Joshua Commanding the Sun to Stand Still
Gustave Doré, 1866 · Joshua 10:13
The passage
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.
Joshua 10:13
About this plate
A wide battlefield seen from a low ridge. The whole top third is a bank of cloud broken open, with rays coming down in hard straight lines across the valley. Cavalry and infantry pour away to the right in a long disordered stream. In the foreground the dead and the dying lie among the rocks.
Doré does not show you Joshua doing anything. There is no figure with a raised staff in the centre commanding the heavens. There is an army, a valley, and light behaving strangely, and you are left to work out that the sun has stopped from the fact that everything is still lit.
That restraint is unusual for him and it pays. The plate reads as a landscape with weather in it until you remember what you are looking at, and then the light stops being scenery.
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