1.—Method of Studying the Record

There are three incidents recorded in Holy Scripture which may fairly, if with no great exactness, be termed astronomical miracles;—the "long day" on the occasion of Joshua's victory at Beth-horon; the turning back of the shadow on the dial of Ahaz, as a sign of king Hezekiah's recovery from sickness; and the star which guided the wise men from the east to the birthplace of the Holy Child at Bethlehem.

As astronomy has some bearing on each of these three remarkable events, it will be of some interest to examine each of them from the point of view of our present astronomical knowledge. It does not follow that this will throw any new light upon the narratives, for we must always bear in mind that the Scriptures were not intended to teach us the physical sciences; consequently we may find that the very details have been omitted which an astronomer, if he were writing an account of an astronomical observation, would be careful to preserve. And we must further remember that we have not the slightest reason to suppose that the sacred historians received any supernatural instruction in scientific matters. Their knowledge of astronomy therefore was that which they had themselves acquired from education and research, and nothing more. In other words, the astronomy of the narrative must be read strictly in the terms of the scientific advancement of the writers.

But there is another thing that has also to be remembered. The narrative which we have before us, being the only one that we have, must be accepted exactly as it stands. That is the foundation of our inquiry; we have no right to first cut it about at our will, to omit this, to alter that, to find traces of two, three, or more original documents, and so to split up the narrative as it stands into a number of imperfect fragments, which by their very imperfection may seem to be more or less in conflict.

The scientific attitude with regard to the record of an observation cannot be too clearly defined. If that record be the only one, then we may accept it, we may reject it, we may be obliged to say, "We do not understand it," or "It is imperfect, and we can make no use of it," but we must not alter it. A moment's reflection will show that a man who would permit himself to tamper with the sole evidence upon which he purports to work, no matter how profoundly convinced he may be that his proposed corrections are sound, is one who does not understand the spirit of science, and is not going the way to arrive at scientific truth.

There is no need then to inquire as to whether the tenth chapter of the Book of Joshua comes from two or more sources; we take the narrative as it stands. And it is one which has, for the astronomer, an interest quite irrespective of any interpretation which he may place upon the account of the miracle which forms its central incident. For Joshua's exclamation:—

implies that, at the moment of his speaking, the two heavenly bodies appeared to him to be, the one upon or over Gibeon, the other over the valley of Ajalon. We have therefore, in effect, a definite astronomical observation; interesting in itself, as being one of the oldest that has been preserved to us; doubly interesting in the conclusions that we are able to deduce from it.

The idea which has been most generally formed of the meaning of Joshua's command, is, that he saw Gibeon in the distance on the horizon in one direction with the sun low down in the sky immediately above it, and the valley of Ajalon in the distance, on the horizon in another direction, with the moon low down in the sky above it.

It would be quite natural to associate the sun and moon with distant objects if they were only some five or six degrees high; it would be rather straining the point to do so if they were more than ten degrees high; and if they were fifteen or more degrees high, it would be quite impossible.

They could not be both in the same quarter of the sky; both rising or both setting. For this would mean that the moon was not only very near the sun in the sky, but was very near to conjunction—in other words, to new moon. She could, therefore, have only shown a slender thread of light, and it is perfectly certain that Joshua, facing the sun in such a country as southern Palestine could not possibly have perceived the thin pale arch of light, which would have been all that the moon could then have presented to him. Therefore the one must have been rising and the other setting, and Joshua must have been standing between Gibeon and the valley of Ajalon, so that the two places were nearly in opposite directions from him. The moon must have been in the west and the sun in the east, for the valley of Ajalon is west of Gibeon. That is to say, it cannot have been more than an hour after sunrise, and it cannot have been more than an hour before moonset. Adopting therefore the usual explanation of Joshua's words, we see at once that the common idea of the reason for Joshua's command to the sun, namely, that the day was nearly over, and that he desired the daylight to be prolonged, is quite mistaken. If the sun was low down in the sky, he would have had practically the whole of the day still before him.

