Main had the circumstances of that eclipse
calculated, with the result that though the eclipse was indeed total in
Africa and Hindostan, yet at Samaria it was only partial and of no
considerable magnitude. Dr. Pusey's words, summing up the situation
are:--"The eclipse then would hardly have been noticeable at Samaria,
certainly very far indeed from being an eclipse of such magnitude, as
could in any degree correspond with the expression, 'I will cause the
Sun to go down at noon.'" ... "Beforehand, one should not have expected
that an eclipse of the Sun, being itself a regular natural phenomenon,
and having no connection with the moral government of God, should have
been the subject of the prophet's prediction. 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."

Dr. Pusey's _Commentary_ from which the above quotation is made[25]
bears the date 1873, but he appears not to have been acquainted with the
important discovery announced no less than six years previously by the
distinguished Oriental scholar, Sir H. C. Rawlinson. The discovery to
which I allude is a contemporary record on an Assyrian tablet of a solar
eclipse which was seen at Nineveh about 24 years after the reputed date
of Amos's prophecy. This tablet had been described by Dr. Hinckes in the
British Museum _Report_ for 1854 but its chronological importance had
not then been realised. Sir H. Rawlinson[26] speaks of the tablet as a
record of or register of the annual archons at Nineveh. He says:--"In the
eighteenth year before the accession of Tiglath-Pileser there is a
notice to the following effect--'In the month Sivan an eclipse of the Sun
took place' and to mark the great importance of the event a line is
drawn across the tablet although no interruption takes place in the
official order of the Eponymes. Here then we have notice of a solar
eclipse which was visible at Nineveh which occurred within 90 days of
the (vernal) equinox (taking that as the normal commencement of the
year) and which we may presume to have been total from the prominence
given to the record, and these are conditions which during a century
before and after the era of Nabonassar are alone fulfilled by the
eclipse which took place on June 15, 763."

This record was submitted to Sir G. B. Airy and Mr. J. R. Hind, and the
circumstances