NASA and the missing day

[Mister Agenda]

I have heard about this for many years and in my teens took it as fact, however growing in maturity and reading books for myself found the NASA thing not to be true.

I'm glad you checked it out. I have a college chum who forwarded me the same urban legend, and she's a medical doctor, which doesn't mean she was qualified to evaluate the claim, but does mean she's not dim-witted. Smart people can be taken in, too.

There are historical records from several places in the ancient world that do record a extra long day at the same time that Joshua lived.

When was that? Is there a date range for it? He's said to have been old when he died, so maybe between 1400 BCE and 1300 BCE?

Some of these peoples would have not known each other, some wouldn't have know some of these people existed. Admittedly I've not done a complete study of this, but here is some thing to consider.

There is apologetic value in ancient legends from various parts of the globe, however, including the following: “It is reported by historians that records of the Chinese during the reign of Emperor Yeo, who lived at the same time as Joshua, report ‘a long day.’

Excellent. I couldn't find an 'Emperor Yeo' anywhere but apologetics sites, do you mean the legendary Emperor Yao, who is supposed to have lived 2356 to 2255 BCE? According to Chinese tradition, that Emperor died over 800 years before Joshua is supposed to have been born. The Shang dynasty was reigning 1400-1300 BCE, I couldn't find a Yeo or Yao in that period.

Also, Heroditus, a Greek historian, wrote that an account of ‘a long day’ appears in records of Egyptian priests.

To be credible (though it's second hand to begin with), shouldn't they have noted a day when the sun stood still in the sky for hours? It wasn't just a long day, and the Egyptians could measure time pretty accurately, and would have been precise if something as astronmically odd as the sun failing to move occurred. Which day was it? The Egyptians had calendars five thousand years ago. I'm having a long day, without more details it could be that they were simply being figurative.

Others cite records of Mexicans of the sun standing still for an entire day in a year denoted as ‘Seven Rabits,’ which is the same year in which Joshua defeated the Philistines and conquered Palestine.” (Bible-Science Newsletter, Daily Reading Magazine, Supplement, Vol. VIII, No. 5, May 1978, Caldwell, Idaho.)

The Olmecs were the Mexican civilization of that era, and there are no artifacts dating from that time that indicate they had invented writing or calendars yet. The Olmecs seem to have developed writing independently, but there are no examples before 900 BCE. Anything they recorded from, say, 1350 BCE would be based on oral history and legends.

Additionally, the historical lore of the Aztecs, Peruvians, and Babylonians speak of a “day of twice natural length.”

The Aztecs didn't replace the Olmecs until around the 12th Century CE, so how would they know what happened 25 centuries before that? From the Olmecs who weren't keeping written records yet?

See also Immanuel Velikovsky’s “Worlds in Collision.” If Joshua’s long day (not “missing” day) occurred—and of course I believe that it did—then we would expect its effects to show up in the historical records of other nations, and that is exactly what we find.

Velikovsky? For reals? Is there a race on for least credible source that I wasn't let in on?

https://bible.org/question/has-%E2%80%9C...ntifically

GC

The thing is, none of your sources were actually scientific. Velikovsky was a psychiatrist, not an astronomer or anthropologist or archeologist. The most fundamental criticism of his work from the scientific community was that the celestial mechanics required for his theory to be true are physically impossible, Using comparative mythology to reach astronomical conclusions was an interesting hypothesis that captured the imaginations of a lot of people, but the hypothesis is proven false. The things he is trying to explain are better off as impossible magic than impossible science.