The Lost Day : snopes.com
The Lost Day
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Claim:   NASA scientists discovered a "missing" day in time that corresponds to Biblical accounts of the sun's standing still in the sky.
FALSE
Example:   [Collected via e-mail, 1999]
For all the scientists out there and for all the students who have a hard time convincing these people regarding the truth of the
Bible . . .
here's something that shows God's awesome creation and shows that He is still in control.
Did you know that the space program is busy proving that what has been called "myth" in the Bible is true?
Mr. Harold
Hill, President of the Curtis Engine Company in Baltimore Maryland and a consultant in the space program,  relates the following development.
"I think one of the most amazing things that God has for us today happened recently to our astronauts and    space  scientists at GreenBelt, Maryland. They were checking the position of the sun, moon, and planets out in space where they would be
100 years
in Second Kings make the missing day in the universe!" Isn't it amazing?
 
Origins:   Folks have been awestruck by the "missing day" legend since at least 1936, when the story emerged into popular culture via a book by Harry Rimmer, titled The Harmony of Science and Scripture. In it, Rimmer cited an 1890 book as his proof of the calculations behind the tale. Scholars dismissed Rimmer's claims as baseless, but despite the authoritative debunkings of the time and in the years since, the legend thrives. Indeed, the Internet has given it new legs; spreading it to new audiences is as easy as clicking the 'forward' button.
Although the notion of a "lost day" in time has been circulating for well over a century, the version cited here, which has been bedevilling NASA since the 1960s, achieved pre-eminence through the tireless efforts of
Mr. Harold
Hill, who was indeed both a real person and the President of the
Curtis Engine Company . However, he had no real connection to NASA, he was not a "consultant in the space program,"  and he did not witness the events described.
Mr. Hill
merely heard a "lost day" legend that had been circulating for many years, embellished it with some details about NASA scientists, and delighted in repeating it when speaking before school groups.  His version of the legend made its way into various church bulletins and was eventually picked up and spread by the mainstream media as well, and he devoted a whole chapter to it in his 1974 book, How to Live Like a King's Kid. (This book lent additional credibility to his tenuous NASA connections — and thus to the legend itself — when he stated that he "was involved [in the space program] from the start, through contractual arrangements with my company." His "involvement" was merely that the Curtis Engine Company had a contract with NASA to service electrical generators.)  Even Hill's admission that he hadn't actually witnessed the events he described clearly wasn't intended to dissuade anyone from believing in the literal truthfulness of his story: "[M]y inability to furnish documentation of the 'Missing day' incident in no way detracts from its authenticity."
The Public Affairs Office at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center  in Greenbelt, Maryland, responded to the prevalence of Hill's fictitious story by issuing a press release that noted (among other things):
[This center] has no knowledge of the use of its computers supposed by
Mr. Harold
Hill and attributed to our scientists. Goddard does not apply its computers to the task of projecting thousands of years into the future or past, as this would be irrelevant to the operational lifetime of satellites, which rarely exceeds a dozen years.
[Harold Hill] worked briefly at Goddard early in the 1960s as a plant engineer, a position which would not place him in direct contact with our computer facilities or teams engaged in orbital computations.
Historically, the notion of a "lost day" in time comes from a combination of two Old Testament passages.  The first is from the Book of Joshua and describes Joshua's defense of Gibeon from the five kings of the Amorites.  In order to enable Joshua to finish off his enemies before they had a chance to flee under cover of darkness, God provided additional daylight by causing the sun to stand still in the sky for nearly a day:
10:12   Then spake Joshua to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel, Sun, stand thou still upon Gibeon; and thou, Moon, in the valley of Ajalon.
10:13   And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves upon their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day
The second passage, from
2 Kings,
describes Hezekiah's request that God move the sun ten degrees backwards as confirmation of his promise that Hezekiah would be delivered into Heaven:
20:8   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?
20:9   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?
20:10   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.
20:11   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.
One of the first issues we have to consider is that the Bible is thousands of years old, and the accounts it contains have come to us through many oral tellings,
re-copyings,
printings, and translations.  We have to be very careful about presenting a specific interpretation of a single English word or phrase from one particular version of the Bible as being "what the Bible actually says." Therefore, the first difficulty this legend presents is that nowhere in the Bible (in the Book of Joshua or elsewhere) is it stated that God made the sun stand still for exactly
23 hours
and
2 minutes;
we have no way of telling.  (The primary means of reckoning the passage of time in Joshua's era was by observing the apparent movement of celestial bodies through the sky relative to the observer.  It's not likely any contemporary of Joshua's could have recorded the length of time the sun stood still with this degree of precision under the best of circumstances, and certainly not when the sun and moon were both fixed in the sky, and the sun's light prevented the sighting of any other stars.)  As it turns out, the
"23 hours
and
20 minutes"
figure was almost certainly an amount of time chosen by the legend's originator for extra-scriptual reasons we'll explain later.
