The Sun Went Backwards

And Hezekiah said unto Isaiah, What shall be the sign that the LORD will heal me, and that I shall go up into the house of the LORD the third day? And Isaiah said, This sign shalt thou have of the LORD, that the LORD will do the thing that he hath spoken: shall the shadow go forward ten degrees, or go back ten degrees? And Hezekiah answered, It is a light thing for the shadow to go down ten degrees: nay, but let the shadow return backward ten degrees. And Isaiah the prophet cried unto the LORD: and he brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down in the dial of Ahaz.

(2 Kings 20:8-10) KJV

The sun going backwards is such a significant event that it’s recorded twice in scripture in 2 Kings 20 and Isaiah 38:8. It’s also referred to in 2 Chronicles 32:31 as “the wonder that was done in the land“.

Here are some options for how you can understand this event, like as before like when we considered the sun and moon standing still in the sky at the command of Joshua.

1. Religion:
   • ignorance is bliss,
   • (most Christians don’t know that this is in the Bible so it’s not an issue).
2. Popular science/Modern theology (SciPop):
   • deny that the event happened,
   • (it’s a metaphor for something spiritual).
3. Velikovsky:
   • concoct some scheme in which the motion of the planet Venus causes the Earth to… blah, blah, blah.
4. Matty’s Paradigm:
   • the sun went backwards, just like the Bible says, it doesn’t cause any physical perturbation of the Earth, and none was experienced by the people of the time.

The people of the time observed the sun going backwards in it’s orbit. That means it’s empirical. There’s no faith involved when you can see something. You don’t have to hope for something if you just watched it happen. There are no mental gymnastics, it just is. People from Babylon showed up on Hezekiah’s front door because of what happened.

In contrast, it took about 1,000 years until Newton had to invent algebra in order to make this impossible in the heliocentric paradigm, even though it happened and people saw it. Popular science (SciPop) has been retrofitting evidence to fit its narrative for a long time.

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