common sense, can it be Joshua that relates what people
had done after he was dead? This account must not only have been written
by some historian that lived after Joshua, but that lived also after the
elders that out-lived Joshua.

There are several passages of a general meaning with respect to time,
scattered throughout the book of Joshua, that carries the time in which
the book was written to a distance from the time of Joshua, but without
marking by exclusion any particular time, as in the passage above
quoted. In that passage, the time that intervened between the death
of Joshua and the death of the elders is excluded descriptively and
absolutely, and the evidence substantiates that the book could not have
been written till after the death of the last.

But though the passages to which I allude, and which I am going to
quote, do not designate any particular time by exclusion, they imply a
time far more distant from the days of Joshua than is contained between
the death of Joshua and the death of the elders. Such is the passage, x.
14, where, after giving an account that the sun stood still upon Gibeon,
and the moon in the valley of Ajalon, at the command of Joshua, (a tale
only fit to amuse children) [NOTE: This tale of the sun standing still
upon Motint Gibeon, and the moon in the valley of Ajalon, is one of
those fables that detects itself. Such a circumstance could not have
happened without being known all over the world. One half would have
wondered why the sun did not rise, and the other why it did not set; and
the tradition of it would be universal; whereas there is not a nation
in the world that knows anything about it. But why must the moon stand
still? What occasion could there be for moonlight in the daytime, and
that too whilst the sun shined? As a poetical figure, the whole is well
enough; it is akin to that in the song of Deborah and Barak, The stars
in their courses fought against Sisera; but it is inferior to the
figurative declaration of Mahomet to the persons who came to expostulate
with him on his goings on, Wert thou, said he, to come to me with the
sun in thy right hand and the moon in thy left, it should not alter my
career. For Joshua to have exceeded Mahomet, he should have put the sun
and moon, one in each pocket, and carried them as Guy Faux carried his
dark lanthorn, and taken them out to shine as he might happen to want
them. The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that