2.—Before the Battle

Before attempting to examine further into the nature of the miracle, it will be well to summarize once again the familiar history of the early days of the Hebrew invasion of Canaan. We are told that the passage of the Jordan took place on the tenth day of the first month; and that the Feast of the Passover was held on the fourteenth day of that month. These are the only two positive dates given us. The week of the Pascal celebrations would have occupied the time until the moon's last quarter. Then preparations were made for the siege of Jericho, and another week passed in the daily processions round the city before the moment came for its destruction, which must have been very nearly at the beginning of the second month of the year. Jericho having been destroyed, Joshua next ordered a reconnaissance of AÏ, a small fortified town, some twenty miles distant, and some 3400 feet above the Israelite camp at Gilgal, and commanding the upper end of the valley of Achor, the chief ravine leading up from the valley of the Jordan. The reconnaissance was followed by an attack on the town, which resulted in defeat. From the dejection into which this reverse had thrown him Joshua was roused by the information that the command to devote the spoil of Jericho to utter destruction had been disobeyed. A searching investigation was held; it was found that Achan, one of the Israelite soldiers, had seized for himself a royal robe and an ingot of gold; he was tried, condemned and executed, and the army of Israel was absolved from his guilt. A second attack was made upon AÏ; the town was taken; and the road was made clear for Israel to march into the heart of the country, in order to hold the great religious ceremony of the reading of the law upon the mountains of Ebal and Gerizim, which had been commanded them long before. No note is given of the date when this ceremony took place, but bearing in mind that the second month of the year must have begun at the time of the first reconnaissance of AÏ, and that the original giving of the Law upon Mount Sinai had taken place upon the third day of the third month, it seems most likely that that anniversary would be chosen for a solemnity which was intended to recall the original promulgation in the most effective manner. If this were so, it would account for the circumstance, which would otherwise have seemed so strange, that Joshua should have attacked two cities only, Jericho and AÏ, and then for a time have held his hand. It was the necessity of keeping the great national anniversary on the proper day which compelled him to desist from his military operations after AÏ was taken.

We are not told how long the religious celebrations at Shechem lasted, but in any case the Israelites can hardly have been back in their camp at Gilgal before the third moon of the year was at the full. But after their return, events must have succeeded each other with great rapidity. The Amorites must have regarded the pilgrimage of Israel to Shechem as an unhoped-for respite, and they took advantage of it to organize a great confederacy. Whilst this confederacy was being formed, the rulers of a small state of "Hivites"—by which we must understand a community differing either in race or habits from the generality of their Amorite neighbours—had been much exercised by the course of events. They had indeed reason to be. AÏ, the last conquest of Israel, was less than four miles, as the crow flies, from Bireh, which is usually identified with Beeroth, one of the four cities of the Hivite State; and the Beerothites had, without doubt, watched the cloud of smoke go up from the burning town when it was sacked; and the mound which now covered what had been so recently their neighbour city, was visible almost from their gates. That was an object-lesson which required no enforcement. The Hivites, sure that otherwise their turn would come next, resolved to make peace with Israel before they were attacked.

To do this they had to deceive the Israelites into believing that they were inhabitants of some land far from Canaan, and this they must do, not only before Joshua actually attacked them, but before he sent out another scouting party. For Beeroth would inevitably have been the very first town which it would have approached, and once Joshua's spies had surveyed it, all chance of the Hivites successfully imposing upon him would have vanished.

But they were exposed to another danger, if possible more urgent still. The headquarters of the newly formed Amorite league was at Jerusalem, on the same plateau as Gibeon, the Hivite capital, and distant from it less than six miles. A single spy, a single traitor, during the anxious time that their defection was being planned, and Adoni-zedec, the king of Jerusalem, would have heard of it in less than a couple of hours; and the Gibeonites would have been overwhelmed before Joshua had any inkling that they were anxious to treat with him. Whoever was dilatory, whoever was slow, the Gibeonites dared not be. It can, therefore, have been, at most, only a matter of hours after Joshua's return to Gilgal, before their wily embassy set forth.But their defection had an instant result. Adoni-zedec recognized in a moment the urgency of the situation. With Joshua in possession of Gibeon and its dependencies, the Israelites would be firmly established on the plateau at his very gates, and the states of southern Palestine would be cut off from their brethren in the north.

