The Astronomy of the Bible Part 31

5.--THE MIRACLE.

It was at this moment, when his scouts announced to him the frustration of his hopes, that Joshua in the anxiety lest the full fruits of his victory should be denied him, and in the supremest faith that the Lord G.o.d, in Whose hand are all the powers of the universe, was with him, exclaimed:

"Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon, And thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon!"

So his exclamation stands in our Authorized Version, but, as the marginal reading shows, the word translated "stand still" is more literally "be silent." There can be no doubt that this expression, so unusual in this connection, must have been employed with intention. What was it that Joshua is likely to have had in his mind when he thus spoke?

The common idea is that he simply wished for more time; for the day to be prolonged. But as we have seen, it was midday when he spoke, and he had full seven hours of daylight before him. There was a need which he must have felt more pressing. His men had now been seventeen hours on the march, for they had started at sunset--7 p.m.--on the previous evening, and it was now noon, the noon of a sub-tropical midsummer. They had marched at least twenty miles in the time, possibly considerably more according to the route which they had followed, and the march had been along the roughest of roads, and had included an ascent of 3400 feet--about the height of the summit of Snowdon above the sea-level.

They must have been weary, and have felt sorely the heat of the sun, now blazing right overhead. Surely it requires no words to labour this point. Joshua's one pressing need at that moment was something to temper the fierce oppression of the sun, and to refresh his men. This was what he prayed for; this was what was granted him. For the moment the sun seemed fighting on the side of his enemies, and he bade it "Be silent."

Instantly, in answer to his command, a mighty rush of dark storm-clouds came sweeping up from the sea.

Refreshed by the sudden coolness, the Israelites set out at once in the pursuit of their enemies. It is probable that for the first six miles they saw no trace of them, but when they reached Beth-horon the Upper, and stood at the top of its steep descent, they saw the Amorites again.

As it had been with their fathers at the Red Sea, when the pillar of cloud had been a defence to them but the means of discomfiture to the Egyptians, so now the storm-clouds which had so revived them and restored their their strength, had brought death and destruction to their enemies. All down the rocky descent lay the wounded, the dying, the dead. For "the Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them, unto Azekah, and they died: they were more which died with hailstones than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword."

"The might of the Gentile, unsmote by the sword, Had melted like snow in the glance of the Lord."

Far below them the panic-stricken remnants of the Amorite host were fleeing for safety to the cities of the Maritime Plain. The battle proper was over; the one duty left to the army of Israel was to overtake and destroy those remnants before they could gain shelter.

But the narrative continues. "The sun stayed in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day." This statement evidently implies much more than the mere darkening of the sun by storm-clouds.

For its interpretation we must return to the remaining incidents of the day.

These are soon told. Joshua pursued the Amorites to Makkedah, twenty-seven miles from Gibeon by the route taken. There the five kings had hidden themselves in a cave. A guard was placed to watch the cave; the Israelites continued the pursuit for an undefined distance farther; returned to Makkedah and took it by a.s.sault; brought the kings out of their cave, and hanged them.

"And it came to pa.s.s at the time of the going down of the sun, that Joshua commanded, and they took them down off the trees, and cast them into the cave wherein they had hidden themselves, and laid great stones on the mouth of the cave, unto this very day."

All these events--the pursuit for twenty-seven miles and more, the taking of Makkedah and the hanging of the kings--took place between noon and the going down of the sun, an interval whose normal length, for that lat.i.tude and at that time of the year, was about seven hours.

This is an abnormal feat. It is true that a single trained pedestrian might traverse the twenty-seven and odd miles, and still have time to take part in an a.s.sault on a town and to watch an execution. But it is an altogether different thing when we come to a large army. It is well known that the speed with which a body of men can move diminishes with the number. A company can march faster than a regiment; a regiment than a brigade; a brigade than an army corps. But for a large force thirty miles in the entire day is heavy work. "Thus Sir Archibald Hunter's division, in its march through Bechua.n.a.land to the relief of Mafeking, starting at four in the morning, went on till seven or eight at night, covering as many as thirty miles a day at times." Joshua's achievement was a march fully as long as any of General Hunter's, but it was accomplished in less than seven hours instead of from fifteen to sixteen, and it followed straight on from a march seventeen hours in length which had ended in a battle. In all, between one sunset and the next he had marched between fifty and sixty miles besides fighting a battle and taking a town.

If we turn to the records of other battles fought in this neighbourhood, we find that they agree as closely as we could expect, not with Joshua's achievement, but with General Hunter's. In the case of the great victory secured by Jonathan, the gallant son of Saul, the Israelites smote the Philistines from Michmash to Ajalon;--not quite twenty miles. In the defeat of Cestius Gallus, the Jews followed him from Beth-horon to Antipatris, a little over twenty miles, the pursuit beginning at daybreak, and being evidently continued nearly till sundown. The pursuit of the Syrians under Nicanor by Judas Maccabaeus seems also to have covered about the same distance, for Nicanor was killed at the first onslaught and his troops took to flight.

It is not at all unusual to read in comments on the Book of Joshua that the "miracle" is simply the result of the dulness of the prose chronicler in accepting as literal fact an expression that originated in the poetic exuberance of an old bard. The latter, so it is urged, simply meaning to add a figure of dignity and importance to his song commemorating a great national victory, had written:--

"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. Ill.u.s.trations 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 (Opcona) 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.

