Joshua 10.12-14
In my judgment Josh. 10.12-14 provides important
testimony to D[euteronomistic]H[istory]’s understanding of the relationship
between Yahweh and the sun at an early period. The passage in question is as
follows:
12 Then Joshua spoke to the Lord on the day the
Lord gave the Amorites over to the Israelites; he said in the presence of
Israel;
‘O sun in Gibeon cease,
And moon in the valley of Aijalon!’
13 And the sun ceased and the moon stood still
Until a nation defeated its foes.
Is this not written in the Book of Jashar? The sun
stayed at mid-heaven and did not hurry to set for a whole day. 14 There has not
been a day like it before or since, when the Lord listened to the voice of a
man; for the Lord fought for Israel.
The general meaning of the passage has always been
clear: the text cites a poem from a different context and understands it as the
statement which gave rise to Yahweh’s miraculous halting of the sun which
allowed the Israelites extended daylight with which to defeat their foes.
When examined in detail, however, the passage
poses a number of problems. Among these difficulties, the best studied is the
original setting of the poetic fragment (and here the original settings
proposed by Dus, Holladay and Miller are particularly noteworthy). For the
present purposes, however, it is important to focus on an additional difficulty
over which virtually every commentator has also justifiably stumbled. The
problem is this: whereas the Deuteronomistic narrative framework introduces
what one clearly expects to be Joshua’s speech to Yahweh, in its place is a poetic
fragment in which an outcry is made to ‘Sun’ (šemeš).
The apparent omission of the words of Yahweh is
certainly problematic. For one thing, as Boling notes, the point of the whole
story focuses on what Yahweh did in response to his being addressed by Joshua.
For another, the substitution poses a religious problem, put in the following
way by Holladay:
It must be admitted that the phenomena portrayed
in this fragment of poetry, which taken at face value, do not fit readily into
what we have reconstructed . . . of the history of the religion of Israel
(would the leader of the Hosts of Israel prayer to Shemesh or Yārēaḥ?)
(Holladay, ‘Days(s) the Moon Stood Still’, p. 167)
To be sure, there are ways around the problem
apart form assuming that Joshua’s address to ‘sin-in-Gibeon’ was in fact his
speech to ‘Yahweh (-in-Gibeon)’, as I believe, but none of these alternatives
are particularly compelling. For example, in his important work on the divine warrior
in ancient Israel, P.D. Miller accounts for the difficulty by regarding the
poem in its original context to have been the words of Yahweh to Sun and Moon
who were members of his heavenly entourage (Miller, Divine Warrior, pp.
125-27. Miller draws support for this possible understanding by referring to
Judg. 5.20 and Hab. 3.11). However, although this is a very plausible original
setting for the poetic fragment, it is nonetheless highly unlikely that the
poetic fragment can be taken within its present setting still to denote
the words of Yahweh to the sun, as Miller maintains (Miller, Divine Warrior,
pp. 125-27). The reasons for this are several. First, in v. 12 of the MT the
line introducing the poetic fragment clearly states, ‘āz yedabbēr
yehôšua’ layhwh, ‘then Joshua spoke to Yahweh’ (the LXX reads ‘elōhîm,
‘God’, here and in the first instance in v. 14. According to my interpretation ‘God’
is secondary and arose as a theological reaction in response to the MT’s
identification between yhwh, ‘Yahweh’, and the sun in vv. 12 and 14).
Secondly, in v. 14 the significance of the event according to the narrator is
that ‘there has not been a day like that neither before nor since when Yahweh
listened to the voice of a man’. Thirdly, the question must be asked: Why,
would the narrator frame the story around the hearkened-to words of a man to Yahweh,
but include instead contrary to his own expressed purpose, the words of Yahweh
to sun and moon?
As noted earlier, my own opinion is that the Deuteronomistic
framing of the poetic fragment must be take not clearly imply a one-to-one
correspondence between Yahweh and šemeš begib’ōn, ‘Shemesh-in-Gibeon’.
A number of considerations support this interpretation. First and most
importantly, as Holladay has implied in part already, this is how the passage
appears to read when taken at face value. This is evident in v. 12 in which
Josiah who addressed only ‘Sun’ and ‘Moon’ is said to have spoken nonetheless
to Yahweh[1] and also in vv. 13b-14. In the latter case of vv. 13b-14, equation
between Yahweh and the sun is apparent because its assumption is the only means
of resolving two difficulties otherwise posed by these verses. First, only on
the assumption that Yahweh-in-Gibeon is the sun can one take seriously the
claim that it was unusual for ‘Yahweh’ to listen to the voice of a man (which
Yahweh regularly does with Joshua and others in DH). Secondly, only on the assumption
that Yahweh was the sun at Gibeon can one account for the way in which Yahweh’s
listening to the voice of a man is implied by its placement in v. 14b (that is,
after the halt of the sun) as a phenomenon equal to or even greater than the
sun’s miraculous arrest in mid-heaven. In other words, only by equating the sun’s
halting with Yahweh’s hearing the voice of a man can the latter be interpreted
as a miracle on a par with the stoppage of the sun in mid-heaven.
If the present interpretation is correct, two
things about Josh. 10.12-14 seems clear. First, there is new reason to uphold the
claim of the narrator that Yahweh indeed listened to the voice of a man in a
way in which he had never done before: ‘Thus did Yahweh fight for the armies of
Israel’. And secondly, there is no basis upon which to complain of the narrator
(or the history of the transmission of the text) that the all-important words
of Joshua to Yahweh have been omitted and in its place an obscure poetic
fragment inserted that is largely irrelevant to the present context. More
importantly, Josh. 10.12-14 provides important new evidence for the notion of a
sun cult at Gibeon that was evidently Yahwistic in character. (J. Glen Taylor, Yahweh
and the Sun: Biblical and Archaeological Evidence for Sun Worship in Ancient
Israel [Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 111;
Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993], 114-18)
[1] It might be argued that the reference to ‘Moon’
as well as ‘Sun’ is problematic for my thesis that Yahweh is identified with
the latter here. The following may be noted in response. First, I do not deny
that the poetic fragment with reference also to moon might originally have come
from a different setting, as the text itself claims by referring to the Book of
Jashar. Secondly, regardless of its origin, the fragment was chosen for its
reference to both ‘sun’ and ‘Gibeon’ and not necessarily for its (perhaps incidental)
reference to the moon. Thirdly, ‘moon’ is in poetic parallelism with ‘sun’ and
thus probably functions as a simple bi-form or close equivalent of sun. Fourthly,
and perhaps most significantly, that no particular emphasis should be placed
upon moon is supported by the context of vv. 13-14 in which significance is assigned
exclusively to the activity of the sun in response to Joshua’s having addressed
it (as Yahweh). And finally, even if one assumes significance to the reference
to moon for the story beyond its occurrence in the poetic fragment, this would
still occasion little difficulty since the moon probably functioned as a
nocturnal counterpart to the sun as representative of the deity (here Yahweh),
something for which there is precedent elsewhere in the ancient Near East (as
in the case of Horus of Edfu, for example). (Ibid., 117 n. 1)