Adoni-zedec lost no time; he sought and obtained the aid of four neighbouring kings and marched upon Gibeon. The Gibeonites sent at once the most urgent message to acquaint Joshua with their danger, and Joshua as promptly replied. He made a forced march with picked troops all that night up from Gilgal, and next day he was at their gates.

Counterblow had followed blow, swift as the clash of rapiers in a duel of fencers. All three of the parties concerned—Hivite, Amorite and Israelite—had moved with the utmost rapidity. And no wonder; the stake for which they were playing was very existence, and the forfeit, which would be exacted on failure, was extinction.

3.—Day, Hour, and Place of the Miracle

The foregoing considerations enable us somewhat to narrow down the time of the year at which Joshua's miracle can have taken place, and from an astronomical point of view this is very important. The Israelites had entered the land of Canaan on the 10th day of the first month, that is to say, very shortly after the spring equinox—March 21 of our present calendar. Seven weeks after that equinox—May 11—the sun attains a declination of 18° north. From this time its declination increases day by day until the summer solstice, when, in Joshua's time, it was nearly 24° north. After that it slowly diminishes, and on August 4 it is 18° again. For twelve weeks, therefore—very nearly a quarter of the entire year—the sun's northern declination is never less than 18°. The date of the battle must have fallen somewhere within this period. It cannot have fallen earlier; the events recorded could not possibly have all been included in the seven weeks following the equinox. Nor, in view of the promptitude with which all the contending parties acted, and were bound to act, can we postpone the battle to a later date than the end of this midsummer period.

We thus know, roughly speaking, what was the declination of the sun—that is to say, its distance from the equator of the heavens—at the time of the battle; it was not less than 18° north of the equator, it could not have been more than 24°.

But, if we adopt the idea most generally formed of the meaning of Joshua's command, namely, that he saw the sun low down over Gibeon in one direction, and the moon low down over the valley of Ajalon in another, we can judge of the apparent bearing of those two heavenly bodies from an examination of the map. And since, if we may judge from the map of the Palestine Exploration Fund, the valley of Ajalon lies about 17° north of west from Gibeon, and runs nearly in that direction from it, the moon must, to Joshua, have seemed about 17° north of west, and the sun 17° south of east.

But for any date within the three summer months, the sun in the latitude of Gibeon, when it bears 17° south of east, must be at least 56° high. At this height it would seem overhead, and would not give the slightest idea of association with any distant terrestrial object. Not until some weeks after the autumnal equinox could the sun be seen low down on the horizon in the direction 17° south of east, and at the same time the moon be as much as 17° north of the west point. And, as this would mean that the different combatants had remained so close to each other, some four or five months without moving, it is clearly inadmissible. We are forced therefore to the unexpected conclusion that it is practically impossible that Joshua could have been in any place from whence he could have seen, at one and the name moment; the sun low down in the sky over Gibeon, and the moon over the valley of Ajalon.

Is the narrative in error, then? Or have we been reading into it our own erroneous impression? Is there any other sense in which a man would naturally speak of a celestial body as being "over" some locality on the earth, except when both were together on his horizon?

Most certainly. There is another position which the sun can hold in which it may naturally be said to be "over," or "upon" a given place; far more naturally and accurately than when it chances to lie in the same direction as some object on the horizon. We have no experience of that position in these northern latitudes, and hence perhaps our commentators have, as a rule, not taken it into account. But those who, in tropical or sub-tropical countries, have been in the open at high noon, when a man's foot can almost cover his shadow, will recognize how definite, how significant such a position is. In southern Palestine, during the three summer months, the sun is always so near the zenith at noon that it could never occur to any one to speak of it as anything but "overhead."

And the prose narrative expressly tells us that this was the case. It is intimated that when Joshua spoke it was noon, by the expression that the sun "hasted not to go down about a whole day," implying that the change in the rate in its apparent motion occurred only in the afternoon, and that it had reached its culmination. Further, as not a few commentators have pointed out, the expression,—"the sun stood still in the midst of heaven,"—is literally "in the bisection of heaven"; a phrase applicable indeed to any position on the meridian, but especially appropriate to the meridian close to the zenith.

This, then, is what Joshua meant by his command to the sun. Its glowing orb blazed almost in the centre of the whole celestial vault—"in the midst of heaven"—and poured down its vertical rays straight on his head. It stood over him—it stood over the place where he was—Gibeon.

