Biblical Hebrew Forum

[K Randolph <kwrandolph AT gmail.com>]

Stephen:

No, there was a second way of telling time, namely how long it takes to get
from place A to place B.

There is a story I heard many years ago about an early motorized expedition
into the Sahara: the leaders hired a local Beduin who had a reputation as a
good guide, to tell them where to go. It started out fine, but then the
Beduin got lost, thoroughly confused. His concept of the distances was tied
up in how long it took to get from one place to another, and when the trucks
took just a fraction of the time, he couldn't adjust.

Similarly the soldiers under Joshua would have realized after a while that
while they were fighting and going from place to place, yet when they looked
up, the sun had not moved, that something was going on that was highly
unusual.

Karl W. Randolph.

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 7:29 AM, Stephen Segall <segall AT umich.edu> wrote:

> It should be noted that the only accurate way people had of measuring
> time of day in biblical times was using the position of the sun.
> Therefore, even if Joshua did tell the sun and moon to stand in place,
> there would be no way for people then to know whether it acutally
> happened. People fighting the battle may have felt that it was
> dragging on indefinitely and wondered when it would end. If afterwards
> they heard that Joshua had told the sun and moon to stay in place,
> they may have believed it happened with no way of determining if it
> were true.
> Stephen Segall