“The sun and moon stood still in their habitation: at the light of thine arrows they went, and at the shining of thy glittering spear.”
- Habakkuk 3:11
For many their religious guidebook of choice has the last word on all things. The Bible includes many fascinating stories. For some, those stories are literal.
When looking for Bible to LOST parallelisms I stumbled upon this verse which says that the sun and moon to stood still. The cause was due to the bright flash of light. We have observed on LOST that a bright flash and a purple sky are followed by some pretty strange time tricks.
But this isn’t the verse I expected because my memory of Sunday school says Joshua was the prophet involved. Sure enough, in Joshua chapter 10 it says the prophet indeed caused the sun to remain shining for 24 hours in order to defeat a surrounding army.
For a moment, consider the Bible infallible. It suggests that a higher power is able to suspend the laws of physics.
Now add a dash of science. How often has mythical stories based on a religion later been shown the scientific truth behind them? Quite a bit. Will one day we discover the scientific explanation behind the sun standing still? Is this the underlying theme of LOST – to explore the spot where religion and science meet?
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Elsewhere in a laboratory in Maryland, scientists were projecting time tables of celestial objects for the benefit of planning satellite orbits. These time tables would help plan an orbit that wouldn’t crash into the moon or they could be timed to be in a desired position in relation to the sun. A computer program handled the heavy lifting until one day, the computer began to beep.
“Beep.”
“Beep.”
“Beep.”
The human’s attention was gained and it was discovered that somehow the calculations failed because it appeared that one day was missing. One member of the science team joked that the Bible said that Joshua made the day stand still for one day and maybe that was their missing day.
His fellow scientists looked at him in doubt. “Show us,” they said.
They read, "The sun stood still and the moon stayed-and hasted not to go down about a whole day!", in Joshua 10:12-13.
They adjusted their programs, but again the program resulted in a rhythmic “beep” alert. They checked further and discovered that the calculations were still off by 40 minutes. They teased their fellow Bible scientists for coming close. He even protested that the verse read “ABOUT a whole day”. Of course, that could mean 4 hours, 40 minutes or 400 seconds – too vague.
Then the scientist remembered another passage. He told them, “Hezekiah, on his deathbed, was visited by the prophet Isaiah who told him that he was not going to die. Hezekiah asked for a sign as proof. Isaiah said "Do you want the sun to go ahead 10 degrees?" Hezekiah said "It is nothing for the sun to go ahead 10 degrees, but let the shadow return backward 10 degrees." Isaiah spoke to the Lord and the Lord brought the shadow ten degrees BACKWARD! Ten degrees is exactly 40 minutes! Twenty-three hours and 20 minutes in Joshua, plus 40 minutes in Second Kings make the missing day in the universe!"’
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Elsewhere, Isaiah was explaining to a woman that he could not help her because the energy from Ayers Rock is not helpful to everyone.
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Elsewhere, Sawyer was giving Mr. Friendly the nickname, “Zeke” – short for Hezekiah.
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Elsewhere, a member of the Dharma Initiative thought it would be a nice touch to hang a painting of the Joshua Tree State Park in the Swan Hatch.
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As promised, you can expect to more postings between now and the premier of Season 6. Keep checking back or use the RSS feed.
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Enjoy,
KC
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