We have, therefore, been able to find that the narrative gives us, by implication, two very important particulars, the place where Joshua was, and the time of the day. He was at Gibeon, and it was high noon.

The expression, "Thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon," has now a very definite signification. As we have already seen, the valley of Ajalon bears 17° north of west from Gibeon, according to the map of the Palestine Exploration Fund, so that this is the azimuth which the moon had at the given moment. In other words, it was almost exactly midway between the two "points of the compass," W.b.N. and W.N.W. It was also in its "last quarter" or nearly so; that is, it was half-full, and waning. With the sun on the meridian it could not have been much more than half-full, for in that case it would have already set; nor much less than half-full, or it would have been too faint to be seen in full daylight. It was therefore almost exactly half-full, and the day was probably the 21st day of the month in the Jewish reckoning.

But the moon cannot be as far as 17° north of west in latitude 31° 51´ N. on the 21st day of the month earlier than the fourth month of the Jewish year, or later than the eighth month. Now the 21st day of the fourth month is about seven weeks after the 3rd day of the third month; the 21st day of the fifth month is eleven weeks. Remembering how close Gilgal, Gibeon and Jerusalem were to each other, and how important was the need for promptitude to Israelite and Amorite alike, it can scarcely be disputed that eleven weeks is an inadmissible length of time to interpose between the reading of the Law and the battle; and that seven weeks is the utmost that can be allowed.

The battle took place, then, on or about the 21st day of the fourth month. But it could only have done so if that particular year began late. If the year had begun earlier than April 1st of our present calendar, the moon could not have been so far north on the day named. For the Jewish calendar is a natural one and regulated both by the sun and the moon. It begins with the new moon, and it also begins as nearly as possible with the spring equinox. But as twelve natural months fall short of a solar year by eleven days, a thirteenth month has to be intercalated from time to time; in every nineteen years, seven are years having an extra month. Now the 21st day of the fourth month must have fallen on or about July 22 according to our present reckoning, in order that the moon might have sufficient northing, and that involves a year beginning after April 1; so that the year of the battle of Beth-horon must have been an ordinary year, one of twelve months, but must have followed a year of thirteen months.

Summarizing all the conclusions at which we have now arrived, Joshua's observation was made at Gibeon itself, almost precisely at the moment of noon, on or about the 21st day of the fourth month, which day fell late in July according to our present reckoning; probably on or about the 22nd. The sun's declination must have been about 20° north; probably, if anything, a little more. The sun rose therefore almost exactly at five in the morning, and set almost exactly at seven in the evening, the day being just fourteen hours long. The moon had not yet passed her third quarter, but was very near it; that is to say, she was about half full. Her declination did not differ greatly from 16° north; she was probably about 5° above the horizon, and was due to set in about half an hour. She had risen soon after eleven o'clock the previous evening, and had lighted the Israelites during more than half of their night march up from Gilgal.

4.—Joshua's Strategy

These conclusions, as to the place and time of day, entirely sweep away the impression, so often formed, that Joshua's victory was practically in the nature of a night surprise. Had it been so, and had the Amorites been put to flight at daybreak, there would have seemed no conceivable reason why, with fourteen hours of daylight before him, Joshua should have been filled with anxiety for the day to have been prolonged. Nor is it possible to conceive that he would still have been at Gibeon at noon, seven hours after he had made his victorious attack upon his enemy.

The fact is that, in all probability, Joshua had no wish to make a night surprise. His attitude was like that of Nelson before the battle of Trafalgar; he had not the slightest doubt but that he would gain the victory, but he was most anxious that it should be a complete one. The great difficulty in the campaign which lay before him was the number of fortified places in the hands of the enemy, and the costliness, both in time and lives, of all siege operations at that epoch. His enemies having taken the field gave him the prospect of overcoming this difficulty, if, now that they were in the open, he could succeed in annihilating them there; to have simply scattered them would have brought him but little advantage. That this was the point to which he gave chief attention is apparent from one most significant circumstance in the history; the Amorites fled by the road to Beth-horon.

