"The prophet Isaiah cried to the Lord; and he brought the shadow back the ten intervals, by which the sun had declined on the dial of Ahaz" (vs. 11)
At various times in the Bible, God appears to change the natural course of events concerning time. For instance, the sun stood still for Joshua to complete a battle (Joshua 10). Here, as a sign to Hezekiah in II Kings 20, the Lord causes the shadow on the sundial to go back 10 intervals rather than continuing to advance forward.
What is the explanation for such an event? Well, when you're dealing with the God who created time and space, you certainly have to leave room for the miraculous! In some marvelous way, God engineered this sign. Personally, I don't believe that He caused the world to stop spinning as usual and then to move backward, only to later resume spinning correctly again. (In other words, I don't think God used the plot device of the 1978 Superman movie!)
While God could certainly have worked such a miracle, it seems hard to explain how such a thing could work without causing major damage to the world. It seems likely that we would have many records of a reversal of the sun happening in other cultures, too, which does not appear to be the case.
But God is also quite capable of causing a manifestation of an otherwise miraculous occurrence. For Isaiah and Hezekiah, the sun appeared to move backward. There are certainly less invasive and catastrophic ways for something like that to happen. Anything from an earthquake to a partial eclipse to a localized miracle could have conceivably occurred.
Put me down as believing that something out of the ordinary happened to give confidence to Hezekiah in Isaiah's words, but whatever it was fell short of actual time travel!
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