Options to solve the problem of Joshua's "long day" appear in the press periodically. Unfortunately, one of the most frequently offered "solutions" was only an obstacle to serious discussion on this topic.
So if we are looking for a reference to a comet during Joshua's lifetime, at least one is available. However, the vision occurred a few days or even weeks before the stone rain on Mount Bethoron. Is it possible to tie all these threads together and still find an explanation for the "long day"?
In fact, the key to the mystery was found in 1946 by the British archaeologist John Fitian-Adams. On June 30, 1908, when a fireball exploded over Tunguska, he was still a young man. That same evening, he and a friend went on a weekend bike ride through southwest England. Fithian Adams later described an extraordinary phenomenon in his memory:
"The weather was very clear and hot. We did not want to sleep, and we walked in the vicinity of the city for a long time. It is one day that falls out. The amazed scientists have checked the equipment and have started the program again, however the failure has occurred on the same date. Then someone remembered the story of Joshua, in which the sun stopped for one day (or about a day). In a closer examination, NASA experts supposedly discovered that the "missing" time was 23 hours and 20 minutes, which is a little less than a day.
Fithian Adams did not exaggerate what he saw. That night, hundreds of thousands of reports about the incredibly bright night sky appeared in diaries, newspapers and police reports.
It was as if all of Europe was suddenly lit up late in the evening of June 30, 1908. In fact, it was very much like a "long day" Joshua. It is still unclear why this happened. It was suggested that the dust thrown into the upper atmosphere after the explosion of the Tunguska meteorite reflected the sunlight over a vast area of the globe. However, astronomer Duncan Steele, a specialist in such things, honestly admitted that we still do not understand exactly how the explosion of the meteorite could illuminate the sky for such a long time.
It was not until 1945 that Fithian Adams, who by that time had become an experienced archaeologist and worked in Palestine, read a scientific report on what had happened in Siberia that evening, when he was observing an extraordinary glow in the sky. As an eyewitness to the consequences of the explosion over the distant Tunguska, he was able to draw confidently a parallel to the "miraculous" extension of the day described in Joshua's book. He also drew attention to the logical connection between the explosion over Tunguska and the stone rain that struck the slopes of Mount Bethoron.
The brilliant guess of Fitian Adams was overlooked for fifty years. Historians of the Ancient world are famous for their conservatism when it comes to "extraterrestrial" explanations of various natural phenomena, especially disasters. In addition, apart from Kulik's reports on his 1927 expedition, the true nature of the explosion over Tunguska remained unclear until the late 1970s, when an article published in the English scientific-popular journal Nature again awakened the interest of Western readers in this topic. Without the sanction of astronomers - and taking into account the "Velikovsky model" and even more extravagant hypotheses put forward by various authors - it is hardly surprising that historians and researchers of the Bible did not pay attention to the strange event that occurred in Siberia in 1908. The theory of Fitian Adams (at the time when he proposed it) looked more like an unsuccessful attempt to explain one secret with the help of another.
Only now is Fithian Adams' guess for a new life. In combination with the increasing number of evidence of the collision of the Earth with fragments of comets in ancient times, his theory can at once explain all the strange phenomena described in the book of Joshua: the vision of an angel with a sword, the rain of stone and unnaturally long day. Works of Club, Neuper and other astronomers now allow us to explain logically all these phenomena.
It is not necessary to forget also that in Joshua's book it is mentioned about earthquakes strong enough to destroy walls of Jericho and to dam the Jordan river. Meteorites, of course, can cause local earthquakes. The fact that the authors of the Old Testament list a number of phenomena that can be reduced to one physical reason, can not be a simple coincidence. When the Earth passed through the flow of scattered matter in the tail of the comet, individual collisions could cause seismic shocks in a large area; rain from the small meteorites could fall over southern Palestine; the explosion of a larger object like the Tunguska meteorite, wherever it fell (perhaps somewhere in central Asia), could lead to the glow of the sky and cause the effect of an unnaturally long day. The sun and moon did not really stop in the middle of the sky, but it may seem to Joshua and his soldiers that this was the case.