"It will happen in that day," says the Lord Yahweh, "That I will cause the sun to go down at noon, And I will darken the earth in the clear day.
Still it had a religious impressiveness then, above what it has now, on account of that wide-prevailing idolatry of the sun. It exhibited the object of their false worship, shorn of its light and passive. If Ussher is right as to the magnitude of those eclipses in the latitude of Jerusalem, and as to the correspondence of the days of the solar year, June 24, Nov. 8, May 5, in those years, with the days of the lunar year upon which the respective feasts fell, it would be a remarkable correspondence. Still the years are somewhat arbitrarily chosen, the second only 771 b.c., (on which the house of Jehu came to an end through the murder of the weak and sottish Zechariah,) corresponding with any marked event in the kingdom of Israel. On the other hand, it is the more likely that the words, “I will cause the sun to go down at noon,” are an image of a sudden reverse, in that Micah also uses the words as an image, “the sun shall go down upon the prophets and the day shall be dark upon” (or, “over”) “them” Micah 2:6.