i. e. most probably a place where the Shecinah or Messiala had been seen, and God by him worshipped, even before the days of Abraham, and where lately lived, and perhaps now lived, Melchizedec, the grand type of the Messiah, (who might then possibly be present at the sacrifice ;) and why this sacrifice was to be offered either on the mountain called afterward distinctly Moriah, where the temple stood, and where all the Mosaic sacrifices were afterward to be offered, as Josephus* and the generality suppose, or perhaps, as others suppose, that where the Messiah himself was to be offered, its neighbour mount Calvary. This seems also the reason why the ram was substituted as a vicarious sacrifice instead of Isaac. These circumstances seem to me very peculiar and extraordinary, and to render the present hypothesis extremely probable. Nor perhaps did St. Clement mean any thing else, when, in his forecited passage, he says, that "Isaac was fully persuaded of what he knew was to come," and therefore "cheerfully yielded himself up for a sacrifice." Nor indeed does that name of this place, Jehovah Jireh, which continued till the days of Moses, and signified, God will see, or rather, God will provide, seem to be given it by Abraham, on any other account, than that God would there, in the fullness of time, provide himself a lamb [that lamb of God, which was to take away the sins of the world] for a burnt-offering.

But now, if after all it be objected, that how peculiar and how typical soever the circumstances of Abraham and Isaac might be in themselves, of which the heathens about them could have little notion, yet such a divine command to Abraham for slaying his beloved son Isaac, must however be of very ill example to the Gentile world, and that it probably did either first occasion, or at least greatly encourage their wicked practices, in offering their children for sacrifices to their idols, I answer by the next consideration :

13. That this objection is so far from truth, that God's public and miraculous prohibition of the execution of this command to Abraham, (which command itself the Gentiles would not then at all be surprised at, because it was so like to their own usual practices,) as well as God's substitution of a vicarious oblation, seem to have been the very occasion of the immediate abolition of those impious sacrifices by Tethmosis, or Amosis, among the neighbouring Egyptians, and of the substitution of more inoffensive ones there instead of

*

Antiq. B. i. cap. xiii, sec. 2.- - John i. 29.

them. Take the account of this abolition, which we shall presently prove was about the time of Abraham's offering up his son Isaac, as it is preserved by Porphyry, from Manetho, the famous Egyptian historian and chronologer, which is also cited from Porphyry by Eusebius and Theodorit: "* Amosis, says Porphyry, abolished the law for slaying men in Heliopolis of Egypt, as Manetho bears witness in his book of antiquity and piety. They were sacrificed to Juno, and were examined, as were the pure calves that were also sealed with them: they were sacrificed three in a day. In whose stead Amosis commanded that men of wax of the same number should be substituted."

Now I have lately shown, that these Egyptians had Abraham in great veneration, and that all the wisdom of those Egyptians in which Moses was afterwards learned, was derived from no other than from Abraham. Now it appears evidently by the fore-cited passage, that the first abolition of these human sacrifices, and that the substitution of waxen images in their stead, and particularly at Heliopolis, in the north-east part of Egypt, in the neighbourhood of Beersheba, in the south of Palestine, where Abraham now lived, at the distance of about one hundred and twenty miles only, was in the days, and by the order of Tethmosis or Amosis, who was the first of the Egyptian kings, after the expulsion of the Phoenician shepherds. Now therefore we are to inquire when this Tethmosis or Amosis lived, and compare his time with the time of the sacrifice of Isaac. Now if we look into my chronological table, published A. D. 1721, we shall find that the hundred and twenty-fifth year of Abraham, or, which is all one, the twenty-fifth year of Isaac, falls into A. M. 2578, or into the thirteenth year of Tethmosis or Amosis, which is the very middle of his twenty-five years reign; so that this abolition of human sacrifices in Egypt, and substitution of others in their room, seems to have been occasioned by the solemn prohibition of such a sacrifice in the case of Abraham, and by the following substitution of a ram in its stead: which account of this matter not only takes away the groundless suspicions of the moderns, but shows the great seasonableness of the divine prohibition of the execution of this command to Abraham, as probably the direct occasion of putting a stop to the barbarity of the,Egyptians in offering human sacrifices, and that for many, if not for all generations afterward.

* Marsh, p. 301.

DISSERTATION III.

Tacitus's account of the origin of the Jewish nation, and of the particulars of the last Jewish War, that the former was probably written in opposition to Josephus's antiquities, and that the latter was for certain almost all directly taken from Josephus's History of the Jewish War.