The only measure of time, available to the Israelites, independent of the apparent motion of the sun, was the number of miles marched. Indeed, with the Babylonians, the same word (_kasbu_) was used to indicate three distinct, but related measures. It was a measure of time--the double hour; of celestial arc--the twelfth part of a great circle, thirty degrees, that is to say the s.p.a.ce traversed by the sun in two hours; and it was a measure of distance on the surface of the earth--six or seven miles, or a two hours' march.

If, for the sake of ill.u.s.tration, we may suppose that the sun were to stand still for us, we should recognize it neither by sundial nor by shadow, but we should see that whereas our clocks had indicated that the sun had risen (we will say) at six in the morning, and had southed at twelve of noon; it had not set until twelve of the night. The register of work done, shown by all our clocks and watches, would be double for the afternoon what it had been for the morning. And if all our clocks and watches did thus register upon some occasion twice the interval between noon and sunset that they had registered between sunrise and noon, we should be justified in recording, as the writer of the book of Joshua has recorded, "The sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day."

The real difficulty to the understanding of this narrative has lain in the failure of commentators to put themselves back into the conditions of the Israelites. The Israelites had no time-measurers, could have had no time-measurers. A sundial, if any such were in existence, would only indicate the position of the sun, and therefore could give no evidence in the matter. Beside, a sundial is not a portable instrument, and Joshua and his men had something more pressing to do than to loiter round it. Clepsydrae or clocks are of later date, and no more than a sundial are they portable. Many comments, one might almost say most comments on the narrative, read as if the writers supposed that Joshua and his men carried stop-watches, and that their chief interest in the whole campaign was to see how fast the sun was moving. Since they had no such methods of measuring time, since it is not possible to suppose that over and above any material miracle that was wrought, the mental miracle was added of acquainting the Israelites for this occasion only with the Copernican system of astronomy, all that the words of the narrative can possibly mean is, that--

"the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day,"

according to the only means which the Israelites had for testing the matter. In short, it simply states in other words, what, it is clear from other parts of the narrative, was actually the case, that the length of the march made between noon and sunset was equal to an ordinary march taking the whole of a day.

If we suppose--as has been generally done, and as it is quite legitimate to do, for all things are possible to G.o.d--that the miracle consisted in the slackening of the rotation of the earth, what effect would have been perceived by the Hebrews? This, and only this, that they would have accomplished a full day's march in the course of the afternoon. And what would have been the effects produced on all the neighbouring nations?

Simply that they had managed to do more work than usual in the course of that afternoon, and that they felt more than usually tired and hungry in the evening.

But would it have helped the Israelites for the day to have been thus actually lengthened? Scarcely so, unless they had been, at the same time, endowed with supernatural, or at all events, with unusual strength. The Israelites had already been 31 hours without sleep or rest, they had made a remarkable march, their enemies had several miles start of them; would not a longer day have simply given the latter a better chance to make good their flight, unless the Israelites were enabled to pursue them with unusual speed? And if the Israelites were so enabled, then no further miracle is required; for them the sun would have "hasted not to go down about a whole day."

Leaving the question as to whether the sun appeared to stand still through the temporary arrest of the earth's rotation, or through some exaltation of the physical powers of the Israelites, it seems clear, from the foregoing a.n.a.lysis of the narrative, that both the prose account and the poem were written by eye-witnesses, who recorded what they had themselves seen and heard whilst every detail was fresh in their memory. Simple as the astronomical references are, they are very stringent, and can only have been supplied by those who were actually present.

Nothing can be more unlike poetic hyperbole than the sum of actual miles marched to the men who trod them; and these very concrete miles were the gauge of the lapse of time. For just as "nail," and "span," and "foot," and "cubit," and "pace" were the early measures of small distance, so the average day's march was the early measure of long distance. The human frame, in its proportions and in its abilities, is sufficiently uniform to have furnished the primitive standards of length. But the relation established between time and distance as in the case of a day's march, works either way, and is employed in either direction, even at the present day. When the Israelites at the end of their campaign returned from Makkedah to Gibeon, and found the march, though wholly un.o.bstructed, was still a heavy performance for the whole of a long day, what could they think, how could they express themselves, concerning that same march made between noon and sundown? Whatever construction we put upon the incident, whatever explanation we may offer for it, to all the men of Israel, judging the events of the afternoon by the only standard within their reach, the eminently practical standard of the miles they had marched, the only conclusion at which they could arrive was the one they so justly drew--

"The sun stayed in the midst of heaven and hasted not to go down about a whole day. And there was no day like that before it or after it, that the Lord hearkened unto the voice of a man: for the Lord fought for Israel."

FOOTNOTES:

[351:1] Revised and reprinted from the _Sunday at Home_ for February and March, 1904.

[372:1] Marcel Dieulafoy, _David the King: an Historical Enquiry_, pp.

155-175.

CHAPTER II

THE DIAL OF AHAZ

The second astronomical marvel recorded in the Scripture narrative is the going back of the shadow on the dial of Ahaz, at the time of Hezekiah's recovery, from his dangerous illness.

It was shortly after the deliverance of the kingdom of Judah from the danger threatened it by Sennacherib king of a.s.syria, that Hezekiah fell "sick unto death." But in answer to his prayer, Isaiah was sent to tell him--

"Thus saith the Lord, the G.o.d of David thy father, I have heard thy prayer, I have seen thy tears: behold, I will heal thee: on the third day thou shalt go up unto the house of the Lord. And I will add unto thy days fifteen years; and I will deliver thee and this city out of the hand of the king of a.s.syria; and I will defend this city for Mine own sake, and for My servant David's sake. And Isaiah said, Take a lump of figs. And they took and laid it on the boil, and he recovered.