If God be
with us, every thing that is impossible becomes possible.

[6] As to this intended work of Josephus concerning the reasons of many
of the Jewish laws, and what philosophical or allegorical sense they
would bear, the loss of which work is by some of the learned not
much regretted, I am inclinable, in part, to Fabricius's opinion, ap.
Havercamp, p. 63, 61, That "we need not doubt but that, among some vain
and frigid conjectures derived from Jewish imaginations, Josephus would
have taught us a greater number of excellent and useful things, which
perhaps nobody, neither among the Jews, nor among the Christians, can
now inform us of; so that I would give a great deal to find it still
extant."

BOOK 1 FOOTNOTES:

[1] Since Josephus, in his Preface, sect. 4, says that Moses wrote some
things enigmatically, some allegorically, and the rest in plain words,
since in his account of the first chapter of Genesis, and the first
three verses of the second, he gives us no hints of any mystery at all;
but when he here comes to ver. 4, etc., he says that Moses, after the
seventh day was over, began to talk philosophically; it is not very
improbable that he understood the rest of the second and the third
chapters in some enigmatical, or allegorical, or philosophical sense.
The change of the name of God just at this place, from Elohim to Jehovah
Elohim, from God to Lord God, in the Hebrew, Samaritan, and Septuagint,
does also not a little favor some such change in the narration or
construction.

[2] We may observe here, that Josephus supposed man to be compounded
of spirit, soul, and body, with St. Paul, 1 Thessalonians 5:23, and the
rest of the ancients: he elsewhere says also, that the blood of animals
was forbidden to be eaten, as having in it soul and spirit, Antiq. B.
III. ch. 11. sect. 2.

[3] Whence this strange notion came, which yet is not peculiar to
Joseph, but, as Dr. Hudson says here, is derived from older authors, as
if four of the greatest rivers in the world, running two of them at vast
distances from the other two, by some means or other watered paradise,
is hard to say. Only since Josephus has already appeared to allegorize
this history, and take notice that these four names had a particular
signification; Phison for Ganges, a multitude; Phrath for Euphrates,
either a dispersion or a flower; Diglath for Tigris, what is swift, with
narrowness; and Geon for Nile, what arises from the east,--we perha