s, it seems that Isaiah was
speaking of the city of Heliopolis, where there had been of old an altar
to the Lord. The leaders of the Greek party wished the Jews to throw
aside the character of strangers and foreign traders; to be at home and
to become owners of the soil. "Hate not laborious work," says the son of
Sirach; "neither husbandry, which the Most High hath ordained."

About the same time the Jews brought before Ptolemy, as a judge, their
quarrel with the Samaritans, as to whether, according to the law of
Moses, the temple ought to have been built at Jerusalem, or on the green
and fertile Mount Gerizim, where the Samaritans built their temple, or
on the barren white crags of Mount Ebal, where the Hebrew Bible says
that it should be built; and as to which nation had altered their copies
of the Bible in the twenty-seventh chapter of Deuteronomy and eighth
chapter of Joshua. This dispute had lately been the cause of riots and
rebellion. Ptolemy seems to have decided the question for political
reasons, and to please his own subjects, the Alexandrian Jews; and
without listening to the arguments as to what the law ordered, he was
content with the proof that the temple had stood at Jerusalem for about
eight hundred years, and he put to death the two Samaritan pleaders, who
had probably been guilty of some outrage against the Jews in zeal for
Mount Gerizim, and for which they might then have been on their trial.

Onias, the high priest, was much esteemed by Philometor, and bore high
offices in the government; as also did Dositheus, another Jew, who had
been very useful in helping the king to crush a rebellion. Dositheus
called himself a priest and a Levite, though his title to that honour
seems to have been doubted by his countrymen. He had brought with him
into Egypt the book of Esther, written in Greek, which he said had been
translated out of the Hebrew in Jerusalem by Lysimachus. It contained
some additions for which the Hebrew has never been brought forward, and
which are now placed among the uncanonical books in the Apocrypha.

Since the Ptolemies had found themselves too weak to hold Ethiopia, they
had placed a body of soldiers on the border of the two countries, to
guard Egypt from the inroads of the enemy. This station, twelve miles
to the south of Syene, had by degrees grown into a city, and was called
Parembole, or _The Camp_; and, as most of the soldiers were Greek
mercenaries, it was natural that the templ