June 9 1284 BCE – 3 Tammuz 2490
Joshua defeated the five major kings of Canaan, kicking off the Israelite conquest of the Promised Land, according to the second-century chronology Seder Olam Rabba (ch. 11). This campaign inspired Joshua’s famous prayer, “Sun, stand still in Gibeon, and moon, in the Valley of Ajalon,” which delayed nightfall until he’d wiped out his enemies.
Scientific research by Cambridge University researchers Sir Colin Humphreys and Graeme Waddington has suggested that the event was actually a solar eclipse.
“Modern English translations, which follow the King James translation of 1611, usually interpret this text to mean that the sun and moon stopped moving,” said Humphreys. “But going back to the original Hebrew text, we determined that an alternative meaning could be that the sun and moon just stopped doing what they normally do: they stopped shining. In this context, the Hebrew words could be referring to a solar eclipse, when the moon passes between the earth and the sun, and the sun appears to stop shining. This interpretation is supported by the fact that the Hebrew word translated ‘stood still’ [dom] has the same root as a Babylonian word used in ancient astronomical texts to describe eclipses.”
Previous searches for total solar eclipses prior to the date of the Merneptah Stone (an Egyptian inscription mentioning a campaign against Israelites in Canaan) found nothing. The two researchers therefore looked for an annular eclipse, in which the sun’s center is covered by the moon, leaving a ring of fire around the dark lunar disk. They found one just over 3,200 years ago, therefore and suggest the date of Joshua’s battle was October 30, 1207 BCE, based on a new computer calculation system and on biblical and ancient Egyptian texts.
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