Sun and moon stood still in heaven,
and Thou didst stand in Thy wrath against our oppressors. . . .
All the princes of the earth stood up,
the kings of the nations had gathered themselves together. . . .
Thou didst destroy them in Thy fury, and Thou didst ruin them in Thy rage.
Nations raged from fear of Thee,
kingdoms tottered because of Thy wrath. . . .
Thou didst pour out Thy fury upon them. . . . Thou didst terrify them in Thy wrath. . . .
The earth quaked and trembled from the noise of Thy thunders.
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Thou didst pursue them in Thy storm,
Thou didst consume them in the whirlwind. . . .
Their carcasses were like rubbish.7
The wide radius over which the heavenly wrath swept is emphasized in the prayer: "All the kingdoms tottered. . . ."
A torrent of large stones coming from the sky, an earthquake, a whirlwind, a disturbance in the movement of the earth—these four phenomena belong together. It appears that a large comet must have passed very near to our planet and disrupted its movement; a part of the stones dispersed in the neck and tail of the comet smote the surface of our earth a shattering blow.
Are we entitled, on the basis of the Book of Joshua, to assume that at some date in the middle of the second millennium before the present era the earth was interrupted in its regular rotation by a comet? Such a statement has so many implications that it should not
1 Ginzberg, Legends, IV, 11-12.
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be made thoughtlessly. To this I say that though the implications are great and many, the present research in its entirety is an interlinked sequence of documents and other evidence, all of which in common carry the weight of this and other statements in this book.
The problem before us is one of mechanics. Points on the outer layers of the rotating globe (especially near the equator) move at a higher linear velocity than points on the inner layers, but at the same angular velocity. Consequently, if the earth were suddenly stopped (or slowed down) in its rotation, the inner layers might come to rest (or their rotational velocity might be slowed) while the outer layers would still tend to go on rotating. This would cause friction between the various liquid or semifluid layers, creating heat; on the outermost periphery the solid layers would be torn apart, causing mountains and even continents to fall or rise.
As I shall show later, mountains fell and others rose from level ground; the earth with its oceans and continents became heated; the sea boiled in many places, and rock liquefied; volcanoes ignited and forests burned. Would not a sudden stop by the earth, rotating at a little over one thousand miles an hour at its equator, mean a complete destruction of the world? Since the world survived, there must have been a mechanism to cushion the slowing down of terrestrial rotation, if it really occurred, or another escape for the energy of motion besides transformation into heat, or both. Or if rotation persisted undisturbed, the terrestrial axis may have tilted in the presence of a strong magnetic field, so that the sun appeared to lose for hours its diurnal movement.8 These problems are kept in sight and are faced in the Epilogue of this volume.
On the Other Side of the Ocean
> The Book of Joshua, compiled from the more ancient Book of Jasher, relates the order of events. "Joshua . . . went up from Gilgal all night." In the early morning he fell upon his enemies unawares at Gibeon, and "chased them along the way that goes up to Beth-8 This explanation was suggested to me by M. Abramovich of Tel Aviv.
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45
horon." As they fled, great stones were cast from the sky. That same day ("in the day when the Lord delivered up the Amorites") the sun stood still over Gibeon and the moon over the valley of Ajalon. It has been noted that this description of the position of the luminaries implies that the sun was in the forenoon position.1 The Book of Joshua says that the luminaries stood in the midst of the sky.
Allowing for the difference in longitude, it must have been early morning or night in the Western Hemisphere.
We go to the shelf where stand books with the historical traditions of the aborigines of Central America.
The sailors of Columbus and Cortes, arriving in America, found there literate peoples who had books of their own. Most of these books were burned in the sixteenth century by the Dominican monks. Very few of the ancient manuscripts survived, and these are preserved in the libraries of robin-bobin
Paris, the Vatican, the Prado, and Dresden; they are called codici, and their texts have been studied and partly read. However, among the Indians of the days of the conquest and also of the following century there were literary men who had access to the knowledge written in pictographic script by their forefathers.2
In the Mexican Annals of Cuauhtitlan 3—the history of the empire of Culhuacan and Mexico, written in Nahua-Indian in the sixteenth century—it is related that during a cosmic catastrophe that occurred in the remote past, the night did not end for a long time.
The biblical narrative describes the sun as remaining in the sky for an additional day ("about a whole day"). The Midrashim, the books of ancient traditions not embodied in the Scriptures, relate that the sun and the moon stood still for thirty-six itim, or eighteen hours,*
1 H. Holzinger, Josua (1901), p. 40, in "Hand-commentar zum Alten Testament," ed. K. Marti.
R. Eisler, "Joshua and the Sun," American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literature, XLH
(1926), 83: "It would have had no sense early in the morning of a battle, with a whole day ahead, to have prayed for the lengthening of the sunlight even into the night time."
2 The Mayan tongue is still spoken by about 300,000 people, but of the Mayan hieroglyphics only the characters employed in the calendar are known for certain.
3 Known also as Codex Chimalpopoca. "This manuscript contains a series of annals of very ancient date, many of which go back to more than a thousand years before the Christian era"
(Brasseur).
*Sefer Ha-Yashar, ed. L. Goldschmidt (1923); Pirkei Rabbi Elieser (Hebrew
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and thus from sunrise to sunset the day lasted about thirty hours.
In the Mexican annals it is stated that the world was deprived of light and the sun did not appear for a fourfold night. In a prolonged day or night time could not be measured by the usual means at the disposal of the ancients.5
Sahagun, the Spanish savant who came to America a generation
fter Columbus and gathered the traditions of the aborigines, wrote
that at the time of one cosmic catastrophe the sun rose only a little
way over the horizon and remained there witiiout moving; the moon
also stood still.8
I am dealing with the Western Hemisphere first, because the biblical stories were not known to its aborigines when it was discovered. Also, the tradition preserved by Sahagun bears no trace of having been introduced by the missionaries: in his version there is nothing to suggest Joshua ben Nun and his war against the Canaanite kings; and the position of the sun, only a very little above the eastern horizon, differs from the biblical text, though it does not contradict it.
We could follow a path around the earth and inquire into the various traditions concerning the prolonged night and prolonged day, with sun and moon absent or tarrying at different points along the zodiac, while the earth underwent a bombardment of stones in a world ablaze. But we must postpone this journey. There was more than one catastrophe when, according to the memory of mankind, the earth refused to play the chronometer by undisturbed rotation on its axis. First, we must differentiate the single occurrences of cosmic catastrophes, some of which took place before the one described here, some after it; some of which were of greater extent, and some of lesser.