While eclipses may not be mentioned explicitly in the Hebrew Bible, Frederick Baltz suggests there might be an oblique, and perhaps unwitting, reference to one in the story of King Hezekiah, a heroic figure who saved his people from the Assyrian onslaught and led them away from idolatry. The books of Kings, Isaiah, and Chronicles all tell of Hezekiah’s illness and miraculous recovery:

The biblical account relates that Isaiah the prophet was sent to Hezekiah to inform him that he would die from his illness. Hezekiah prayed for healing, and Isaiah had not yet left the palace when he was sent back to the king with a different message: the Lord would heal him and give him another fifteen years of life. A sign was to confirm the healing. A shadow could move forward or backward on an outdoor stairway. Hezekiah chose for the shadow to move backward, [and so it did]. (2 Kings 20:10).

On March 5, 702 BCE, the sixteenth year before Hezekiah’s death, a prominent solar eclipse appeared over the Middle East. Its path crossed the Arabian Peninsula, and the obscuration of the sun over Israel was more than 60 percent.

If a stairway had been engulfed in darkness and then restored to daylight, the shadow would have appeared to retreat. A shadow wave, produced by an eclipse, may also have given the appearance of a shadow retreating. If you are in the path of the eclipse on August 21, you, too, may be able to see this rare biblical sign.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.