Three [things] here are to be noted, but in few [words]. First, if the question be of the truth of the words, he spoke not rightly, because what he said was false. But if the discourse be of moral rectitude, he lied in nothing. For so he thought the matter to be. But [that] a lie is [speech] against the mind, St. Augustine teaches (book Against Lying). Nor did he say anything rashly or imprudently; for it is wont to happen in hearing, as [also] in sight, that at first a sound is perceived, as it were, generally and confusedly, then more distinctly, afterward [as] such and such — as Aristotle taught, of other cognitions too (Physics 1, ch. 1). He, then, who expresses in a word that first and confused cognition — unless some other thing hinders — can be charged with no rashness or imprudence. Nay, on this account Joshua is not a little to be praised, because he seems to have said these things in order modestly to invite Moses to bring help, and to pour out prayers, as he had lately done against the Amalekites. But now the third [point] is: why what Joshua says in Hebrew and Greek — “I heard the voice of battle” — our [translator] rendered “the howl of battle”? The answer is at hand: [that] that shout which most nations are wont to raise at the very beginning of battles, or in [their] progress and heat, is called by the Greeks ἀλαλαγμός or ἀλκυθμός (Suidas being witness), but by the Latins now baritus (in Tacitus, On the Customs of the Germans; Ammianus, books 16, 21, and 31), now ululatus [howl]. “The Gauls,” says Livy (book [21]), “rush upon [them] on the bank, with various howls and their manner of singing…”
(col. 128)
…[and their manner of singing]. See, if you please, Gellius (book 1, ch. 11) [and] Lipsius (Dialogue 11, book 4, On Warfare). These howls Philo calls (book On Moses) “hymns no different from dirges”; (book On the Special Laws) “odes and hymns in place of dirges”; (book On Drunkenness) “that which is convivial and reveling — through which, in feasts and banquets, [it is] the sweetest strain, but truly, as over the dying, a dirge” — so that that ἀντὶ [“in place of”] here seems to be taken for “like.”