, but it must have been, not on December 6, 1882, but on some other occasion. Lady Burton may indeed have told her niece that this was the Transit of Venus, but that was simply because she did not know what a transit was, nor that it occurred in the daytime, not at night. Lady Burton's narrative was therefore not written at the time. So if the facts of the tenth chapter of Joshua, as we have it, had not been written at the time of the battle, some gross astronomical discordance would inevitably have crept in.

Let us suppose that the sun and moon did actually stand still in the sky for so long a time that between noon and sunset was equal to the full length of an ordinary day. What effect would have resulted that the Israelites could have perceived? This, and this only, that they would have marched twice as far between noon and sunset as they could have done in any ordinary afternoon. And this as we have seen, is exactly what they are recorded to have done.