The next difficulty is the interpretation presented in this legend of the statement in
2 Kings 20
about God's moving "the shadow" backwards "ten degrees" as meaning that the sun's shadow was moved backwards through ten angular degrees of measurement on a dial (presumably a sundial).  Since a dial is a circle, and a circle contains
360 degrees,
moving the sun's shadow backwards ten degrees would correspond to resetting time by one thirty-sixth of day.  One thirty-sixth of a twenty-four hour day is two-thirds of an hour, or forty minutes.  Voilà!  The problem is,
2 Kings 20
doesn't quite say this — the word "degree" is an artifact of certain English translations.  How this passage is presented in other translations is more general: that the sun's shadow moved backwards ten steps (or ten units or ten intervals or ten markings) on the "dial of Ahaz."  Since we have no idea exactly what the "dial of Ahaz" was, nor how much time was represented by one of its units, we cannot make any real estimate as to how far the sun actually moved.  (If the dial of Ahaz had forty evenly-spaced markings on it, for example, ten of those units would represent one-fourth of a day, or six hours.)
We can only speculate, but it seems likely that once the originator of this legend decided upon an interpretation of
2 Kings 20
of time, he also decided that the "about a whole day" described in
Joshua 10
was a period of exactly
23 hours
and
20 minutes
so that the two amounts combined would equal exactly one day (even though the length day is actually about
23 hours
and
56 minutes).
Why?  Perhaps because God is associated with balance and perfection, and any natural process that appears ordered is often attributed to divine handiwork.  If scientists discovered a "missing"
23 hours
and
18 minutes,
that could be taken as some random fluke of the cosmos, but if the "missing" period were exactly one day, that would be evidence of a directed celestial intervention by a higher power.
Regardless of the amount of time involved, the discovery of a "missing" period of time remains implausible.  If the sun had indeed stood still for a day a few millennia ago, we would have no way of determining that fact through astronomic observations today.  We have no frame of reference, no cosmic calendar or master clock to check against to see if we're overdrawn at the Bank of Time. The concept described here would be like giving someone a non-functioning clock and asking him to determine how much time had elapsed since the clock had stopped running.  One could note the positions of the hands on the dial and make a reasonable guess about what the time of day was when the clock stopped running, but without knowing whether that time was A.M. or P.M., and without knowing the calendar date on which stoppage occurred, one could not possibly make any reasonable estimate about how long ago the clock stopped.
Even the putative reasons offered for the scientists' performing the calculations described in this legend make little sense.  We need not know about any "missing time" in the past in order to be able to launch spacecraft today.  Even if the sun really did once stand still for a day, that would have absolutely no effect on where the sun, the moon, or the other planets are going to be one hundred or one thousand years from now.  If we put a new battery in our stopped clock, all we have to do to get it back on track is to set it to the correct time; we don't need to determine how much time the clock "lost" while it wasn't running to be assured that it will display the correct time in the future.
The appeal of this legend isn't difficult to see: the tale confirms not only the existence of God, but also the literal truth of the Bible. Moreover, it pits the scientists versus the believers, with the believers emerging victorious and the (presumed godless) scientists left ground  into dust by the very science they'd so long and so loudly upheld. David (in the form of the pure-hearted believer) takes on the Goliath of Science who continally bleats for independently verifiable proof of the Almighty, and for once the faithful are able to deliver up on a silver platter what's been asked for.
To those who've given over their hearts to God and the Holy Word, this is a deeply satisfying legend. Faith is, after all, the firm belief in something which cannot necessarily be proved, a quality that can leave believers (especially those who find themselves in the midst of
non-believers
) feeling unsatisfied. As steadfast as their certainty is, they cannot prove the rightness of the path they tread to those who jeer at their convictions. And this is a heavy burden to shoulder.  A legend such as the "missing day explained" tale speaks straight to the hearts of those who yearn for a bit of vindication in this life. Being right isn't always enough: sometimes what one most longs for is sweet recognition from others.
That recognition, and that satisfaction, is what this legend provides. Intoxicatingly heady stuff, that. No wonder this tale has survived from generation to generation and withstood the ravages of countless debunkings. Nonetheless, its factual details are wrong, the scientific processes it describes are dubious, and its premise of a "missing day" depends upon some very selective and questionable intepretations of scripture.
Authenticity matters little, though: our willingness to accept legends depends far more upon their expression of concepts we want to believe than upon their plausibility.  If the sun once really did stand still for a day, the best evidence we'd have for proving it would be the accounts of people who saw it happen.  That is what the Bible is said to offer.  Some people accept that as sufficient proof, and others don't.
Last updated:   25 June 2014
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