BREAKFAST BIBLE STUDY

And Yet It Moves

JOSHUA 10: 12-14 (NIV)

10/12/25

“Christian nationalism is about power, nothing more.” – Christian Pecker

I should have guessed what Bible passage we would read this week. All week, Christian, Grace, and I have been working to harvest. We have good lights on the combines that let us work early in the morning and well into the night, but the best time to harvest is during the day. At this time of year, we almost still have eleven hours of daylight, but every day, daytime gets a little shorter. As a joke, Christian reached out to the sun to try to freeze it in the sky like Joshua from the Bible, but the sun kept moving, and an unseasonably warm day became crisp enough for jackets at night.

“You wanted a fun passage this week,” Christian said the next morning.

“Is it short?” I asked. “We still have to get to the north fields.”

Christian showed me the passage. I knew the story well. In this one, Joshua was fighting the Amorites of the hills. God helped by throwing down hail and killing people, but Joshua asks for a miracle almost as big as the parting of the Red Sea:

“On the day the Lord gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the Lord in the presence of Israel:

“‘Sun, stand still over Gibeon,
    and you, moon, over the Valley of Aijalon.”
So the sun stood still,
    and the moon stopped,
    till the nation avenged itself on its enemies,

as it is written in the Book of Jashar.

“The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day. There has never been a day like it before or since, a day when the Lord listened to a human being. Surely the Lord was fighting for Israel!” (Joshua 10: 12-14)

“This one is neat,” I said. “Why isn’t it good for kids to hear in public schools?”

“Other than Joshua stopping the sun and moon to prolong a slaughter?” Grace said.

“Old Testament miracles tend to raise body counts,” Christian said.

“They didn’t have night vision like Christian did when he was a Navy SEAL,” I said. 

“We didn’t use night vision to slaughter people,” Christian said.

“It’s still a neat miracle,” I said. “But wait, what’s the Book of Jashar?”

“A lost book,” Christian said. “Remember that the Bible lifts much of its work from earlier tradition. The Book of Jashar likely contained the poetic iteration of an earlier folktale about Joshua.”

“I don’t know what iterations are,” I said, “but if they’re poetry, I don’t like that.”

“Illiterate people remembered stories through song,” Grace said. “Songs are easy to memorize. The Book of Jashar might have contained songs passed down from many generations.”

“They made the songs up when Joshua was fighting for Israel?” I asked.

“Joshua might not have existed,” Christian said. “He might have been a legendary figure.”

“But Israel got to the Promised Land,” I said.

“Most of them were probably always there,” Christian said. “No evidence exists of a mass Exodus from Egypt. Egypt controlled the Levant during much of the Bronze Age.”

“But the Bible says it happened,” I said.

“But right there in the text,” Christian said, “is cited an earlier source. Oral tradition often had fantastical elements.”

“You don’t think Joshua stopped the sun and moon?” I asked.

“The Sun is millions of times bigger than the Earth,” Christian said. “Ancient writers didn’t know that. They thought it was just a fiery ball in the sky, going east to west.”

“The Earth moves around the Sun,” Grace said, “not the other way around.”

“The Moon goes around the Earth,” I said.

“Indeed,” Christian said. “If it suddenly came to a stop, the tidal forces would not be good for this planet. If the Earth came to a sudden stop, that wouldn’t be good either.”

“Oh, so it’s not good science?” I asked.

“It’s horrible science,” Grace said.

“That’s what miracles are,” I said.

“So…you think this happened?” Grace asked.

“Not everything in the Bible is fake,” I said.

“Okay,” Christian said. “The sun and moon are frozen in the sky for a whole day, yes?”

“Yep.”

“That would affect everybody on the planet, correct?”

“Yep,” I said. “I know how the orbits work and stuff.”

“Joshua’s miracle was a big deal?”

“It’s right there in the text,” I said. “You always say to look at the text.”

“Okay, thought experiment—writing exists at this point, correct?” Christian said.

“You don’t believe that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible,” I said, “but if he did, writing definitely existed during Joshua because Moses came before Joshua. Joshua was like his replacement or something.”

“Writing existed in many other parts of the world at this point, yes?” Christian asked.

“Um,” I said. “They had those steles, right?”

“Did they have writing in Egypt?” Grace asked.

“All sorts, I bet,” I said. “In Egypt, they made those pictures. In Babylon, people did their chicken scratches in clay. We still have those, don’t we?”

“Cuneiform?” Grace asked. “Those date back to, what, 3400 BCE?”  

“That!” I said. “They had a bunch of people writing. Remember how they had that stele that had the story from both points of view…and Chemosh was a fake god?”

“That came a bit later, but yes,” Christian said. “Those were Semitic writing forms.”

“So people were doing all sorts of writing,” I said. “Moses probably knew how to write. I bet if he had priests, they could have helped him write the first five books of the Bible.”

“So…sure, and a generation later, a great astronomical event unfolds that should have affected the whole world,” Christian said, “but nobody else, no astronomers in Mesopotamia, nobody in India, nobody in Egypt or China, none of them, bothers writing about it? Why is that?”

“Maybe…they didn’t notice?” I asked.

“C’mon, Cole,” Christian said.

“Or it just happened in that valley,” I said, “like an optical illusion or something.”

“Or it’s just another legend,” Grace said.

“A mythologized history,” Christian says. “Is that so hard to believe?”

In state legislatures across the country, Christian fundamentalists are passing laws meant to force the teaching of the Christian Bible in public schools. From the posting of textually inaccurate iterations of the Ten Commandments on the walls of classrooms to the incorporation of the “Trump Bible” across multiple pedagogical disciplines, these laws and mandates are sweeping the reddest parts of this nation.

The height of hypocrisy is banning books in the name of “protecting children” while mandating one particular book rife with numerous acts of sexual violence and scenes of graphic violence and genocide.

Book bans are dangerous. The Bible is worth reading and exists online and in public school libraries across the country, but proponents of mandating its formal teaching in public schools need to know what it actually says.

Some themes in my books below might not be appropriate for children.