Keeping yourself still in the position of an Oriental historian, consider what you would be called on to describe, in setting down the story of Israel. You would find, as your materials, various traditions, mostly oral, mostly perhaps poetic, describing a great deliverance wrought in every particular by the hand of Jehovah Himself: you would find the nation around you, and yourself among the rest, believing that Jehovah Himself had drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea, that His terrible voice had given the Law from Sinai, that He had been to wandering Israel a cloud in the noontide to protect them from the sun, and a light in the darkness to give them guidance, that He had supplied them with food from Heaven and spread a table for them in the wilderness, that He had Himself given them water from Himself (the Rock of Israel!) to quench their thirst. If the Jordan’s fords, unusually shallow, had allowed the whole nation to pass across, as upon dry land, you would be taught as a child to hear and sing, in hymns that reiterated the national deliverance, that the Lord Himself had done this: “The waters saw thee, O Lord, the waters saw thee, and were afraid.” If, in the general terror of the Canaanites, a strong city suffered itself to be taken on the mere onset and war cry of the invaders as easily as though it had been an unwalled hamlet, the traditions would tell how the walls fell flat at the sound of the trumpets of Joshua; if some sudden storm, accompanied with hail and immediately followed by an inundation of swollen streams, threw the chariots and horses of the enemy into confusion and ensured their speedy rout; or if, on another occasion, the sudden gloom of a storm had been succeeded by a long evening of peculiar brightness and clearness facilitating the pursuit and destruction of the foe, then you would hear that the “stars in their courses” fought against Sisera, or that in the day of Beth-horon the Lord Himself sent down hailstones upon the enemy and stopped the sun at the prayer of Joshua:— “The sun and moon stood still in their habitation; At the light of thine arrows as they went, At the shining of thy glittering spear.”[9] All these materials, expressed in terse poetic phrase, you, as a historian, would have to amplify into prose. Is it not easy to see how, in the process, without any fraud or conscious exaggeration on your part, you would transmute the natural into the miraculous?