wings, while saying something which may be supposed to be a prayer" (et aves nunc exsurgentes eriguntur ad caelum, et alarum crucem pro manibus expandunt et dicunt aliquid quod oratio videatur). Of the Christians he said that they not only lift up their hands in prayer, "but also spread them out, and, modulating them by the Lord's passion, in our prayers also express our faith in Christ" (nos vero non attollimus tantum sed etiam expandimus, et dominica passione modulantes, et orantes confitemur Christo). According to Naphthali Wieder, it was because Christians interpreted prayer with outspread hands as referring to the crucifixion of their Messiah that Jews abandoned this prayer posture, which had previously been Jewish tradition. Justin Martyr interpreted as foreshadowing the shape of the execution cross the episode in the Book of Exodus 17:8–13. The text says that Moses "raised" (ירים, ἐπῆρεν in the Greek Septuagint translation) his hands, without specifying in what way they were raised; but Justin uses a more specific expression to describe the posture of Moses, saying that he "spread out his hands on both sides" (τὰς χεῖρας ἑκατέρως ἐκπετάσας). He added that, when Moses relaxed some element of "this posture imitating the cross" (τοῦ σχήματος τούτου τοῦ τὸν σταυρὸν μιμουμένου), the people were defeated, but when Moses maintained it, the people prevailed "on account of the cross" (διὰ τοῦ σταυροῦ); he attributed this effect not to the prayer of Moses but to the fact that Moses "was forming the sign of the cross" (τὸ σημεῖον τοῦ σταυροῦ ἐποίει). The same Old Testament event is interpreted in a similar way in the earlier Epistle of Barnabas, which saw as one of the prophetic signs of "the cross and him who was to be crucified on it" (περὶ τοῦ σταυροῦ καὶ τοῦ σταυροῦσθαι μέλλοντος) in what Moses did when he, "standing higher than all, stretched out his hands, and so again Israel conquered; then, when he let them down, they were again slaughtered". It says that in this Moses was inspired to "make the form of a cross, and of him who was about to suffer" (ἵνα ποιήσῃ τύπον σταυροῦ καὶ τοῦ μέλλοντος πάσχειν). Justin Martyr said the cross's shape is found in things that have a transverse as well as an upright element: "The sea is not traversed except that trophy which is called a sail abide safe in the ship; and the earth is