PART I - The “sun stood still, and the moon stopped”

The “sun stood still, and the moon stopped”

As [the Amorites] fled from before Israel … the LORD threw large stones from heaven on them ... and they died; there were more who died from the hailstones than those whom the sons of Israel killed with the sword.

Then Joshua spoke to the LORD … and he said in the sight of Israel, “O sun, stand still at Gibeon, And O moon in the valley of Aijalon.”

So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, Until the nation avenged themselves ... the sun stopped in the middle of the sky and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day…

^{- Joshua 10:10-12, New American Standard Version}

This was, for the Israelites, a ‘miracle to beat all miracles’—second only to the parting of the Red Sea some fifty years earlier—for indeed,

There was no day like that before it or after it, when the LORD listened to the voice of a man. - Joshua 10:14

Many volumes have been written over the centuries in an effort to understand exactly what happened that day. From the comfort of the 21st Century, such a thing is impossible and so must have been invented by writer of the book of Joshua. There is no known—or at least accepted—explanation for why the sun and moon would appear to hover in the sky “for about a whole day”, certainly not by any known—or accepted—laws of the physical universe. So, if we are to determine what may have actually happened on that “day of days”, we are essentially left with a tri-fold dilemma: either

1) nothing at all happened and what we have is nothing more than a fictional tale;

or

2) a Divine Deity really did intervene on the Israelites’ behalf, causing the sun and moon to miraculously cease in their course across the sky;

or

3) something happened that involved no deity's aid whatsoever and the eyewitnesses’ testimonies as recorded in holy books, myths and legends the world over were their attempts to explain, in terms they could comprehend, the terrifyingly-violent, cataclysmic events happening in the heavens above their heads and the earth beneath their very feet. ⁴

If the answer to this dilemma is the first, then there is little to be gained by even discussing the matter.  If it is the second, then should this matter not be left to the realm of religious teachers and faith?

If, however, the answer is the third, and something happened in mankind’s past that so profoundly traumatized the human race that it forgot what actually happened—transmuting, as it were, the reality into the legendary and mythological, and ultimately the religiously dogmatic—then ought we not strive to determine what that “something” was?  Almost certainly if it could happen once, it could happen again, and we might be the next generation to face just such a test of our mettle.

But is such an investigation possible? The events described in the Biblical book of Joshua are said to have taken place around 3,500 years ago, and the Biblical record is one of the few accounts we have to go on. ⁵  Is there any evidence outside the Scriptures and other Jewish writings that something even remotely similar was witnessed by cultures in other parts of the world?

There is a vast supply of literary records—including petroglyphs and cave paintings—as well as written and oral mythologies, that speak of celestial phenomena unlike anything we have seen in our skies for two and half millennia—Joshua’s experience on the battlefield of Aijalon, for instance.  While those records are critical to understanding our past and its impact on the human psyche, without physical evidence still discernible today, who’s to say our ancestors didn’t just make it all up?  If they didn’t make it up, where is the proof?  What evidence is there that a cataclysmic event took place, not billions or even millions of years ago, but only thousands, well within the time-frame of recorded history—and not just once, but at least