Why the Sun Stood Still
A Preview by Fulton Oursler of Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky�s Sensational New Book, 1950:
�WORLDS IN COLLISION, Published in 1950�

Velikovsky Believed that "Joshua's Long Day" actually occurred due to the evidence provided by the number of similar stories documenting the occurrence from around the world and from many cultures. He simply believes that there was a natural explanation for what the Bible claims was miraculous...(Having A Form of Godliness, But Denying It's Power, 2 Tim 3)...

We don't believe that there is a natural explanation for these events but recognize that they would have been witnessed in some form worldwide....s8int.com

Of �Worlds In Collision�* Clifton Fadiman has said: �It may well turn out to be as epochal as The Origin of the Species of Darwin or the Principia of Newton.� In the light of its new deductions and speculations.

Dr. Gordon A. Atwater, chairman and curator of the Hayden planetarium of the American Museum of Natural History, suggests that �the underpinning of modern science can now be re-examined�; and John J. O�Neill, science editor of the New York Herald Tribune, declares: �This magnificent piece of scholarly research raises world history to a level of superlative interest.�

The author of this exciting new volume, Russian-born Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, studied natural sciences at Edinburgh University, history, law and medicine (M.D.) in Moscow, biology in Berlin, the working brain in Zurich, psychoanalysis in Vienna. He came to this country in 1939.

Worlds In Collision has been written after ten years of extensive research in which the author consulted with scholars and specialists all over the world. About 25 years ago, a small-town schoolmaster in Tennessee told his boys about Darwin�s theory of evolution. For this violation of a state law which forbade instruction contrary to the Bible, the teacher was arrested, and the world sat back to watch one of history�s most extraordinary trials.

Called to the witness box as defender of the faith was a three-times candidate for the Presidency, William Jennings Bryan. The defender of John T Scopes, the schoolteacher, was Clarence Darrow, eminent agnostic. Furiously Darrow attacked the wonder tales of the Bible, cross-examined Bryan as a believer in myths and fairy tales.

�Mr. Bryan, do you believe that Joshua made the sun stand still?�

�Mr. Darrow, I do!��Wouldn�t have been the earth itself that stood still? An if that is what you believe, don�t you believe that if the earth ever stopped turning it would be converted into a molten mass of matter?� The indignant Darrow seemed to be speaking with exact knowledge. But science is never so dogmatic.

A quarter of a century after the Scopes trial, a scientist is publishing a book declaring that within historical times the earth did pause in its daily rotation, and that for more than a day the sun remained visible over Joshua and his troops.

While this is only incidental to the author�s purpose, the book tends to confirm the Bible in other miraculous accounts; familiar tales of wonder emerge not as myths but as accurate reporting of actual events.

The savant who raises these possibilities, Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky, calls his book Worlds In Collision. As Darwin did, he sets up certain original hypotheses, and buttresses them with impressive scholarship. Like a detective among the sciences, (archaeology, paleontology, geology, astronomy, psychology, anthropology, physics) he has put together by deductive reasoning a chain of circumstantial evidence that may deeply affect the world of thinking men.

The links of his reasoning are forged out of the history and literature of ancient and modern tribes and nations from all over the earth. Text and footnotes sparkle with confirming data from the Bible and the Talmud, from Egyptian papyri, Babylonian astronomical tablets, Mayan and Aztec calendars, from the folklore of Arabia, India, North America, Tibet, China, Peru.

The tale of the sun standing still illustrates one of his principal methods for getting at the facts. Clearly if the sun �hasted not to go down about a whole day� the phenomenon could not have been merely a local spectacle.

The whole area of the earth had to be affected: if the sun hung in the morning sky over Gibeon, then elsewhere in the world twilight or darkness was prolonged for the same period.

Dr. Velikovsky produces records from all over the earth which agree as to the time and as to the altered portions of daylight and dark in each area.

Similarly concerted testimony repeats itself again and again in other wonder stories. For every such incident which he analyzes, Dr. Velikovsky quotes dozens, scores, even hundreds of confirmations.

For the Bible�s most incredible story - the standing still of the moon and sun while Joshua routed the foe - there is worldwide evidence. says Dr. Velikovsky at the start of a long series of citations:

�Allowing for the difference in longitude, it must have been early morning or night in the Western Hemisphere. We go to the books with the historical traditions of the aborigines of Central America. In the Mexican Annuls of Cuauhtitlan -- the history of the empire of Clohuacan and Mexico, written in Nahua-Indian (Nahuatl) -- it is related that during a cosmic catastrophe that occurred in the remote past the night did not end for a long time.

We could follow a path around the earth and inquire into the various traditions concerning a prolonged night and prolonged day, with sun and moon absent or tarrying at different points along the zodiac.�

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