One day, as I was in the process of collecting Chácobo mythology, my informant Caco Pistia  related to me and “event” that had  been handed down for generations.  Was he telling me a fable, or, a bit of actual history?  For him it was history. And if I were not a Bible translator, I would have chalked it up as being a fable.

​

He recounted a time  when the sun failed to come up, an event which not only frighten all the Chácobo, but all the birds and animals living in the Amazonian Rainforest as well. As the night grew longer and longer and the sun failed to come up, their villages slowly began to fill up with every kind of animal, with primates, wild boar, tapir, and jaguars.  

 

Even the animals of the rainforest instinctively knew something unusual had happen. Of course, such an event occurring in history would today be classified by all naturalists as being, absurd, contrary to the laws of nature, as a figment of the imagination.  

 

Jewish scholar Immanuel Velinkovsky agreed. In his controversial book, Worlds In Collision, a book of which I had a copy, he wrote: “Because the

scientific mind cannot believe that man can make the sun and moon to

stand still, it disbelieves also the alleged event.”  The “scientific mind”

must cancel the long day account as being an event in history.

 

Aware that Joshua spoke of an event in history when “the sun stood still and the moon stopped” (Joshua 10:12-14),  Velikovsky, logically declares: If effect A, then effect B. “Allowing for the difference in longitude, it must have been early morning or night in the Western Hemisphere.”

In the Mexican Annals of Cuathtitlab aka Codex Chimalpopoca  —the empire of Culhuacan and Mexico, written in Nahua-Indian in the sixteen century —it is related that during a cosmic catastrophe, that there occurred in the remote past, the night did not end for a long time. 

 

Assuming if effect A, then effect B  I continued the search once a search was available to me on the worldwide web.  Now east of the Chácobo living in the mountains of Peru lived the Incas. I discovered they also had a long night story.  The story was recorded by Spanish priest-historian Fernando de Montisinos who lived in Cusco between the years 1630-1641. His goal was to reconstruct a history of the Incas going back to the times of Inca Ruler Pachacuti II (BC 1418-1471). According to Montesinos, it was during the third year of his reign that the sun was hidden for nearly 20 hours.

​

Then by examining the myths recorded by anthropologists of tribes living in the same latitude, I discovered the following tribes, which like the Inca, also had long night stories.  They were the Quiché of Guatemala, the Aztec of Mexico, the Omaha of the Great Plains, the Objibwa living in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Canada,  the Wyandot of living around lake Ontario, the Dogrib of the Northwest Territories,  the Kwakiutl and Tlingit of Northwest Canada  and the Tsimshian of Alaska. According to anthropologist Franz Boas, these three tribes believed “daylight was kept in box by a chief and liberated by a raven” aka Trickster.  

 

The Great Trickster, in this case, was defending mankind’s right to have sunlight.  Trickster no doubt was contending with Yahweh the "chief" saying, "It is unjust for half the world's population to be deprived of sunlight."

 

Now the “long day” event that occurred around 1450 BC and which was experienced by the Chácobo as the “long night” clearly places the Chácobo in the Amazon Rainforest when it happened.  That was approximately 3,500 years ago. ​Amazing!

 

Convictions

1. The existence of long night stories in the Western Hemisphere provide proof that Joshua's "Long Day" recorded in Joshua 10: 12-14 actually took place. It was not an eclipse as some claim.  It was an event in history.                                                     

 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.”

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. 

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!. 

​

   2.  I was able to tell Caco that the event handed down to him by his ancestors was not a fable.

   3. “Those who balk at this account are almost invariably those who have already rejected 6-day creation through compromise with evolution’s fictitious long ages, and have thus rejected the authority of the Bible"  --Russel Grigg

  https://creation.com/joshuas-long-day

 

​Gil Prost (March 2021)