[5] The historical problems are noticed in all biblical histories, and in the commentaries on Joshua and Judges. Against the ordinary critical view, see J. Orr, _Problem of the O.T._ (1905) pp. 240 seq. This writer (on whom see A. S. Peake, _The Interpreter_, 1908, pp. 252 seq.) takes the book as a whole, allowance being made for "the generalizing tendency peculiar to all summaries." His argument that "the circumstantiality, local knowledge and evidently full recollection of the narratives (in Joshua) give confidence in the truth of their statements" is one which historical criticism in no field would regard as conclusive, and his contention that a redactor would hardly incorporate conflicting traditions in his narrative "if he believed they contradicted it" begs the question and ignores Oriental literature. [6] E.g. the vicissitudes of Levitical families, other migrations into Palestine, &c. The story of Joseph has probably been used as a link (see Luther, _op. cit._ pp. 142 seq.). JOSHUA THE STYLITE, the reputed author of a chronicle which narrates the history of the war between the Greeks and Persians in 502-506, and which is one of the earliest and best historical documents preserved to us in Syriac. The work owes its preservation to having been incorporated in the third part of the history of pseudo-Dionysius of Tell-Mahre, and may probably have had a place in the second part of the _Ecclesiastical History_ of John of Asia, from whom (as Nau has shown) pseudo-Dionysius copied all or most of the matter contained in his third part. The chronicle in question is anonymous, and Nau has shown that the note of a copyist, which was thought to assign it to the monk Joshua of Zuknin near Amid, more probably refers to the compiler of the whole work in which it was incorporated. Anyhow the author was an eye-witness of many of the events which he describes, and must have been living at Edessa during the years when it suffered so severely from the Persian War. His view of events is everywhere characterized by his belief in overruling Providence; and as he eulogizes Flavian II., the Chalcedonian patriarch of Antioch, in warmer terms than those in which he praises his great Monophysite contemporaries, Jacob of Serugh and Philoxenus of Mabbog, he was probably an orthodox Catholic.