Notes and Queries, Number 71, March 8, 1851, page 39 by Various Authors
<< Return to Title Details & Download40
destruction at the bidding of Joshua, whom God had commissioned to be the scourge of idolaters. And when the inspired recorder of the miracle wrote that "the sun stood still," he told what the eyes saw, with the same truth as I might say that the sun rose before seven this morning. Inspiration was not bestowed to make men wise in astronomy, but wise unto salvation.
Those who think that the inspired penman should have said "the earth stood still," in order to give a perfectly true account of the miracle, have need to be told, or would do well to remember, that the stopping of the diurnal revolution of the earth, in order to keep the sun and moon's apparent places the same, would not involve a cessation of its motion in its orbit, still less a cessation of that great movement of the whole solar system, by which it is now more than conjectured that the sun, the moon, and the earth are all carried on together at the rate of above 3700 miles in an hour; so that to say "the earth stood still" would be liable to the same objection, viz., that of not being astronomically true. I. K. carries his notion of the "inseparable connexion" of the sun "with all planetary motion" too far, when he supposes that a stoppage of the sun's motion round its own axis would have any effect on our planet. The note he quotes from Kitto's Pictorial Bible is anything but satisfactory; and that from Mant is childishly common-place. Good old Scott adverts with propriety to the Creator's power to keep all things in their places, when the earth's revolution was stopped; but when he endeavoured to illustrate it by the little effect of a ship's casting anchor when under full sail, he should have consulted his friend Newton, who would have stopped such an imagination. Another commentator, Holden, has argued, in spite of the Hebrew, that "in the midst of heaven" cannot mean mid-day, having made up his mind that the moon can never be seen at that hour!
Such helpers do but make that difficult which, if received