Josephus: Against Apion

vastly greater numbers which came up at the three great festivals; to say nothing of the probable increase in their number between the days of Hecateus and Josephus, which was at least three hundred years. But see a more authentic account of some of these measures in my Description of the Jewish Temples. However, we are not to expect that such heathens as Cherilus or Hecateus, or the rest that are cited by Josephus and Eusebius, could avoid making many mistakes in the Jewish history, while yet they strongly confirm the same history in the general, and are most valuable attestations to those more authentic accounts we have in the Scriptures and Josephus concerning them.]

[Whiston / edition note] 20 (return) [ A glorious testimony this of the observation of the sabbath by the Jews. See Antiq. B. XVI. ch. 2. sect. 4, and ch. 6. sect. 2; the Life, sect. 54; and War, B. IV. ch. 9. sect. 12.]

[Whiston / edition note] 21 (return) [ Not their law, but the superstitious interpretation of their leaders which neither the Maccabees nor our blessed Savior did ever approve of.]

[Whiston / edition note] 22 (return) [ In reading this and the remaining sections of this book, and some parts of the next, one may easily perceive that our usually cool and candid author, Josephus, was too highly offended with the impudent calumnies of Manethe, and the other bitter enemies of the Jews, with whom he had now to deal, and was thereby betrayed into a greater heat and passion than ordinary, and that by consequence he does not hear reason with his usual fairness and impartiality; he seems to depart sometimes from the brevity and sincerity of a faithful historian, which is his grand character, and indulges the prolixity and colors of a pleader and a disputant: accordingly, I confess, I always read these sections with less pleasure than I do the rest of his writings, though I fully believe the reproaches cast on the Jews, which he here endeavors to confute and expose, were wholly groundless and unreasonable.]

[Whiston / edition note] 23 (return) [ This is a very valuable testimony of Manetho, that the laws of Osarsiph, or Moses, were not made in compliance with, but in opposition to, the customs of the Egyptians. See the note on Antiq. B. III. ch. 8. sect. 9.]

[Whiston / edition note] 24 (return) [ By way of irony, I suppose.]

[Whiston / edition note] 25 (return) [ Here we see that Josephus esteemed a generation between Joseph and Moses to be about forty-two or forty-three years; which, if taken between the earlier children, well agrees with the duration of human life in those ages. See Antheat. Rec. Part II. pages 966, 1019, 1020.]

[Whiston / edition note] 26 (return) [ That is the meaning of Hierosyla in Greek, not in Hebrew.]