After reading chapter 10:
*Now that Ai has been destroyed and Gibeon has a peace treaty with the Israelites, other kings in the area were worried. Gibeon was an important acquisition. Five Kings joined forces and decided to attack the Gibeonites. The Gibeonites sent word to Joshua and begged for help. Joshua marched his whole army to the area, with the blessing of Yahweh. He took the armies of the five kings by surprise and they were defeated. As they were running away from the pursuing Israelites, Yahweh threw hailstones at them, so that more were killed by hail than by the sword. The five kingdoms were Jerusalem, Hebron, Lachish, Jarmuth, and Eglon.
*Next is a very interesting passage. On the day of this battle Joshua commanded the sun and the moon to stand still and they did! The sun supposedly stopped in the middle of the sky, which would make it about noon, and delayed going down a full day, presumably 24 hours. This had never happened before and hasn't since. That must mean Yahweh was fighting for Israel, unless it's a fairy tale. Verse 13 says this passage is written in the "Book of Jashar," an apparently lost work of the ancient Israelites.
*We all know that the sun doesn't travel around the earth in the sky. The earth rotates on its axis while it travels around the sun, only giving an appearance of the sun moving. If the earth stopped spinning, to make the sun appear to stand still, we would be in big trouble. Nothing would survive the cataclysmic results. The authors of my study bible seem to realize this story of the sun standing still is impossible, so they have proposed several possible natural explanations for the wording, except the posibility that it never happened.
*After this Joshua and his army returned to camp.
Edited
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