SINCE Tacitus, the famous Roman historian, who has written more largely and professedly about the origin of the Jewish nation, about the chrorography of Judea, and the last Jewish war under Cestius, Vespasian, and Titus, than any other old Roman historian; and since both Josephus and Tacitus were in favour with the same Roman emperors, Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian; and since Tacitus was an eminent pleader and writer of history at Rome, during the time or not long after our Josephus had been there studying the Greek language, reading the Greek books, and writing his own works in the same Greek language, which language was almost universally known at Rome in that age; and since, therefore, it is next to impossible to suppose that Tacitus could be unacquainted with the writings of Josephus, it cannot but be highly proper to compare their accounts of Judea, of the Jews, and Jewish affairs together. Nor is it other than a very surprising paradox to me, how it has been possible for learned men, particularly for the several learned editors of Josephus and Tacitus, to be so very silent about this matter as they have hitherto been, especially when not only the correspondence of the authors as to time and place, but the -likeness of the subject-matter and circumstances is so very often, so very remarkable; nay indeed, since many of the particular facts belonged peculiarly to the region of Judea, and to the Jewish nation, and are such as could hardly be taken by a foreigner from any other author than from our Josephus, this strange silence is almost unaccountable, if not inexcusable. The two only other writers whom we know of when such Jewish affairs might be supposed to be taken by Tacitus, who never appears to be in Judea himself, are

Justus of Tiberias, a Jewish historian, contemporary with Josephus, and one Antonius Julianus, once mentioned by Minutius Felix in his Octavius, § 33. as having written on the same subject with Josephus, and both already mentioned by me on another occasion, Dissert. I. As to Justus of Tiberias, he could not be the historian whence Tacitus took his Jewish affairs, because, as we have seen, in the place just cited, the principal passage in Tacitus of that nature, concerning Christ, and his sufferings under the emperor Tiberius, and by his procurator Pontius Pilate, was not there, as we know from the testimony of Photius, Cod. xxx. And as to Antonius Julianus, his very name shows him not to have been a Jew but a Roman. He is never mentioned by Josephus, and so probably knew no more of the country, or affairs of Judea, than Tacitus himself. He was, I suppose, rather an epitomiser of Josephus, and not so early as Tacitus, than an original historian himself before him. Nor could so exact a writer as Tacitus ever take up with such poor and almost unknown historians as these were, while Josephus's Seven Books of the Jewish War were then so common; were in such great reputation at Rome; were attested to, and recommended by Vespasian and Titus the emperors, by king Agrippa, and king Archelaus, and Herod, king of Chalcis; and he was there honoured with a statue: and these his books were deposited at the public library at Rome, as we know from Josephus himself, Eusebius, and Jerom, while we never hear of any other history of the Jews that had then and there any such attestations or recommendations. Some things indeed Tacitus might take from the Roman records of this war, I mean from the commentaries of Vespasian, which are mentioned by Josephus himself, in his own life, 65. vol. iv. and some others from the relations of Roman people, where the affairs of Rome were concerned; as also other affairs might be remembered by old officers and soldiers that had been in the Jewish war. Accordingly, I still suppose that Tacitus had some part of his information these ways, and particularly where he a little differs from, or make's additions to Josephus: but then, as this will all reach no further than three or four years during this war, so will it by no means account for that abridgment of the geography of the country, and entire series of the principal facts of history thereto relating, which are in Tacitus, from the days of Antiochus Epiphanes, two hundred and forty years before that war, with which Antio

chus both Josephus and Tacitus begin their distinct history of the Jews, preparatory to the history of the late war. Nor could Tacitus take the greatest part of those earlier facts belonging to the Jewish nation from the days of Moses, or to Christ and the christians in the days of Tiberius, from Roman authors; of which Jewish and christian affairs those authors had usually very little knowledge, and which the heathen generally did grossly pervert and shamefully falsify; and this is so true as to Tacitus's own account of the origin of the Jewish nation, that the reader may almost take it for a constant rule, that when Tacitus contradicts Josephus's Jewish Antiquities, he either tells direct falsehoods, or truths so miserably disguised as renders them little better than falsehoods, and hardly ever light upon any thing relating to them that is true and solid, but when the same is in those antiquities at this day; of which matters more will be said in the notes on his history immediately following.

HISTORY OF THE JEWS.

BOOK V.-CHAP. II.

SINCE we are now going to relate the final period of this famous city, [Jerusalem,] it seems proper to give an account of its original.*—The tradition is, that the Jews ran away from the island of Crete, and settled themselves on the coast of Lybia, and this at that time when Saturn was driven out of his kingdom by the power of Jupiter: an argument for it is fetched from their name. The mountain Ida is famous in Crete; and the neighbouring inhabitants are named Idaei, which, with a barbarous augment, becomes the name of Judaei [Jews.] Some say they were a people that were very numerous in Egypt under the reign of Isis, and that the Egyptians got free from that burden by sending them into the adjoining countries, under their captains Hierosolymus and Judas. The greatest part say, they were those Ethiopians whom fear and hatred obliged to change their habitations in the reign of king Cepheus.† There are those which

* Most of these stories are so entirely groundless, and so contradictory to one another, that they do not deserve a serious confutation. It is strange Tacitus could persuade himself thus crudely to set them down.

+ One would wonder how Tacitus, or any heathen, could suppose the African Ethiopians under Cepheus, who are known to be blacks, could be the parents of the Jews, who are known to be whites..