In another thread I listed the four passages in scripture that were used by some priests to claim that the Bible agreed with Aristotle's idea that the heavens rotated around a stationary Earth. Perhaps the most powerful of these verses (the others were from the poetry of Psalms and Ecclesiastes ) was the story of the Sun and Moon standing still for Joshua.
Interestingly there is more to this story.
I can understand that people who are not well acquainted with physics might think that the Joshua story is an obvious fairytale.
Actually, it is only today that some are beginning to understand that the story may have recorded an eyewitness account of an amazing phenomenon in the heavens: a near miss of the Earth by a large heavenly body.
Any disturbance of a gyroscope, and that is what the constantly spinning Earth is, would cause a precession of the axis, a wobble if you will. This could have the temporary effect of delaying the setting of the Sun, or else delaying its rise, depending upon where the observer was on the surface of the Earth. (Incidentally, this would not affect the constant speed of rotation of either a gyroscope or the spinning Earth.)
It is interesting that the Joshua story records that the movement of the Moon was also affected, which is just what one would expect to happen if the spinning Earth had been disturbed during a “near miss”. How did the “mythmakers” know to throw in that detail?
Finally, there is another “myth”, this one from the Far East, that records a phenomenon known as a double sunrise, an event where the sun rose slightly in the morning, went back down, and then rose again. Could this have been the same event as Joshua’s, except viewed from a different earthly vantage point?
Interestingly there is more to this story.
I can understand that people who are not well acquainted with physics might think that the Joshua story is an obvious fairytale.
Actually, it is only today that some are beginning to understand that the story may have recorded an eyewitness account of an amazing phenomenon in the heavens: a near miss of the Earth by a large heavenly body.
Any disturbance of a gyroscope, and that is what the constantly spinning Earth is, would cause a precession of the axis, a wobble if you will. This could have the temporary effect of delaying the setting of the Sun, or else delaying its rise, depending upon where the observer was on the surface of the Earth. (Incidentally, this would not affect the constant speed of rotation of either a gyroscope or the spinning Earth.)
It is interesting that the Joshua story records that the movement of the Moon was also affected, which is just what one would expect to happen if the spinning Earth had been disturbed during a “near miss”. How did the “mythmakers” know to throw in that detail?
Finally, there is another “myth”, this one from the Far East, that records a phenomenon known as a double sunrise, an event where the sun rose slightly in the morning, went back down, and then rose again. Could this have been the same event as Joshua’s, except viewed from a different earthly vantage point?
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