Joshua 10:12-13 God made the sun and moon stand still

[Compassionist]

"On the day the LORD gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the LORD in the presence of Israel: "Sun, stand still over Gibeon, and you, moon, over the Valley of Aijalon." So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the nation avenged itself on its enemies, as it is written in the Book of Jashar. The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day." - Joshua 10:12-13, The Bible (New International Version). If the Bible is true and this really happened, then why is there no records by any other civilizations of the extraordinary event of the sun and the moon standing still for a day? For this to occur, the Earth would need to suddenly stop rotating on its axis which would cause people and other animals, structures, bodies of water, etc. to be flung out into space due to inertia. Besides, how can a loving and just God command genocide?

[Justin108]

The sun appears to rise in the east and set in the west. This illusion is created by the real movement Earth's axial rotation.

Exactly! So we speak of the sun as doing something when it really isn't doing at all , it is as you rightly said an "illusion" in other words something that is not physically happening as we describe but does as you say "appear" to be that way. ie the sun "appears"to be moving up and down from a human perspective. If we speak in such terms today,even though we know it is not literally true, why could Joshua not do the same?

For the sun and the moon to appear to stand still, the Earth's axial rotation would have to stop which would cause people and other animals, structures, bodies of water, etc. to be flung out into space due to inertia.

Illustions don't work that way. the whole point of an illusion is that one cannot "trust" their eyes to be conveying a physical reality. Your point is like saying, the only way for the magician to have his assistant's feet and legs sticking out of one half of the box and her head and hands in another direction is to dislocate her spine! er... well yes, if he really did saw her in half. But we all know he did not, only that it was an illustion and he APPEARED to. How people perform trick, I cannot say, but I can say that they don't kill their assistants so their spines are almost certainly not severed in two.

HOW Joshua was given the impression that the sun wasn't moving we cannot say for sure, but it almost certainly wasn't by stopping the earth from rotating although if there is a God an omnipotent God that certainly wouldn't be beyond his capabilities (to do so would seem a bit like overkill to me, no pun intended)...



JW

On the day the LORD gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the LORD in the presence of Israel: "Sun, stand still over Gibeon, and you, moon, over the Valley of Aijalon. The sun then said "no can do, Josh. But I can make it look like I'm standing still?" to which Joshua said "sure, that will do"

- Joshua 10:12-13 (selective interpretation edition)

[JehovahsWitness]

[Replying to post 20 by Justin108]

For me the details are of less relevance to the fact that, if we take the sheer number of flood legends in cultures that have nothing to do with the Abrahamic traditions, it points to a global deluge being a historical fact. I cannot see any other logical explanation for them...

[Justin108]

[Replying to post 20 by Justin108]

For me the details are of less relevance to the fact that, if we take the sheer number of flood legends in cultures that have nothing to do with the Abrahamic traditions, it points to a global deluge being a historical fact. I cannot see any other logical explanation for them...

What about the sheer number of UFO sightings? Is it a historical fact that aliens came to earth?

Ever consider the possibility that the Jews came across the Epic of Gilgamesh, figured they liked it and rewrote it their own way?

[JehovahsWitness]

On the day the LORD gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the LORD in the presence of Israel: "Sun, stand still over Gibeon, and you, moon, over the Valley of Aijalon. The sun then said "no can do, Josh. But I can make it look like I'm standing still?" to which Joshua said "sure, that will do"

So, do you say ..."that was a beautiful sunset" do you say "That was a beautiful looks like the sun was setting"?

[Justin108]

On the day the LORD gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the LORD in the presence of Israel: "Sun, stand still over Gibeon, and you, moon, over the Valley of Aijalon. The sun then said "no can do, Josh. But I can make it look like I'm standing still?" to which Joshua said "sure, that will do"

So, do you say ..."that was a beautiful sunset" do you say "That was a beautiful looks like the sun was setting"?

A sunset is an event. We describe it as such out of habit. If this is the event that Joshua was describing, then he would, in his command, expect the earth to stand still. Not just for a magical light to imitate the sun.

[JehovahsWitness]

[Replying to post 25 by Justin108]

So who made you the "we decide how to describe things" Police?

[JehovahsWitness]

Ever consider the possibility that the Jews came across the Epic of Gilgamesh, figured they liked it and rewrote it their own way?

Yes, but that wouldn't explain the global extent of flood myths, so as I said, I believe it is more logical to conclude it was a historical event.

QUESTION: What is indicated by the existence of so many flood myths?

FLOOD MYTHS The existence of so many flood myths bear credence to the fact there seems to have indeed been some kind of catastrophic event that left its imprint on the human psyche. The universiality of these stories and common features that this was an event early in man's history that left few survivors, cannot merely be dismissed that most people lived in areas near rivers susceptible to floods and indicate that this must have been a historical event.

www.bibleprobe.com/chinese.htm

The fact that the Sumerians (and many MANY other cultures) have a "flood myth" is, imo, undeniable evidence that the flood really happened!

The harmony between all these accounts is an undeniable guarantee that the tradition is no idle invention; a fiction is individual, not universal; that tradition has, therefore, a historical foundation; it is the result of an event which really happened in the ages of the childhood of mankind. - Historical and Critical Commentary of the Old Testament

The universality of the flood accounts is usually taken as evidence for the universal destruction of humanity by a flood . . . Moreover, some of the ancient accounts were written by people very much in opposition to the Hebrew-Christian tradition. - The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia Volume 2, page 319

[Justin108]

[Replying to post 25 by Justin108]
So who made you the "we decide how to describe things" Police?

