2 W. Whiston wrote in his New Theory of the Earth (6th ed., 1755), pp. 19-21, 39
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According to the knowledge of our age—not of the age when the Book of Joshua or of Jasher was written—this could have happened if the earth had ceased for a time to roll along its robin-bobin
prescribed path. Is such a disturbance conceivable? No record of the slightest confusion is registered in the present annals of the earth. Each year consists of 365 days, 5 hours, and 49
minutes.
A departure of the earth from its regular rotation is thinkable, but only in the very improbable event that our planet should meet another heavenly body of sufficient mass to disrupt the eternal path of our world.
It is true that aerolites or meteorites reach our earth continually, sometimes by the thousands and tens of thousands. But no dislocation of our precise turning round and round has ever been perceived.
This does not mean that a larger body, or a larger number of bodies, could not strike the terrestrial sphere. The large number of asteroids between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter suggests that at some unknown time another planet revolved there; now only these meteorites follow approximately the path along which the destroyed planet circled the sun.
Possibly a comet ran into it and shattered it.
That a comet may strike our planet is not very probable, but the idea is not absurd. The heavenly mechanism works with almost absolute precision; but unstable, their way lost, comets by the thousands, by the millions, revolve in the sky, and their interference may disturb the harmony.
Some of these comets belong to our system. Periodically they return, but not at very exact intervals, owing to the perturbations caused by gravitation toward the larger planets when they fly too close to them. But innumerable other comets, often seen only through the telescope, come flying in from immeasurable spaces of the universe at very great speed, and disappear—possibly forever. Some comets are visible only for hours, some for days or weeks or even months.
concerning the wonder of the sun standing stilclass="underline" "The Scripture did not intend to teach men philosophy, or accommodate itself to the true and Pythagoric system of the world." And again:
"The prophets and holy penmen themselves . . . being seldom or never philosophers, were not capable of representing these things otherwise than they, with the vulgar, understood them."
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Might it happen that our earth, the earth under our feet, would roll toward perilous collision with a huge mass of meteorites, a trail of stones flying at enormous speed around and across our solar system? This probability was analyzed with fervor during the last century. From the time of Aristotle, who asserted that a meteorite, which fell at Aegospotami when a comet was glowing in the sky, had been lifted from the ground by the wind and carried in the air and dropped over that place, until the year 1803 when, on April 26, a shower of meteorites fell at 1'Aigle in France and was investigated by Biot for the French Academy of Sciences, the scholarly world—and in the meantime there lived Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Kepler, Newton, and Huygens—did not believe that such a thing as a stone falling from the sky was possible at all. And this despite many occasions when stones fell before the eyes of a crowd, as did the aerolite in the presence of Emperor Maximilian and his court in Ensisheim, Alsace, on November 7, 1492.3
Only shortly before 1803, the Academy of Sciences of Paris refused to believe that, on another occasion, stones had fallen from the sky. The fall of meteorites on July 24, 1790 in southwest France was pronounced "un phenomene physiquement impossible." 4 Since the year 1803, however, scholars have believed that stones fall from the sky. If a stone can collide with the earth, and occasionally a shower of stones, too, cannot a full-sized comet fly into the face of the earth? It was calculated that such a possibility exists but that it is very unlikely to occur.5
If the head of a comet should pass very close to our path, so as to effect a distortion in the career of the earth, another phenomenon besides the disturbed movement of the planet would probably occur:
3 C. P. Olivier, Meteors (1925), p. 4.
4 P. Bertholon, Vubhlicazionl della specola astronomica Vaticana (1913).
5 D. F. Arago computed on some occasion that there is one chance in 280 million that a comet will hit the earth. Nevertheless, a hole one mile in diameter in Arizona is a sign of an actual headlong collision of the earth with a small comet or asteroid. On June 30, 1908, a calculated robin-bobin
forty-Uiousand-ton mass of iron fell in Siberia at 60° 56' north latitude and 101° 57' east longitude. In 1946 the small Giacobini-Zinner comet passed within 131,000 miles of the point where the earth was eight days later.
While investigating whether an encounter between the earth and a comet had
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a rain of meteorites would strike the earth and would increase to a torrent. Stones scorched by flying through the atmosphere would be hurled on home and head.
In the Book of Joshua, two verses before the passage about the sun that was suspended on high for a number of hours without moving to the Occident, we find this passage:
>"As they [the Canaanite kings] fled from before Israel, and were in the going down to Beth-horon ... the Lord cast down great stones from heaven upon them unto Azekah, and they died: they were more which died with hail stones [stones of barad] than they whom the children of Israel slew with the sword." 6
The author of the Book of Joshua was surely ignorant of any connection between the two phenomena. He could not be expected to have had any knowledge about the nature of aerolites, about the forces of attraction between celestial bodies, and the like. As these phenomena were recorded to have occurred together, it is improbable that the records were invented.
The meteorites fell on the earth in a torrent. They must have fallen in very great numbers for they struck down more warriors than the swords of the adversaries. To have killed persons by the hundreds or thousands in the field, a cataract of stones must have fallen. Such been the subject of a previous discussion, I found that W. Whiston, Newton's successor at Cambridge and a contemporary of Halley, in his New Theory of the Earth (the first edition of which appeared in 1696) tried to prove that the comet of 1680, to which he (erroneously) ascribed a period of 575K years, caused the biblical Deluge on an early encounter.
G. Cuvier, who was unable to offer his own explanation of the causes of great cataclysms, refers to the theory of Whiston in the following terms: "Whiston fancied that the earth was created from the atmosphere of one comet, and that it was deluged by the tail of another. The heat which remained from its first origin, in his opinion, excited the whole antediluvian population, men and animals, to sin, for which they were all drowned in the deluge, excepting the fish, whose passions were apparently less violent."
I. Donnelly, author, reformer, and member of the United States House of Representatives, tried in his book Ragnarok (1883) to explain the presence of till and gravel on the rock substratum in America and Europe by hypothesizing an encounter with a comet, which rained till on the terrestrial hemisphere facing it at that moment. He placed the event in an indefinite period, but at a time when man already populated the earth. Donnelly did not show any awareness that Whiston was his predecessor. His assumption that there is till only in one half of the earth is arbitrary and wrong. 6 Joshua 10: 11.
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a torrent of great stones would mean that a train of meteorites or a comet had struck our planet.
The quotation in the Bible from the Book of Jasher is laconic and may give the impression that the phenomenon of the motionless sun and moon was local, seen only in Palestine between the valley of Ajalon and Gibeon. But the cosmic character of the prodigy is pictured in a thanksgiving prayer ascribed to Joshua: