ates, where they
resided for three successive generations, that they imbibed manners and
opinions which had been rejected as contrary to their law. When our
king Cyrus had delivered them from slavery, their heart was won to us
by gratitude; they became our disciples and imitators; and they admitted
our dogmas in the revision of their books;* for your Genesis, in
particular, was never the work of Moses, but a compilation drawn up
after the return from the Babylonian captivity, in which are inserted
the Chaldean opinions of the origin of the world.

* In the first periods of the Christian church, not only the
most learned of those who have since been denominated
heretics, but many of the orthodox conceived Moses to have
written neither the law nor the Pentateuch, but that the
work was a compilation made by the elders of the people and
the Seventy, who, after the death of Moses, collected his
scattered ordinances, and mixed with them things that were
extraneous; similar to what happened as to the Koran of
Mahomet. See Les Clementines, Homel. 2. sect. 51. and
Homel. 3. sect. 42.

Modern critics, more enlightened or more attentive than the
ancients, have found in Genesis in particular, marks of its
having been composed on the return from the captivity; but
the principal proofs have escaped them. These I mean to
exhibit in an analysis of the book of Genesis, in which I
shall demonstrate that the tenth chapter, among others,
which treats of the pretended generations of the man called
Noah, is a real geographical picture of the world, as it was
known to the Hebrews at the epoch of the captivity, which
was bounded by Greece or Hellas at the West, mount Caucasus
at the North, Persia at the East, and Arabia and Upper Egypt
at the South. All the pretended personages from Adam to
Abraham, or his father Terah, are mythological beings,
stars, constellations, countries. Adam is Bootes: Noah is
Osiris: Xisuthrus Janus, Saturn; that is to say Capricorn,
or the celestial Genius that opened the year. The
Alexandrian Chronicle says expressly, page 85, that Nimrod
was supposed by the Persians to be their first king, as
having invented the art of hunting, and that he was
translated into heaven, where he appears under the name of
Orion.

"At first the pure followers of the law, oppo