Are biblical accounts of astronomical events accurate?

A friend recently pointed out that Joshua 10:12 and 2 Kings 20:9 say the sun was made to stand still and that ancient Chinese astronomical records made during the time Joshua and 2 Kings were written nowhere mention the sun standing still. Isn't this evidence that the biblical accounts are incorrect?

No. Although we're not sure exactly what took place in those biblical accounts, we can be sure that, whatever the phenomenon was, it appeared to the observers that the sun stood still. The writers were perfectly correct to describe the events this way. What's more, God could have restricted the phenomenon to those in the immediate area, so people elsewhere would have noticed nothing unusual.

Such a localized phenomenon is documented to have occurred as recently as October 1917 in Fatima, Portugal. During our Lady's final apparition there, the sun began to pulsate and spin, giving off various colors, and appeared to plunge toward the earth in a zigzag motion. About 70,000 people witnessed this spectacle, all within a radius of a few dozen miles of Fatima. And it wasn't just Catholics who saw the sun's convulsions--many non-Catholics, even atheists, attested to the strange event, which was widely reported in the secular and communist newspapers. But in the rest of the world, indeed in the rest of Portugal, nothing unusual seemed to happen to the sun that day.

God is able to cause the sun or other celestial bodies to do wondrous things and restrict the evidence of the phenomenon to a localized area. This would explain why the Chinese had no inkling that God was doing something amazing with the sun on the other side of the planet.

Two excellent books dealing with the apparent contradictions in the Bible are Gleason Archer's "Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties" and William G. Most's "Free From All Error".