Joshua 10:12-13 narrates the sun and moon standing still for about a full day so Joshua could finish slaughtering the Amorites, while Genesis 8:22 has YHWH promise that as long as the earth remains, day and night shall not cease — implying the regular celestial cycle is unbroken.
Proposed answers
People have answered this in several ways; GEBible presents them as equal peers.
Yes
God made the sun stand still for 24 hours so that Joshua could finish slaughtering the Amorites.
12Then Joshua spoke to Yahweh in the day when Yahweh delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel. He said in the sight of Israel, “Sun, stand still on Gibeon! You, moon, stop in the valley of Aijalon!”13The sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the nation had avenged themselves of their enemies. Isn’t this written in the book of Jashar? The sun stayed in the middle of the sky, and didn’t hurry to go down about a whole day.
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement— a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward reconciliation
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The tension is between a narrated miracle and a covenantal promise, and it largely dissolves once the genre of each text is taken seriously. Joshua 10:12-13: "Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Aijalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed... So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day." Genesis 8:22, the post-Flood divine pledge: "While the earth remaineth... day and night shall not cease." The apparent collision: Joshua halts the day-night cycle for roughly twenty-four hours while Genesis promises it will not cease.
The simplest harmonization is lexical. Genesis 8:22's verb is *lō' yishbotû* — "shall not cease/Sabbath," i.e., shall not be permanently abolished. John Walton, John Sailhamer, and Kenneth Mathews read this as a standing ordinance guaranteeing the durability of the created order, not a moment-by-moment promise that the heavens will never be interrupted. A single anomalous day within an otherwise unbroken system does not negate a long-term covenant. At the level of textual logic this is sound: "shall not cease" and "was paused once" are not strict contradictories. Some apologists (Hugh Ross) press further, recasting Joshua 10 as a localized atmospheric phenomenon, prolonged refraction, or even a prayer for the sun's heat to relent during the hailstorm of v. 11 — but these readings abandon the surface sense to buy modern plausibility and are not required by the text.
The more decisive consideration is genre, and here the text itself supplies the key. Joshua 10:13 states that the episode is "written in the book of Jashar" (*sēfer hayyāshār*), a lost anthology of Israelite verse also cited at 2 Samuel 1:18. Verses 12-13 are poetry — parallelistic, addressed to sun and moon as if commanding them — embedded in prose. Robert Boling, J. Alberto Soggin, and Richard Nelson all argue that the original was a fragment of war poetry, and that the literalizing clause "about a whole day" (*kĕyôm tāmîm*) is the prose narrator's interpretation of a poetic image. Ancient battle poetry routinely magnifies a day; "the sun stood still" is the idiom of a day that felt decisive and unending, comparable to the cosmic imagery of Judges 5:20 ("the stars in their courses fought against Sisera"). On this reading the poem never asserted a halt in celestial mechanics; the prose frame did, secondarily.
Where the harmonization cannot fully rescue the literal reading is cosmology. Joshua 10:12 has Joshua command the sun to stand still *over Gibeon* and the moon *over the valley of Aijalon* — bodies that move across a fixed firmament and can be told to halt at map coordinates. The miracle is constructed inside a pre-Copernican cosmos; "the sun stood still" describes solar motion stopping, not terrestrial rotation. Read literally as a historical event, its physics are incoherent on any post-Galilean understanding, which is exactly why Ross-type defenses must abandon the plain sense. The genre reading avoids this by not requiring the text to be physics at all.
The net result favors partial harmonization. The pause-versus-cease distinction defuses the strict logical collision with Genesis 8:22, and the Book of Jashar citation shows the long-day text is quoted poetry rather than astronomical reportage. The contradiction emerges only when both passages are flattened to literal historical-scientific claims — precisely the move the genre-critical reading rejects.
Where the critical reading lands: largely harmonizable on genre and lexical grounds; the residual problem is cosmological, not covenantal.
Sources for this reading
Robert G. Boling, Joshua (AB 6; Doubleday, 1982) pp. 281-285on the Book of Jashar fragment
Richard D. Nelson, Joshua: A Commentary (OTL; Westminster John Knox, 1997) on Joshua 10:12-13Joshua 10:12-13
J. Alberto Soggin, Joshua: A Commentary (OTL; Westminster, 1972) on Joshua 10:12-13Joshua 10:12-13
John H. Walton, The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest (IVP Academic, 2017) on the long day and ancient cosmology
Kenneth A. Mathews, Genesis 1-11:26 (NAC 1A; Broadman & Holman, 1996) on Genesis 8:22Genesis 8:22
Trent C. Butler, Joshua 1-12 (WBC 7A; Zondervan, 2nd ed. 2014) on Joshua 10:12-13Joshua 10:12-13
Examining the tension
What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.
How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward reconciliation
This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.
The tension is between a narrated miracle and a covenantal promise, and it largely dissolves once the genre of each text is taken seriously. Joshua 10:12-13: "Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Aijalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed... So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day." Genesis 8:22, the post-Flood divine pledge: "While the earth remaineth... day and night shall not cease." The apparent collision: Joshua halts the day-night cycle for roughly twenty-four hours while Genesis promises it will not cease.
The simplest harmonization is lexical. Genesis 8:22's verb is *lō' yishbotû* — "shall not cease/Sabbath," i.e., shall not be permanently abolished. John Walton, John Sailhamer, and Kenneth Mathews read this as a standing ordinance guaranteeing the durability of the created order, not a moment-by-moment promise that the heavens will never be interrupted. A single anomalous day within an otherwise unbroken system does not negate a long-term covenant. At the level of textual logic this is sound: "shall not cease" and "was paused once" are not strict contradictories. Some apologists (Hugh Ross) press further, recasting Joshua 10 as a localized atmospheric phenomenon, prolonged refraction, or even a prayer for the sun's heat to relent during the hailstorm of v. 11 — but these readings abandon the surface sense to buy modern plausibility and are not required by the text.
The more decisive consideration is genre, and here the text itself supplies the key. Joshua 10:13 states that the episode is "written in the book of Jashar" (*sēfer hayyāshār*), a lost anthology of Israelite verse also cited at 2 Samuel 1:18. Verses 12-13 are poetry — parallelistic, addressed to sun and moon as if commanding them — embedded in prose. Robert Boling, J. Alberto Soggin, and Richard Nelson all argue that the original was a fragment of war poetry, and that the literalizing clause "about a whole day" (*kĕyôm tāmîm*) is the prose narrator's interpretation of a poetic image. Ancient battle poetry routinely magnifies a day; "the sun stood still" is the idiom of a day that felt decisive and unending, comparable to the cosmic imagery of Judges 5:20 ("the stars in their courses fought against Sisera"). On this reading the poem never asserted a halt in celestial mechanics; the prose frame did, secondarily.
Where the harmonization cannot fully rescue the literal reading is cosmology. Joshua 10:12 has Joshua command the sun to stand still *over Gibeon* and the moon *over the valley of Aijalon* — bodies that move across a fixed firmament and can be told to halt at map coordinates. The miracle is constructed inside a pre-Copernican cosmos; "the sun stood still" describes solar motion stopping, not terrestrial rotation. Read literally as a historical event, its physics are incoherent on any post-Galilean understanding, which is exactly why Ross-type defenses must abandon the plain sense. The genre reading avoids this by not requiring the text to be physics at all.
The net result favors partial harmonization. The pause-versus-cease distinction defuses the strict logical collision with Genesis 8:22, and the Book of Jashar citation shows the long-day text is quoted poetry rather than astronomical reportage. The contradiction emerges only when both passages are flattened to literal historical-scientific claims — precisely the move the genre-critical reading rejects.
Where the critical reading lands: largely harmonizable on genre and lexical grounds; the residual problem is cosmological, not covenantal.
Sources for this reading