The Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus (top fiction books of all time txt) 📖

Chio, or Cyprus, the juice of the turpentine tree, than this precious balm. This last is also the same word that we elsewhere render by the same mistake balm of Gilead; it should be rendered, the turpentine of Gilead, Jeremiah 8:22.]

18 (return)
[ Whether these fine gardens and rivulets of Etham, about six miles from Jerusalem, whither Solomon rode so often in state, be not those alluded to, Ecclesiastes 2:5, 6, where he says, "He made him gardens and orchards, and planted trees in them of all kinds of fruits: he made him pools of water, to water the wood that bringeth forth trees;" and to the finest part whereof he seems to allude, when, in the Canticles, he compares his spouse to a garden "enclosed," to a "spring shut up," to a "fountain sealed," ch. 4. 12 [part of which from rains are still extant, as Mr. Matmdrell informs us, page 87, 88]; cannot now be certainly determined, but may very probably be conjectured. But whether this Etham has any relation to those rivers of Etham, which Providence once dried up in a miraculous manner, Psalm 74:15, in the Septuagint, I cannot say.]

19 (return)
[ These seven hundred wives, or the daughters of great men, and the three hundred concubines, the daughters of the ignoble, make one thousand in all; and are, I suppose, those very one thousand women intimated elsewhere by Solomon himself, when he speaks of his not having found one [good] woman among that very number, Ecclesiastes 7:28.]

20 (return)
[ Josephus is here certainly too severe upon Solomon, who, in making the cherubims, and these twelve brazen oxen, seems to have done no more than imitate the patterns left him by David, which were all given David by Divine inspiration. See my description of the temples, ch. 10. And although God gave no direction for the lions that adorned his throne, yet does not Solomon seem therein to have broken any law of Moses; for although the Pharisees and latter Rabbins have extended the second commandment, to forbid the very making of any image, though without any intention to have it worshipped, yet do not I suppose that Solomon so understood it, nor that it ought to be so understood. The making any other altar for worship but that at the tabernacle was equally forbidden by Moses, Antiq. B. IV. ch. 8. sect. 5; yet did not the two tribes and a half offend when they made an altar for a memorial only, Joshua 22; Antiq. B. V. ch. 1. sect. 26, 27.]

21 (return)
[ Since the beginning of Solomon's evil life and adversity was the time when Hadad or Ader, who was born at least twenty or thirty years before Solomon came to the crown, in the days of David, began to give him disturbance, this implies that Solomon's evil life began early, and continued very long, which the multitude of his wives and concubines does imply also; I suppose when he was not fifty years of age.]

22 (return)
[ This youth of Jeroboam, when Solomon built the walls of righteous and keep the laws, because he hath proposed to thee the greatest of all rewards for thy piety, and the honor thou shalt pay to God, namely, to be as greatly exalted as thou knowest David to have been." Jerusalem, not very long after he had finished his twenty years building of the temple and his own palace, or not very long after the twenty-fourth of his reign, 1 Kings 9:24; 2 Chronicles 8:11, and his youth here still mentioned, when Solomon's wickedness was become intolerable, fully confirm my former observation, that such his wickedness began early, and continued very long. See Ecclus. 47:14.]

23 (return)
[ That by scorpions is not here meant that small animal so called, which was never used in corrections, but either a shrub, furze bush, or else some terrible sort of whip of the like nature see Hudson's and Spanheim's notes here.]

24 (return)
[ Whether these "fountains of the Lesser Jordan" were near a place called Dan, and the fountains of the Greater near a place called Jor, before their conjunction; or whether there was only one fountain, arising at the lake Phiala, at first sinking under ground, and then arising near the mountain Paneum, and thence running through the lake Scmochonitis to the Sea of Galilee, and so far called the Lesser Jordan; is hardly certain, even in Josephus himself, though the latter account be the most probable. However, the northern idolatrous calf, set up by Jeroboam, was where Little Jordan fell into Great Jordan, near a place called Daphnae, as Josephus elsewhere informs us, Of the War, B. IV. ch. 1. sect. 1: see the note there.]

25 (return)
[ How much a larger and better copy Josephus had in this remarkable history of the true prophet of Judea, and his concern with Jeroboam, and with the false prophet of Bethel, than our other copies have, is evident at first sight. The prophet's very name, Jadon, or, as the Constitutions call him, Adonias, is wanting in our other copies; and it is there, with no little absurdity, said that God revealed Jadon the true prophet's death, not to himself as here, but to the false prophet. Whether the particular account of the arguments made use of, after all, by the false prophet against his own belief and his own conscience, in order to persuade Jeroboam to persevere in his idolatry and wickedness, than which more plausible could not be invented, was intimated in Josephus's copy, or in some other ancient book, cannot now be determined; our other copies say not one word of it.]

