Joshua's long day

 The Book of Joshua is mostly about the conquest of the Canaanites. It takes place after Moses has died, and describes the military campaign of the Israelites.

They made a treaty with the Gibeonites (supposedly tricked into thinking Gibeon was a distant city), and the other Canaanites joined forces and attacked Gibeon. The Gibeonites asked for help.

Joshua 10:9 After an all-night march from Gilgal, Joshua took them by surprise. 10 The Lord threw them into confusion before Israel, so Joshua and the Israelites defeated them completely at Gibeon. Israel pursued them along the road going up to Beth Horon and cut them down all the way to Azekah and Makkedah. 11 As they fled before Israel on the road down from Beth Horon to Azekah, the Lord hurled large hailstones down on them, and more of them died from the hail than were killed by the swords of the Israelites.

So the enemy was already defeated, the Israelites just needed more time to slaughter the defeated armies.

12 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.”

13 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. 14 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 asked that God make the day longer so he could kill more men, and God obliged!

Of course, the people of the day believed the world is flat, and the sun is just a small ball of fire traversing the inside of a dome. Making said ball of fire stop for 24 hours would be quite a reasonable, if impressive, miracle for a god to perform.

But of course the world is not flat.

And so Christians who insist the story is true are obliged to claim that planet earth stopped rotating.

Such an event required the direct intervention of the Creator Himself. He who had started the earth rotating in the first place, when He separated day and night (Genesis 1:3–5), now slowed it down again until it stopped, and the daylight continued until Joshua could rout the Amorites.

https://www.icr.org/article/joshuas-long-day

The traditional view, however, is that the length of that ancient day actually was prolonged by a retardation of the earth’s rotation upon its axis. Professor Leon J. Wood has argued that only this view does justice to the language of the sacred text. He suggests that expressions like “stood still,” “stayed,” and “hastened not to go down” (13) “definitely indicates a change in pattern movement” (A Survey of Israel’s History, Zondervan, 1986, p. 148). The fact that there was “no day like that before it, or after it” (v. 14) does seem to suggest the uniqueness of that occasion, whereas there were other supernatural instances in the Scriptures of the local control of light (see Ex. 10:21-23; 2 Kgs. 20:10,11; cf. 2 Chron. 32:24-31).

At any rate, conservative scholars are in agreement that this circumstance involved a genuine miracle, and that the account is not a mere poetic or mythological description of an ancient victory.

https://christiancourier.com/articles/how-do-you-explain-joshuas-long-day

Thank about that. At the equator, everything is moving at about 1000 mph. The people, the sea, the rocks, the mountains. And it all just stopped, just like that, for a day. And it did so seemingly without anyone noticing. Think about when you are in a car and you brake from 30 mph to zero. Now imagine braking from 1000 mpg to zero and think what that would feel like.

All the inertia and all the energy just magically evaporated.

And then God started it all up again, magically, and instantly, pumping all that inertia and energy back into the planet.

All so Joshua could continue to slaughter an already defeated enemy.

And yet... Not long after Joshua had died, God was defeated by some other Canaanites, because they had iron chariots.

Judges 10:19 The Lord was with the men of Judah. They took possession of the hill country, but they were unable to drive the people from the plains, because they had chariots fitted with iron. 

Hmm... Some does not add up here.