ed and
fifty years earlier than the building of Carthage; concerning whom I
have formerly produced testimonials out of those Phoenician records, as
also that this Hirom was a friend of Solomon when he was building the
temple of Jerusalem, and gave him great assistance in his building that
temple; while still Solomon himself built that temple six hundred and
twelve years after the Jews came out of Egypt. As for the number of
those that were expelled out of Egypt, he hath contrived to have the
very same number with Lysimaehus, and says they were a hundred and ten
thousand. He then assigns a certain wonderful and plausible occasion for
the name of Sabbath; for he says that "when the Jews had traveled a six
days' journey, they had buboes in their groins; and that on this account
it was that they rested on the seventh day, as having got safely to that
country which is now called Judea; that then they preserved the language
of the Egyptians, and called that day the Sabbath, for that malady of
buboes on their groin was named Sabbatosis by the Egyptians." And
would not a man now laugh at this fellow's trifling, or rather hate his
impudence in writing thus? We must, it seems, fake it for granted that
all these hundred and ten thousand men must have these buboes. But,
for certain, if those men had been blind and lame, and had all sorts of
distempers upon them, as Apion says they had, they could not have gone
one single day's journey; but if they had been all able to travel over a
large desert, and, besides that, to fight and conquer those that opposed
them, they had not all of them had buboes on their groins after the
sixth day was over; for no such distemper comes naturally and of
necessity upon those that travel; but still, when there are many ten
thousands in a camp together, they constantly march a settled space [in
a day]. Nor is it at all probable that such a thing should happen by
chance; this would be prodigiously absurd to be supposed. However, our
admirable author Apion hath before told us that "they came to Judea in
six days' time;" and again, that "Moses went up to a mountain that lay
between Egypt and Arabia, which was called Sinai, and was concealed
there forty days, and that when he came down from thence he gave laws to
the Jews." But, then, how was it possible for them to tarry forty days
in a desert place where there was no water, and at the same time to pass
all over the country between that and Judea in the six d