What does that even mean...?

[Justin108]

Ever consider the possibility that the Jews came across the Epic of Gilgamesh, figured they liked it and rewrote it their own way?

Yes, but that wouldn't explain the global extent of flood myths

Yes it would. All the myths could have come from the same source. They could have all heard a similar tail from an older culture and adapted it.

The universiality of these stories and common features that this was an event early in man's history that left few survivors, cannot merely be dismissed that most people lived in areas near rivers susceptible to floods

Sure it can. It is far more believable that a few cultures thought a local flood was in fact a global flood than it is to believe that all animals were saved from extinction with one giant boat.

The fact that the Sumerians (and many MANY other cultures) have a "flood myth" is, imo, undeniable evidence that the flood really happened!

So the parts that agree with you (the flood happening, giant boat, etc.)... this is "undeniable evidence" that those things happened. But the parts that disagree with you (the people on the boat, the circumstances surrounding the flood, the gods responsible for the flood)... those don't matter at all? How do you explain the differences between these myths if they are all supposedly based on a single, true event?

[enki]

There are over 300 flood epics, well written before the Noahnic epic. The Biblical flood is written about 1700 BCE or so, while the older Sumer flood is a Nippur cuneiform tablet that was found by Thorkild Jacobsen. Thorkild Jacobsen is also a historian on the Eridu Genesis.

The younger revised epic of Noah is interesting as the epic of Noah is a much younger epic than that of the Epic of Ziusudra, who is a pious man and is saved from a flood. We see this later on with Noah and his family. Cool fact about the time of Noah, the common method of making rafts was to inflate sheep bladders like balloons and lash those together. Planks of wood or more likely reed mats could be placed on top.

A little on the ark of Noah, we begin with a Bible verse

Genesis 6: 14-16

Make yourself an ark (tēv�h) of gopher wood [came the instruction]; make rooms
(qinnīm) in the ark, and cover it (k�par) inside and out with pitch (kopher). This is how you are to make it: the length of the ark three hundred cubits, its width fifty cubits, and its height thirty cubits. Make a roof for the ark, and finish it to a cubit above; and put the door of the ark in its side; make it with lower, second, and third decks.

The biblical word tēv�h, which is used for the arks of Noah and Moses, occurs
nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible. The flood and baby episodes are thus deliberately associated and linked in Hebrew just as the Atrahasis and Sargon Arks are linked associatively in Babylonia.
Now for something extraordinary: no one knows what language tēv�h is or what it
means. The word for the wood, gopher, is likewise used nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible and no one knows what language or what kind of wood it is. This is a peculiar state of affairs for one of the most famous and influential paragraphs in all of the world’s writing

The associated words kopher, ‘bitumen’, and k�phar, ‘to smear on’, are also to be found nowhere else in the Hebrew Bible, but, significantly, they came from
Babylonia with the narrative itself, deriving from Akkadian kupru, ‘bitumen’, and kap�ru, ‘to smear on’. In view of this it is logical to expect that tēv�h and gopher are similarly loanwords from Babylonian Akkadian into Hebrew, but there has been no convincing candidate for either word. Suggestions have been made for gopher-wood, but the identification, or the non-Hebrew word that lies behind it, remains open.

Ideas have also been put forward over the centuries concerning the word tēv�h, some linking it – because Moses was in Egypt – with the ancient Egyptian word thebet, meaning ‘box’ or ‘coffin’, but these have ended nowhere. The most likely explanation is that tēv�h, like other ark words, reflects a Babylonian word.

A cuneiform tablet dealing with boats from around 500 BC, now in the British
Museum, mentions a kind of boat called a ṭubbû which is found at a river crossing, apparently as part of a vessel swap among boatmen:

BM 32873: 2

… a boat (eleppu) which is six cubits wide at the beam, a ṭubbû which is at the
crossing, and a boat (eleppu) five and a half (cubits) wide at the beam which is at the bridge, they exchanged for (?) one boat which is five cubits wide at the beam.

The consonants t (in tēv�h) and ṭ (in ṭubbû) are distinct from one another, so it is impossible that ṭubbû, a masculine noun of unknown etymology, and tēv�h, a feminine noun of unknown etymology, represent the same word etymologically. I think that the Judaeans encountered the Akkadian boat word ṭubbû used for the Ark in the story along with the other Akkadian ark words and Hebraised it as tēv�h. In this case the original consonants are less important; the idea was to render the foreign word, for it was only to be used twice in the whole Bible, once for Noah, once for Moses. The relationship between the words is thus that they are neither cognate nor loaned: the Babylonian was given a Hebrew ‘shape’. It is much the same as the way in which Nebuchadnezzar’s eunuch Nabu-sharrussu-ukin became Nebusarsekim in the Book of Jeremiah. This would perforce mean that the word ṭubbû must have occurred in place of eleppu, ‘boat’, for Utnapishti’s Ark, in some first millennium BC Babylonian source for the Flood Story that we do not have now.

(Irving Finkel- The flood before Noah)