The great captain of the hosts of God, A slave brought up in the brick-fields of Egypt, O’ercame the Amorites. There was no day Like that, before or after it, nor shall be. The sun stood still, the hammers of the hail Beat on their harness; and the captains set Their weary feet upon the necks of kings, As I will upon thine, Antiochus, Thou man of blood!--Behold, the rising sun Strikes on the golden letters of my banner, _Be Elohim Yehovah!_ Who is like To thee, O Lord among the gods?--Alas! I am not Joshua, I cannot say, “Sun, stand thou still on Gibeon, and thou Moon In Ajalon!” Nor am I one who wastes The fateful time in useless lamentation: But one who bears his life upon his hand To lose it or to save it, as may best Serve the designs of Him who giveth life. The “nor shall be” which closes the fourth line of this quotation is a false note. The Maccabee did expect to repeat Joshua’s glory; that expectation of recurrent providences was the basis of Israel’s belief in Providence. Again, even though in his day Hebrew had given way to Aramaic as the national speech (let some of our Hebrew zealots remember that Judas Maccabæus did _not_ talk in Hebrew!), none the less Judas would hardly have been guilty of the error to begin a Hebrew sentence in the middle. Yet Longfellow repeats this curious slip later on, making Judas rush to battle, shouting _Be Elohim Yehovah!_ as though “Among the gods, O Lord” (for that is what the Hebrew words mean) could possibly be a war-cry. No doubt he knew that in one theory the name Maccabee is explained as the initials of the Hebrew text “Who is like unto Thee among the mighty (or the gods), O Lord.” But it was a queer confusion that made him employ the second half of the verse as a signal, and to substitute _elohim_ for the _elim_ of the Song of Moses (Exod. 15. 11). I say nothing of his putting into Judas’ mouth the monstrosity _Yehovah_--a misspelling (more common in the form _Jehovah_) which was invented about the year 1520 by the reformers. As is well known, the misspelling arose by reading the _vowels_ of _adonai_ (Lord), as the Name was quite early read, with the consonants of the Name as written in the Hebrew text.