You don't have to be a trained theologist to see that the miracle of the sun standing still over Gibeon has been inserted into the bible later. Joshua 10:10 and 10:16 form a perfectly rounded-off unity:
After an all-night march from Gilgal, Joshua took them by surprise. The LORD threw them into confusion before Israel, who defeated them in a great victory at Gibeon. Israel pursued them along the road going up to Beth Horon and cut them down all the way to Azekah and Makkedah. Now the five kings had fled and hidden in the cave at Makkedah.
You don’t miss anything, right? Still, the bible adds in two miracles:
After an all-night march from Gilgal, Joshua took them by surprise. The LORD threw them into confusion before Israel, who defeated them in a great victory at Gibeon. Israel pursued them along the road going up to Beth Horon and cut them down all the way to Azekah and Makkedah.
As they fled before Israel on the road down from Beth Horon to Azekah, the LORD hurled large hailstones down on them from the sky, and more of them died from the hailstones than were killed by the swords of the Israelites. On the day the LORD gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the LORD in the presence of Israel: "O sun, stand still over Gibeon, O 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. There has never been a day like it before or since, a day when the LORD listened to a man. Surely the LORD was fighting for Israel! Then Joshua returned with all Israel to the camp at Gilgal.
Now the five kings had fled and hidden in the cave at Makkedah.
You can clearly tell it’s a plug-in by the closing remark, “Then Joshua returned with all Israel to the camp at Gilgal” (Josh 10:15). This verse is an exact copy of Joshua 10:43.
It’s a trick so often used in the bible that theologists even have a word for it: ‘Wiederaufnahme’ or ‘resumptive repetition’.
Also interesting is that the add-on doesn’t exactly make the bible better. Quite the contrary! The ‘new’ story doesn’t make sense, because in it the enemy armies are destroyed not once, but twice (in Joshua 10:11-14 and 19-21).
In reality, the sun, of course, doesn’t just stop. It’s physically impossible.
In order for the sun to stop, you would have to stop the world from turning. This would immediately end all life on our planet. Our atmosphere would take off, the moon would crash into the earth, the earth’s crust would break and the oceans would slosh out.
In ancient mythology, the Gods tamper with the celestial bodies all of the time.
The Greek goddess Athens stretched the night so that Odysseus could spend more time with his lover Penelope, and Zeus once stopped the sun to thwart a guy named Thyestes.
Still, Joshua underscores that it is really something special when the Lord stops the sun.
There has never been a day like it before or since, a day when the LORD listened to a man (Josh 10:14)
Well, forget it. In 2 Kings 20:11, Yahweh even pushes the sun back in its tracks as a token for king Hezekaia.
In the late 1990s, it was rumoured that Nasa had stumbled upon the ‘missing day’ of Joshua. Meticulously sifting through the calender, Nasa researchers had found one day was missing, several Christian websites reported.
But it was a hoax: of course, it would have been impossible to track down a ‘missing’ day from the 13th century BC.
