What can we gain from Joshua’s Long day? Can it be detected by a computer “glitch” in astronomical software? No. That is the myth that goes around. But it can be detected by computer calculations that are actually looking for it. Imagine a runner jogging along a highway with mile markers, and you notice that the jogger passes a mile marker every 15 minutes. You ask him what time he started, and he says noon, and you note that it is 1:30 p.m. So you quickly calculate he had jogged 6 miles in 90 minutes. Such is the nature of astronomical calculations. So you predict that 1 hour ago the jogger was passing the 2 mile mark. Did your calculation tell the truth? No, because the jogger did not tell you that he took a 30 minute break at the 3 mile mark. He sat down on a roadside bench. No, the first calculation did not show a glitch. It worked perfectly as far as math goes. But it is wrong because it assumed that the man jogged the whole distance at a constant rate. We need an additional revelation to calculate correctly. The jogger says he always jogs at a constant rate, but he took a 30 minute break at the 3 mile mark. So you calculate 3 miles in 45 minutes, a 30 minute break, which is 75 minutes total, leaving 15 minutes. So he has jogged one mile after the break for a total of 4 miles in 90 minutes.
Astronomy is like this. According to the ordinances of creation the sun and moon move at constant rates to keep time. This is from an earth centered point of view. The sun goes around once every 24 hours and the moon goes around once every month. What happens if the sun takes a rest for 12 hours and does not move? Any calculations concerning the time before it rested will be incorrect if we do not take the rest into account in our calculations. It is just like the runner. The first calculations were only good for the last mile. He did run the last mile in 15 minutes in both cases. But the first calculations were incorrect for the time of his rest and before. Five miles were not jogged in the previous 75 minutes. But those minutes were three miles jogged in 45 minutes and 30 minutes of rest.
We have to know the exceptions to the rule that the clock of the sun and moon runs at a constant rate. No computer can detect an exception. You have to program it in, or leave it out. The computer will not crash or glitch. It will simply give incorrect or correct results depending what is put into it. The myth that circulates is that NASA’s computer glitched when trying to calculate past the time of Joshua’s Long Day, and then that some helpful Christian solved the problem by pointing the Joshua text out. This nonsense only serves to put people off from examining the real story.
We have Scripture to tell us the exception concerning the sun and moon. Joshua 10:14 tells us that there is only one exception to take account of, “And there has been no day like that day before it or after it for Yăhwēh to listen to the voice of a man, because Yăhwēh was fighting for Yisra’ēl.”
There is a way to confirm this. If the celestial mechanics of the sun, moon, and earth, are run backwards at a constant rate, there there will be solar and lunar eclipses. We can run these calculations back to Joshua’s long day, and expect them to be accurate. For the solar eclipses the track of the shadow of the moon is plotted on a map of the world for a specific time and date. And only the people along the track will see the sky darken and the sun blotted out. For lunar eclipses, only people on the night side of the earth will see the lunar eclipse.
Now back to Joshua’s Long Day there are historical records giving times and years of solar and lunar eclipses. The records do not have to be very accurate. A solar eclipse only happens in a place on average once in 300 years. After Joshua’s Long Day we can match these records up to the calculated path’s of the eclipses, as far back as the 13th and 14th centuries BC. But before Joshua’s Long day the historical records diverge from the calculations! I am talking about records in the thousand years before the 15th century BC. These records come from tablets of the ancient near east. Astronomers have tried to match them up with history and astronomical calculations, and have failed.
Why have they failed? They have failed because their calculations do not take account of Joshua’s Long Day. If the sun stops for 12 hours over the city of Gibeon, then every calculation that blindly goes past that event will be incorrect. To make this simpler think of the earth’s rotation as pausing for 12 hours under a noon sun above Gibeon. The sun takes a 12 hour rest. This means that a solar eclipse track assumed to occur on the map in one place will in reality have occurred at a place offset by 12 hours from the supposed track. What this means is that to find an eclipse before Joshua’s Long day we have to look at the eclipse tracks on the other side of the earth according to NASA’s calculations. The same is true for lunar eclipses. The historical reports have to be matched up with observations from the other side of the earth according to NASA’s calculations.
It turns out then, that when the astronomical calculations are adjusted for a 12 hour pause of the sun over Gibeon that the records previous to Joshua’s Long Day now match their historical and chronological contexts. Adjustment allows us to bring the Shulgi Ballad Double Eclipse into alignment with the history of UR-III and also the Solar Elcipse of Puzur-Ishtar. There are also Chinese records that can be explained, such as the San Mio Eclipse and the Hi and Ho eclipse, the drunk astronomers who failed to predict a solar eclipse. The Emperor executed them. Egyptian Lunar records also come into alignment, and there is even a record from the Battle Hymn of Sargon from the 23rd century BC that comes into alignment.
This data has some profound implications for the date of the Exodus, because the Tell Muhammad eclipses match calculations after the Long Day, confirming the early date of the Exodus and preserving the conventional Egyptian Chronology.
This is stuff that no humanist archaeologist or atheist or higher critic is going to touch with a ten foot pole. It electrocutes their world view. Because they have no faith in the Scripture. But if the earth really locked its rotation at the longitude of Gibeon with the sun for 12 hours 2600 years ago, and we really have faith in the word of the Almighty, then what is hidden from the world in the records of the past can be revealed to us.
For details on Joshua’s Long Day and the many eclipses before and after it, and ancient near eastern history in general read the