to another. See ch. 8. sect. 2.

[10] This Jewish feast of tabernacles was imitated in several heathen
solemnities, as Spanheim here observes and proves. He also further
observes presently, what great regard many heathens had to the monuments
of their forefathers, as Nehemiah had here, sect. 6.

[11] This rule of Esdras, not to fast on a festival day, is quoted in
the Apostolical Constitutions, B. V., as obtaining among Christians
also.

[12] This miserable condition of the Jews, and their capital, must
have been after the death of Esdras, their former governor, and before
Nehemiah came with his commission to build the walls of Jerusalem. Nor
is that at all disagreeable to these histories in Josephus, since Esdras
came on the seventh, and Nehemiah not till the twenty-fifth of Xerxes,
at the interval of eighteen years.

[13] This showing king Xerxes's epistles to God, or laying them open
before God in the temple, is very like the laying open the epistles of
Sennacherib before him also by Hezekiah, 2 Kings 19:14; Isaiah 37:14,
although this last was for a memorial, to put him in mind of the
enemies, in order to move the Divine compassion, and the present as
a token of gratitude for mercies already received, as Hayercamp well
observes on this place.

[14] It may not be very improper to remark here, with what an unusual
accuracy Josephus determines these years of Xerxes, in which the walls
of Jerusalem were built, viz. that Nehemiah came with his commission
in the twenty-fifth of Xerxes, that the walls were two years and four
months in building, and that they were finished on the twenty-eighth
of Xerxes, sect. 7, 8. It may also be remarked further, that Josephus
hardly ever mentions more than one infallible astronomical character, I
mean an eclipse of the moon, and this a little before the death of
Herod the Great, Antiq. B. XVII. ch. 6. sect. 4. Now on these two
chronological characters in great measure depend some of the most
important points belonging to Christianity, viz. the explication of
Daniel's seventy weeks, and the duration of our Savior's ministry, and
the time of his death, in correspondence to those seventy weeks. See the
Supplement to the Lit. Accorap. of Proph. p. 72.

[15] Since some skeptical persons are willing to discard this Book of
Esther as no true history; and even our learned and judicious Dr. Wall,
in his late posthumous Critical Notes upon all the other Hebrew books
of the Old Testament, g