“The Sun Stops in Gibeon!” was the bold headline, black ink on white posters, covering the walls of Jerusalem a few years ago, when one of the grand ultra-orthodox rabbis died of old age. The dramatic expression, borrowed from today’s chapter in Joshua, seems odd as a declaration of lament for the loss of a leader but makes sense when we realize that the original war cry refers to dramatic moments that blend perceptions of natural and supernatural reality. The great rabbi’s death, though expected, was for his followers like a solar eclipse - a shift in the order of the known order of things. A similar statement was made just this past week, right near my home in Harlem, as another great religious leader was brought to rest. Rev. Calvin Butts III was eulogized at the Abyssinian Baptist Church where he’s been the devoted and beloved leader for 50 years, with the words ‘time stopped when he died.’
The original context for the ‘sun stop in Gibeon’ cry was a bloody battle, fought by Joshua on behalf of his new allies - the people of Gibeon. Five local kings, including the King of Jerusalem, furious that the Gibeonites chose survival as slaves and allies of Israel instead of being decimated, attack their neighbors, who then call on Joshua for help. The battle rages on, with Adonai intervening with rocks falling from the sky, and still Joshua realized his army needed more daylight hours to triumph, and called out:
The sun indeed stops and with extra daylight hours the battle’s ends with the five kings’ crushing defeat. But what exactly is this miraculous military myth all about? A close reading of the text shows that the sun kept on shining over Gibeon - while the moon already did its thing in the Ayalon valley just a few miles away. Adonai, as well as many other gods, is often depicted as a God of War, actively participating in the battles of their devotees with great miraculous intervention. The pausing of the waters of the Jordan on behalf of Joshua’s people’s dramatic entrance to the land just one recent example. But to actually stop the sun in its tracks?? The sages and rabbinic interpreters of the ages struggled to explain it as plain historical memory, uncomfortable reading it as myth, coming up with the max amount of plausible hours for this unusual fete that even eclipsed the power of Moses. In the 12th century Maimonides speculated that this was not about changing the laws of nature but that this was at the height of summer and Joshua simply used the longest day of the year to his advantage.
Prof.Ada Taggar-Cohen suggests that by bringing God into the battlefield, the editors of Joshua use the familiar trope in which the responsibility for the terrors of war are not upon the human leaders - but upon the gods they claim to serve. A similar trope is used when Agamemnon calls on Zeus to stop the sun in the Iliad. In this case - Joshua's victory is not only over the kings of Canaan - it's over the forces of nature, making Adonai the ultimate winner over pagan reality, local gods and all threats to the conquest.
“The ancient world waged wars constantly,” She writes, “The ancients explained wars using religious language, claiming that the god or goddess joined in the war, or even that the war was commanded by the deity. Such explanations could not change the terrible realities of war, but they allowed kings to continue with their constant wars without taking moral responsibility. In the end, it was all up to the gods.”
The sun finally sets on that bloody day and when it does, Joshua, victorious, commands that the corpses of the five kings who collaborated to fight Gibeon be hanged and buried in a nearby cave, marked by boulders ‘to this day’. The conquest continues swiftly all the way down south to Gaza, for Joshua, not fighting alone, “is fighting along with Adonai the God of Israel.” Fact or fiction, myth and/or memory - these are the narratives that still echo today, in eulogies and political platforms, settlement expansion maps and sermons; believe it, or not.
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Gott mit uns.