fter the slaying of
Goliath, imagined that any one would seriously suppose that Saul had
actually with his own hand killed two thousand Philistines, and David
twenty thousand. But, say they, the later prose chronicler, quoting from
the ballad, and accepting a piece of poetic hyperbole as actual fact,
reproduced the statement in his own words, and added, "the sun stayed in
the midst of heaven, and hasted not to go down about a whole day."

Not so. The poem and the prose chronicle make one coherent whole.
Working from the poem alone, treating the expressions in the first two
lines merely as astronomical indications of time and place, and without
the slightest reference to any miraculous interpretation, they lead to
the inevitable conclusion that the time was noonday. This result
certainly does not lie on the surface of the poem, and it was wholly
beyond the power of the prose chronicler to have computed it, yet it is
just in the supposed stupid gloss of the prose chronicler, and nowhere
else, that we find this fact definitely stated: whilst the "miracle"
recorded both by poem and prose narrative completely accords with the
extraordinary distance traversed between noon and sunset.

Any man, however ignorant of science, if he be but careful and
conscientious, can truthfully record an observation without any
difficulty. But to successfully invent even the simplest astronomical
observation requires very full knowledge, and is difficult even then.
Every astronomer knows that there is hardly a single novelist, no matter
how learned or painstaking, who can at this present day introduce a
simple astronomical relation into his story, without falling into
egregious error.

We are therefore quite sure that Joshua did use the words attributed to
him; that the "moon" and "the valley of Ajalon" were not merely inserted
in order to complete the parallelism by a bard putting a legend into
poetic form. Nor was the prose narrative the result of an editor
combining two or three narratives all written much after the date. The
original records must have been made at the time.

All astronomers know well how absolutely essential it is to commit an
observation to writing on the spot. Illustrations of this necessity
could be made to any extent. One may suffice. In vol. ii. of the _Life
of Sir Richard Burton_, by his wife, p. 244, Lady Burton says:--

"On the 6th December, 1882 . . . we were walking on the Karso
(Opcona) alone; the