cient book, cannot now be determined; our other
copies say not one word of it.

[26] 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] 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] 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] 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 fro