Victory, O Lord! by Sir John Everett Millais Bt PRA (1829-96)

Victory, O Lord!

Sir John Everett Millais Bt PRA (1829-96)

1870

Oil on canvas

Image credit: Manchester Art Gallery

Source: Art UK, reproduced under the terms of the Creative Commons Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-NC-ND). Click on the image to enlarge it.

This image replaces the original black-and-white one on this page scanned from The Life of Millais, facing II, 20; text by George P. Landow.

This painting of Moses' two brothers, Aaron & Hur, holding up his arms in prayer during battle with the Amalekites, may be another late example of the artist's use of biblical typology. According to Exodus, as long as Moses raised his arms in prayer the Israelites prevailed, but as soon as he grew tired and lowered them the battle went against them. Exodus 17:12 relates: "But Moses' hands were heavy; and they took a stone, and put it under him, and he sat thereon; and Aaron and Hur stayed up his hands, the one on the one side, and the other on the other side; and his hands were steady until the going down of the sun." According to some Victorian interpreters of the Bible, this event, which put Moses under terrible strain since the battle lasted all day, prefigured Christ's crucifixion.

Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld’s popular The Bible in Pictures, which appeared more than a decade before Millais’s painting, included a powerful image of Moses in prayer during the battle against the Amalakites (image), which depicted the three men seen from a vantage point behind them. Holman Hunt used the same pose in The Shadow of Death (1869-73; image) to show Jesus at prayer after a hard day's labor. F.R. Pickersgill also illustrates this Old Testament episode in Moses' Hands Held Up in the Dalziels’ Bible Gallery (1881 [1880]; image).

Bibliography

Millais, John Guile. The Life and Letters of John Everett Millais, President of the Royal Academy. 2 vols. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1899.

Last modified 6 August 2026