There have been several battles of Beth-horon since the days of Joshua, and the defeated army has, on more than one occasion, fled by the route now taken by the Amorites. Two of these are recorded by Josephus; the one in which Judas MaccabÆus defeated and slew Nicanor, and the other when Cestius Gallus retreated from Jerusalem. It is probable that Beth-horon was also the scene of one, if not two, battles with the Philistines, at the commencement of David's reign. In all these cases the defeated foe fled by this road because it had been their line of advance, and was their shortest way back to safety.

But the conditions were entirely reversed in the case of Joshua's battle. The Amorites fled away from their cities. Jerusalem, the capital of Adoni-zedec and the chief city of the confederation, lay in precisely the opposite direction. The other cities of their league lay beyond Jerusalem, further still to the south.

A reference to the map shows that Gilgal, the headquarters of the army of Israel, was on the plain of Jericho, close to the banks of the Jordan, at the bottom of that extraordinary ravine through which the river runs. Due west, at a distance of about sixteen or seventeen miles as the crow flies, but three thousand four hundred feet above the level of the Jordan, rises the Ridge of the Watershed, the backbone of the structure of Palestine. On this ridge are the cities of Jerusalem and Gibeon, and on it, leading down to the Maritime Plain, runs in a north-westerly direction, the road through the two Beth-horons.

The two Beth-horons are one and a half miles apart, with a descent of 700 feet from the Upper to the Lower.

The flight of the Amorites towards Beth-horon proves, beyond a doubt, that Joshua had possessed himself of the road from Gibeon to Jerusalem. It is equally clear that this could not have been done by accident, but that it must have been the deliberate purpose of his generalship. Jerusalem was a city so strong that it was not until the reign of David that the Israelites obtained possession of the whole of it, and to take it was evidently a matter beyond Joshua's ability. But to have defeated the Amorites at Gibeon, and to have left open to them the way to Jerusalem—less than six miles distant—would have been a perfectly futile proceeding. We may be sure, therefore, that from the moment when he learned that Adoni-zedek was besieging Gibeon, Joshua's first aim was to cut off the Amorite king from his capital.The fact that the Amorites fled, not towards their cities but away from them, shows clearly that Joshua had specially manoeuvred so as to cut them off from Jerusalem. How he did it, we are not told, and any explanation offered must necessarily be merely of the nature of surmise. Yet a considerable amount of probability may attach to it. The geographical conditions are perfectly well known, and we can, to some degree, infer the course which the battle must have taken from these, just as we could infer the main lines of the strategy employed by the Germans in their war with the French in 1870, simply by noting the places where the successive battles occurred. The positions of the battlefields of Mars-la-Tour, Gravelotte, and Sedan would show clearly that the object of the Germans had been, first, to shut Bazaine up in Metz, and then to hinder MacMahon from coming to his relief. So in the present case, the fact that the Amorites fled by the way of the two Beth-horons, shows, first, that Joshua had completely cut them off from the road to Jerusalem, and next, that somehow or other when they took flight they were a long way to the north of him. Had they not been so, they could not have had any long start in their flight, and the hailstorm which occasioned them such heavy loss would have injured the Israelites almost as much.

How can these two circumstances be accounted for? I think we can make a very plausible guess at the details of Joshua's strategy from noting what he is recorded to have done in the case of AÏ. On that occasion, as on this, he had felt his inability to deal with an enemy behind fortifications. His tactics therefore had consisted in making a feigned attack, followed by a feigned retreat, by which he drew his enemies completely away from their base, which he then seized by means of a detachment which he had previously placed in ambush near. Then, when the men of AÏ were hopelessly cut off from their city, he brought all his forces together, surrounded his enemies in the open, and destroyed them.

It was a far more difficult task which lay before him at Gibeon, but we may suppose that he still acted on the same general principles. There were two points on the ridge of the watershed which, for very different reasons, it was important that he should seize. The one was Beeroth, one of the cities of the Hivites, his allies, close to his latest victory of AÏ, and commanding the highest point on the ridge of the watershed. It is distant from Jerusalem some ten miles—a day's journey. Tradition therefore gives it as the place where the Virgin Mary and St. Joseph turned back sorrowing, seeking Jesus. For "they, supposing Him to have been in the company, went a day's journey," and Beeroth still forms the first halting-place for pilgrims from the north on their return journey.

