If we turn to the records of other battles fought in this neighbourhood, we find that they agree as closely as we could expect, not with Joshua's achievement, but with General Hunter's. In the case of the great victory secured by Jonathan, the gallant son of Saul, the Israelites smote the Philistines from Michmash to Ajalon;--not quite twenty miles. In the defeat of Cestius Gallus, the Jews followed him from Beth-horon to Antipatris, a little over twenty miles, the pursuit beginning at daybreak, and being evidently continued nearly till sundown. The pursuit of the Syrians under Nicanor by Judas Maccabæus seems also to have covered about the same distance, for Nicanor was killed at the first onslaught and his troops took to flight. It is not at all unusual to read in comments on the Book of Joshua that the "miracle" is simply the result of the dulness of the prose chronicler in accepting as literal fact an expression that originated in the poetic exuberance of an old bard. The latter, so it is urged, simply meaning to add a figure of dignity and importance to his song commemorating a great national victory, had written:-- "And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, Until the nation had avenged themselves of their enemies," but with no more expectation that the stay of the moon would be accepted literally, than the singers, who welcomed David after 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.