26 (return)
[ That this Shishak was not the same person with the famous Sesostris, as some have very lately, in contradiction to all antiquity, supposed, and that our Josephus did not take him to be the same, as they pretend, but that Sesostris was many centuries earlier than Shishak, see Authent. Records, part II. page 1024.]

27 (return)
[ Herodotus, as here quoted by Josephus, and as this passage still stands in his present copies, B. II. ch. 14., affirms, that "the Phoenicians and Syrians in Palestine [which last are generally supposed to denote the Jews] owned their receiving circumcision from the Egyptians;" whereas it is abundantly evident that the Jews received their circumcision from the patriarch Abraham, Genesis 17:9-14; John 7:22, 23, as I conclude the Egyptian priests themselves did also. It is not therefore very unlikely that Herodotus, because the Jews had lived long in Egypt, and came out of it circumcised, did thereupon think they had learned that circumcision in Egypt, and had it not broke. Manetho, the famous Egyptian chronologer and historian, who knew the history of his own country much better than Herodotus, complains frequently of his mistakes about their affairs, as does Josephus more than once in this chapter. Nor indeed does Herodotus seem at all acquainted with the affairs of the Jews; for as he never names them, so little or nothing of what he says about them, their country, or maritime cities, two of which he alone mentions, Cadytus and Jenysus, proves true; nor indeed do there appear to have ever been any such cities on their coast.]

28 (return)
[ This is a strange expression in Josephus, that God is his own workmanship, or that he made himself, contrary to common sense and to catholic Christianity; perhaps he only means that he was not made by one, but was unoriginated.]

29 (return)
[ By this terrible and perfectly unparalleled slaughter of five hundred thousand men of the newly idolatrous and rebellious ten tribes, God's high displeasure and indignation against that idolatry and rebellion fully appeared; the remainder were thereby seriously cautioned not to persist in them, and a kind of balance or equilibrium was made between the ten and the two tribes for the time to come; while otherwise the perpetually idolatrous and rebellious ten tribes would naturally have been too powerful for the two tribes, which were pretty frequently free both from such idolatry and rebellion; nor is there any reason to doubt of the truth of the prodigious number upmost: signal an occasion.]

30 (return)
[ The reader is to remember that Cush is not Ethiopia, but Arabia. See Bochart, B. IV. ch. 2.]

31 (return)
[ Here is a very great error in our Hebrew copy in this place, 2 Chronicles 15:3-6, as applying what follows to times past, and not to times future; whence that text is quite misapplied by Sir Isaac Newton.]

32 (return)
[ This Abelmain, or, in Josephus's copy, Abellane, that belonged to the land of Israel, and bordered on the country of Damascus, is supposed, both by Hudson and Spanheim, to be the same with Abel, or Ahila, whence came Abilene. This may be that city so denominated from Abel the righteous, there buried, concerning the shedding of whose blood within the compass of the land of Israel, I understand our Savior's words about the fatal war and overthrow of Judea by Titus and his Roman army; "That upon you may come all the righteous blood shed upon the land, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zacharias son of Barnchins, whom ye slew between the temple and the altar. Verily, I say unto you, all these things shall come upon this generation," Matthew 23;35, 36; Luke 11:51.]

33 (return)
[ Josephus, in his present copies, says, that a little while rain upon the earth; whereas, in our other copies, it is after many days, 1 Kings 18:1. Several years are also intimated there, and in Josephus, sect. 2, as belonging to this drought and famine; nay, we have the express mention of the third year, which I suppose was reckoned from the recovery of the widow's son, and the ceasing of this drought in Phmuiela [Footnote which, as Menander informs us here, lasted one whole year]; and both our Savior and St. James affirm, that this drought lasted in all three years and six months, as their copies of the Old Testament then informed them, Luke 4:25; James 5:17. Josephus here seems to mean, that this drought affected all the habitable earth, and presently all the earth, as our Savior says it was upon all the earth, Luke 4:25. They who restrain these expressions to the land of Judea alone, go without sufficient authority or examples.]

34 (return)
[ Mr. Spanheim takes notice here, that in the worship of Mithra [the god of the Persians] the priests cut themselves in the same manner as did these priests in their invocation of Baal [the god of the Phoenicians].]

35 (return)
[ For Izar we may here read [with Hudson and Cocceius] Isachar, i.e of the tribe of Isachar, for to that tribe did Jezreel belong; and presently at the beginning of sect. 8, as also ch. 15. sect. 4, we may read for Iar, with one MS. nearly, and the Scripture, Jezreel, for that was the city meant in the history of Naboth.]

36 (return)
[ "The Jews weep to this day," [says Jerome, here cited by Reland,] "and roll themselves upon sackcloth, in ashes, barefoot, upon such occasions." To which Spanheim adds, "that after the same manner Bernice, when his life was in danger, stood at the tribunal of