Beeroth also was the city of the two sons of Rimmon who murdered Ishbosheth, the son of Saul. When it is remembered how Saul had attempted to extirpate the Gibeonites, and how bitter a blood feud the latter entertained against his house in consequence, it becomes very significant that the murderers of his son were men of this Gibeonite town.

Beeroth also commanded the exit from the principal ravine by which Joshua could march upwards to the ridge—the valley of Achor. The Israelites marching by this route would have the great advantage that Beeroth, in the possession of their allies, the Gibeonites, would act as a cover to them whilst in the ravines, and give them security whilst taking up a position on the plateau.

But Beeroth had one fatal disadvantage as a sole line of advance. From Beeroth Joshua would come down to Gibeon from the north, and the Amorites, if defeated, would have a line of retreat, clear and easy, to Jerusalem. It was absolutely essential that somewhere or other he should cut the Jerusalem road.

This would be a matter of great difficulty and danger, as, if his advance were detected whilst he was still in the ravines, he would have been taken at almost hopeless disadvantage. The fearful losses which the Israelites sustained in the intertribal war with Benjamin near this very place, show what Joshua might reasonably have expected had he tried to make his sole advance on the ridge near Jerusalem.

Is it not probable that he would have endeavoured, under these circumstances, to entice the Amorites as far away to the north as possible before he ventured to bring his main force out on the ridge? If so, we may imagine that he first sent a strong force by the valley of Achor to Beeroth; that they were instructed there to take up a strong position, and when firmly established, to challenge the Amorites to attack them. Then, when the Israelite general in command at Beeroth perceived that he had before him practically the whole Amorite force—for it would seem clear that the five kings themselves, together with the greater part of their army, were thus drawn away—he would signal to Joshua that the time had come for his advance. Just as Joshua himself had signalled with his spear at the taking of AÏ, so the firing of a beacon placed on the summit of the ridge would suffice for the purpose. Joshua would then lead up the main body, seize the Jerusalem road, and press on to Gibeon at the utmost speed. If this were so, the small detachment of Amorites left to continue the blockade was speedily crushed, but perhaps was aware of Joshua's approach soon enough to send swift runners urging the five kings to return. The news would brook no delay; the kings would turn south immediately; but for all their haste they never reached Gibeon. They probably had but advanced as far as the ridge leading to Beth-horon, when they perceived that not only had Joshua relieved Gibeon and destroyed the force which they had left before it, but that his line, stretched out far to the right and left, already cut them off, not merely from the road to Jerusalem and Hebron, but also from the valley of Ajalon, a shorter road to the Maritime Plain than the one they actually took. East there was no escape; north was the Israelite army from Beeroth; south and west was the army of Joshua. Out-manoeuvred and out-generalled, they were in the most imminent danger of being caught between the two Israelite armies, and of being ground, like wheat, between the upper and nether millstones. They had no heart for further fight; the promise made to Joshua,—"there shall not a man of them stand before thee,"—was fulfilled; they broke and fled by the one way open to them, the way of the two Beth-horons. Whilst this conjectural strategy attributes to Joshua a ready grasp of the essential features of the military position and skill in dealing with them, it certainly does not attribute to him any greater skill than it is reasonable to suppose he possessed. The Hebrews have repeatedly proved, not merely their valour in battle, but their mastery of the art of war, and, as Marcel Dieulafoy has recently shown,[372:1] the earliest general of whom we have record as introducing turning tactics in the field, is David in the battle of the valley of Rephaim, recorded in 2 Sam. v. 22-25 and 1 Chron. xiv. 13-17.

"The several evolutions of a complicated and hazardous nature which decided the fate of the battle would betoken, even at the present day, when successfully conducted, a consummate general, experienced lieutenants, troops well accustomed to manoeuvres, mobile, and, above all, disciplined almost into unconsciousness, so contrary is it to our instincts not to meet peril face to face.... In point of fact, the Israelites had just effected in the face of the Philistines a turning and enveloping movement—that is to say, an operation of war considered to be one of the boldest, most skilful, and difficult attempted by forces similar in number to those of the Hebrews, but, at the same time, very efficacious and brilliant when successful. It was the favourite manoeuvre of Frederick II, and the one on which his military reputation rests."