Firstlightdawn
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Does the Bible say the earth rotates? Ancient Hebrew has no word for “spin,” “rotate,” or “axis.”
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Geocentric or Heliocentric (what shape is the earth) ?
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Does the Bible say your heart pumps blood throughout your body?
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What I meant is that the Bible is inerrant but people’s interpretations are not.
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The Barbarian
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You might as well ask where the center of the surface of the Earth is. For the same reason. Gravity affects space, bending it a bit. Over a universe, space curves in, resulting in a cosmos that is limited, but unbounded. Like the surface of the Earth.
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Firstlightdawn
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The text says the sun “stood still” and the moon “stopped.”. The Bible does not say: "Stopping the rotation of the earth or stopping time". I think we need to look what the Bible really says and quit making stuff up. No one had a concept of Earth’s rotation. The Bible says the sun rises and the sun sets.
In the Bible, humans aren’t appointed to control creation — we’re appointed to observe it. From Genesis onward, God builds a world that communicates through what we see: the lights in the sky for signs and seasons, the shadow on the steps for Hezekiah, the sun standing still “in the sight of Israel” for Joshua. The point of these events isn’t human power but human witness. God acts; we observe. That’s the pattern of Scripture. The miracle is not about manipulating time or nature — it’s about God revealing His work to those He has appointed to watch.
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Firstlightdawn
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Modern cosmology says something remarkable: in an expanding universe, every point can be treated as the center. There is no single physical middle — every location sees the expansion moving away from it in all directions.
That means two things at once:
- We stand at the center of our observable universe.
- So does every other point in creation.
And that’s the point.
The center is not a galaxy, a planet, or a coordinate in space. The center is the One who gives meaning to space, time, and existence itself.
Creation has no physical center because the true center is God — the One who is present to every point, every moment, every observer.
We are not the center because of our location. We are the center because the Center Himself defines all things from His own being.
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The Barbarian
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Firstlightdawn
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Yes that is the whole point of Sepher Yetzirah. A part of the Oral Tradition that is said to go bach to Abraham. Or even all the way back to Adam.
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Job 33:6
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I really like this.
Apparently, other Ancient Near Eastern texts include stories of both the sun and the moon stopping, not just the sun, in ways that suggest these celestial events were seen as omens. A similar idea appears in Habakkuk:
Habakkuk 3:11 (ESV)
"The sun and moon stood still in their place at the light of your arrows as they sped, at the flash of your glittering spear."
Here, the celestial bodies stand still as a sign of awe and a demonstration of the Lord’s power, particularly in connection with wartime events, such as in Joshua. How these bodies operate in the sky could also reflect expectations on the battlefield.
For example, the Greeks observed the positioning of the sun and moon as omens, interpreting them as indications of whether their deities favored them in battle. Similarly, the biblical texts may be highlighting celestial phenomena as markers of divine presence or judgment during conflict. Hence why in Joshua, the enemy armies are defeated by hailstone from the heavens.
@The Barbarian what do you think of this idea?
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I'm sorry to have to bring in Source Criticism and Redaction Criticism, but the whole 'sun standing still' incident is colored over by the fact that we don't have The Book of Jasher. And it sounds like the writer of Joshua 10:12-13 [and we don't know it was Joshua] was dependent on Jasher as a source for "the sun standing still."
So, while I can offer mild belief that the 'sun stood still by God's command,' I can only do so as a critical historical reader, and not simply due to a prima facie reading of Joshua 10:12-13.
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I do think Walton's position is plausible and the video you've posted seems to be reflective of points he has more briefly laid out in his older book, Ancient Near Eastern Thought and the Old Testament (2006 ed.), even if it seems to me that his position tends to be on the 'softer' side of several represented within and among critical biblical scholars.
At this moment, I'm reading through the pertinent section on Joshua 10 in Trent C. Butler's critical commentary and I'm weighing the other critical positions mentioned therein, .............all of which are inconclusive as they attempt to unwind the possible source material of the Book of Jasher within the historiographical complexities of the narrative.
But I like Walton's interpretive suggestions, nevertheless, and I'm not a fan of the Copenhagen school or of other Minimalists. It could very well be that this passage relates to ANE forms of divination and omens as Walton is saying. Ultimately, it would be great to think that God indeed 'stopped' the sun and moon and held the earth in His Almighty providence, preventing it from being torn apart in the process.
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If you are stuck in heavy traffic and all you can see is the cars around you, if the other lanes start moving forward then from your perspective you've started moving backwards. It seems a very foolish position to take to pretend we don't now know that the earth is a rotating globe. From the perspective of the ancient Hebrews who did not have the benefit of what we can now see, the earth was stationary and the sun and moon passed overhead from East to West then somehow managed to get back over to the East in order to rise again.
Which only works if the earth is a globe. The ancient Greeks figured that out long ago without the benefit of satellite photography.
Honestly, I don't know what it is you are trying to argue.
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Just for the record, even though you're correct that the ancient Greeks (maybe Aristotle specifically?) realized the Earth is round, this doesn't retroactively feed back to earlier times than the Classical Era. With this in mind, we can't infer that early Hebrews or Iron Age Israelites up and through the time of Ezra and Nehemiah also knew the world was round or that Old Testament writings infer that the world is round.
So, in sum, we can't actually impute the idea that the ancients who lived prior to the Greeks knew what Aristotle knew................ maybe Jesus or Paul did, but most likely folks from the time of Moses through Malachi did not.
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I wasn't suggesting that they did. However, @Firstlightdawn seems to be suggesting that we must ignore any additional knowledge we have today, and assume that the description of events in the Old Testament can only be interpreted in terms of their understanding of cosmology.
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I would tend to agree with his essential proposition: the ancients who lived before the classical Greeks---that is, the Sumerians, Egyptians, Old Babylonians, Assyrians, Canaanites and other ancient clans, Persians, early Hebrews and latter Iron Age Israelites were ensconced in older sets of Cosmology, none of which seem to indicate an understanding that the Earth is round. Theirs was what we would think of as a mythological cosmos, and it would be anachronistic for us to read our current understanding of the form of the Earth back into the viewpoints of those earlier civilizations.
Of course, the Lord would have known all along the Earth was round, moves around the Sun, and is placed within a system of planets, among many such systems around other stars that also exist in a nearly infinite array through space and time. But Moses didn't know that. Solomon didn't know that. Ezra didn't know that. And in this likely fact, we might bring in Calvin's assertion that God 'accomodated' earlier people's much more limited ability to understand the cosmos in which they were placed and lived.
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The Barbarian
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Physically "stopping the sun" would entail stopping the Earth's rotation. Which God could do. But then there's the issue of Joshua ( and everything else on the Earth) suddenly decelerating from over 20,000 mph to 0 mph. Which would ordinarily result in miles-high tsunamis, the crust breaking loose in huge chunks, people hurling through the air at tremendous speeds, etc. Which God could prevent by various miracles. But the available evidence (such as evolution being more efficient than design) suggests that He'd arrange to have light continue to flow as though the sun had not moved. Assuming it's meant to be a literal account. He seems to prefer elegant solutions.
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