The text expressly asserts this (verse 14); but because in the Hebrew it is only had, “There was not [a day] like this day before,” and in the Greek, “There was not such a day,” [some] have thought…
(col. 1025)
Masius thought that this day is not compared with others in length simply, but in length [combined] with such an end and effect: “It is not treated,” he says, “of the length of this day comparatively; but it is preferred to any [other] days only in this: that God prolonged no other day, at the prayers of that man, for the sake of cutting down the enemy, by interrupting the Sun’s motion, as He prolonged this one.” But both the Rabbis of the Hebrews and the Greek and Latin Fathers have handed down that the comparison is made in length; and this seems sufficiently gathered from the fact that, when [the text] had said the Sun stood still and did not run on to its wonted setting, it at once subjoined: “There was not before and after [a day] like this day,” or “there was not such a day” — that is, so long. And therefore Arias [Montano speaks] better than Masius: “What we read in the Latin,” he says, “‘so long a day,’ is to be referred not only to the space [duration], but to the quality and excellence: that that day was notable beyond all example — first by [its] magnitude and the duration of light, then [as] most remarkable by the very efficiency and power of God.” But this must now be seen: whether so long a day truly was not [seen] before? From the opinions of certain Rabbis, the Rabbi Shem-Tob, cited before, relates (in the Moreh Nevuchim) that the Sun stood still also at the command of Moses, and indeed for a longer [time]. Otherwise — which those Rabbis greatly abhor — Moses would have been surpassed by Joshua in some matter, the master by the disciple. But this is a mere fabrication of theirs, explained nowhere in Scripture, handed down by no one’s memory. But whether on that account Moses is less than Joshua, St. Thomas long ago disputed (Secunda Secundae, question 174, article 4, [reply] to [objection] 2) — of which, perhaps, afterward. For now let this be observed (which must be applied also to the following question): that those longest days — which, from a certain position of the sphere, [are had] somewhere — are of two months, and of three, and even of half a year, namely from the [terrestrial] latitude of 69 degrees of pole-altitude, in July, as is clear in chapter 3 of the Sphere. For here the discourse is of a land of the same, or a like, climate [latitude] with Judaea.