's
and the Jews' faithfulness and goodwill to the Romans before the senate
and people of Rome, were principally Pompey, Scaurus, and Gabinius; of
all whom Josephus had already given us the history, so far as the Jews
were concerned with them.

[19] We have here a most remarkable and authentic attestation of the
citizens of Pergamus, that Abraham was the father of all the Hebrews;
that their own ancestors were, in the oldest times, the friends of those
Hebrews; and that the public arts of their city, then extant, confirmed
the same; which evidence is too strong to be evaded by our present
ignorance of the particular occasion of such ancient friendship and
alliance between those people. See the like full evidence of the kindred
of the Lacedemonians and the Jews; and that became they were both of the
posterity of Abraham, by a public epistle of those people to the Jews,
preserved in the First Book of the Maccabees, 12:19-23; and thence by
Josephus, Antiq. B. XII. ch. 4 sect. 10; both which authentic records
are highly valuable. It is also well worthy of observation, what Moses
Chorenensis, the principal Armenian historian, informs us of, p. 83,
that Arsaces, who raised the Parthian empire, was of the seed of Abraham
by Chetura; and that thereby was accomplished that prediction which
said, "Kings of nations shall proceed from thee," Genesis 17:6.

[20] If we compare Josephus's promise in sect. 1, to produce all the
public decrees of the Romans in favor of the Jews, with his excuse
here for omitting many of them, we may observe, that when he came
to transcribe all those decrees he had collected, he found them so
numerous, that he thought he should too much tire his readers if he had
attempted it, which he thought a sufficient apology for his omitting
the rest of them; yet do those by him produced afford such a strong
confirmation to his history, and give such great light to even the Roman
antiquities themselves, that I believe the curious are not a little
sorry for such his omissions.

[21] For Marcus, this president of Syria, sent as successor to Sextus
Caesar, the Roman historians require us to read "Marcus" in Josephus,
and this perpetually, both in these Antiquities, and in his History of
the Wars, as the learned generally agree.

[22] In this and the following chapters the reader will easily remark,
how truly Gronovius observes, in his notes on the Roman decrees in favor
of the Jews, that their rights and privileges