So
the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the nation avenged itself on
its enemies, as it is written in the Book of Jashar. The sun stopped in the
middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. (Joshua 10:13)
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Scientifically the above saying is incorrect. The
above text seems to indicate the sun orbits around the earth, so it was able to
stop? Thanks to astronomy we know the sun does not orbit around the earth,
rather the earth orbits around the sun. the Sun
does spin, or rotate. Because it is a gas, it does not rotate like a solid. The
Sun actually spins faster at its equator than at its poles. The Sun rotates
once every 24 days at its equator, but only once every 35 near its poles. We
know this by watching the motion of sunspots and other solar features move
across the Sun. The giant gas planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune,
also spin faster at their equators than at their poles. It sure doesn’t orbit around other celestial
bodies. Thus Joshua 10:13 is incorrect.
Secondly suppose we even agreed for the sake of argument that
the sun stood still, this would mean the earth which rotates stood still. Now if
this really did happen could you imagine the damage this would have caused the
earth? A sudden pause would cause everything on its
surface to suddenly move at a speed of over 1,000 mph (1,600 kph) in a sideways
direction. Since the velocity needed to escape the Earth’s gravity is over
24,800 mph, we stay tacked to the surface, yet jolted forward. Also, the oceans
would be thrown into chaos, sloshing sideways and swamping anything and
everything in their path. The speed the Earth rotates slows down as you move
from the equator and towards the poles and so standing at the North and South
poles, you would hardly feel a thing!
Additionally a day would now last 365
days (assuming the planet wasn’t tidally locked to the Sun). We would no longer
see day turn to night and the Sun would take a year to move through the sky.
One hemisphere would be subjected to the Sun’s intense heat for half a year,
while the other would be in pitch darkness.
Freezing our planet’s rotation would
also cause it to spring into a perfectly spherical shape rather than its
current flattened ball appearance. Since our planet’s tilt is defined by how
it’s rotating compared to the Sun, no rotation means that there will no longer
be any seasons.
