The Bible Mentions a Lost Book We No Longer Have

The strange reference to the Book of Jashar reveals something fascinating about how Scripture was written

Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still upon Gibeon by John Martin (1816). The spectacular miracle in Joshua 10 contains another strange detail: a reference to a book that has since disappeared. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Sometimes I get so caught up in a dramatic bible story that I miss some of the smaller details. Joshua 10 is one of those stories.

Israel is fighting a coalition of Amorite kings. The battle is fierce, the enemy is fleeing, and the story says that God throws huge hailstones from the sky. Then Joshua does something even more extraordinary. He speaks to the sun and moon:

“Sun, stand still over Gibeon,
and you, moon, over the Valley of Aijalon.”

The text says that the sun stopped and the moon stood still until Israel had taken vengeance on its enemies. It is one of the most famous miracles in the Old Testament, and one of the most debated. Did the writer mean that the Earth literally stopped rotating? Is this ancient poetry describing an unusually long day? Is something else going on?

Those are interesting questions, but they are not the detail that caught my attention. Because in the middle of this extraordinary story, the writer suddenly says something very odd: