"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.
Some have tried to refer this to an eclipse, even attempting to discover which eclipse was meant; but, even as McKeating admitted, "It is pointless to decide that  Amos 8:9 refers to an eclipse and then try to identify the eclipse!"[25]  No eclipse ever recorded could be an example of the sun's "going down"; and, besides that, no eclipse ever involved more than the tiniest fraction of "the earth."  "The language as Amos used it referred to more than just an eclipse of the sun,"[26] and it should be added, "something far different from any such natural phenomenon."  It is also impossible to restrict the meaning of this passage to something that was to come to pass in the near future.  As Mays pointed out: