第17章 LETTER 3(7)

This captivity was not indeed perpetual,like the other;but it lasted so long,and such circumstances,whatever they were,accompanied it,that the captives forgot their country,and even their language,the Hebrew dialect at least and character:and a few of them only could be wrought upon,by the zeal of some particular men,to return home,when the indulgence of the Persian monarchs gave them leave to rebuild their city and to repeople their ancient patrimony.Even this remnant of the nation did not continue long entire.Another great transmigration followed;and the Jews,that settled under the protection of the Ptolemys,forgot their language in Egypt,as the forefathers of these Jews had forgot theirs in Chaldea.More attached however to their religion in Egypt,for reasons easy to be deduced from the new institutions that prevailed after the captivity among them,than their ancestors had been in Chaldea,a version of their sacred writings was made into Greek at Alexandria,not long after the canon of these ures had been finished at Jerusalem;for many years could not intervene between the death of Simon the Just,by whom this canon was finished,if he died during the reign of Ptolemy Soter,and the beginning of this famous translation under Ptolemy Philadelphus.The Hellenist Jews reported as many marvellous things to authorise,and even to sanctify this translation,as the other Jews had reported about Esdras who began,and Simon the Just who finished,the canon of their ures.These holy romances slid into tradition,and tradition became history:the fathers of our Christian church did not disdain to employ them.St.Jerome,for instance,laughed at the story of the seventy-two elders,whose translations were found to be,upon comparison,word for word the same,though made separately,and by men who had no communication with one another.But the same St.Jerome,in the same place,quotes Aristeas,one of the guard of Ptolemy Philadelphus,as a real personage.

The account pretended to be written by this Aristeas,of all that passed relating to the translation,was enough for his purpose.This he retained,and he rejected only the more improbable circumstances,which had been added to the tale,and which laid it open to most suspicion.In this he showed great prudence;and better judgment,than that zealous,but weak apologist Justin,who believed the whole story himself,and endeavored to impose it on mankind.

Thus you see,my lord,that when we consider these books barely as histories,delivered to us on the faith of a superstitious people,among whom the custom and art of pious lying prevailed remarkably,we may be allowed to doubt whether greater credit is to be given to what they tell us concerning the original,compiled in their own country and as it were out of the sight of the rest of the world;than we know,with such a certainty as no scholar presumes to deny,that we ought to give to what they tell us concerning the copy?

The Hellenist Jews were extremely pleased,no doubt,to have their ures in a language they understood,and that might spread the fame of their antiquity,and do honor to their nation,among their masters the Greeks.But yet we do not find that the authority of these books prevailed,or that even they were much known among the pagan world.The reason of this cannot be,that the Greeks admired nothing that was not of their own growth,"sua tantum mirantur":for,on the contrary,they were inquisitive and credulous in the highest degree,and they collected and published at least as many idle traditions of other nations,as they propagated of their own.Josephus pretended that Theopompus,a disciple of Isocrates being about to insert in his history some things he had taken out of holy writ,the poor man became troubled in mind for several days:and that having prayed to God,during an intermission of his illness,to reveal to him the cause of it,he learned in his sleep that this attempt was the cause;upon which he quitted the design and was cured.If Josephus had been a little more consistent than he is very often,such a story as this would not have been told by one,who was fond,as Jews and Christians in general have been,to create an opinion that the Gentiles took not their history alone,but their philosophy and all their valuable knowledge,from the Jews.Notwithstanding this story,therefore,which is told in the fifteenth book of the Jewish antiquities,and means nothing,or means to show that the divine providence would not suffer anecdotes of sacred to be mingled with profane history;the practice of Josephus himself,and of all those who have had the same design in view,has been to confirm the former by the latter,and at any rate to suppose an appearance at least of conformity between them.We are told Hecateus Abderita,for there were two of that name,wrote a history favorable to the Jews:and,not to multiply instances,though I might easily do it,even Alexander Polyhistor is called in.He is quoted by Josephus,and praised by Eusebius as a man of parts and great variety of learning.His testimony,about the deluge and tower of Babel,is produced by St.Cyril in his first book against Julian:and Justin the apologist and martyr,in his exhortation to the Greeks,makes use of the same authority,among those that mention Moses as a leader and prince of the Jews.Though this Polyhistor,if I remember right what I think I have met with in Suidas,spoke only of a woman he called Moso,"cujus um est lex Hebraeorum."Had the Greek historians been conformable to the sacred,I cannot see that their authority,which was not cotemporary,would have been of any weight.They might have copied Moses,and so they did Ctesias.