house as the high Idaces of a forest;" which was
long before foretold by the prophet Micah, ch. 3:12, and quoted from him
in the prophecies of Jeremiah, ch. 26:18.
[3] See Ecclesiastes 8:11.
[4] This Berytus was certainly a Roman colony, and has coins extant
that witness the same, as Hudson and Spanheim inform us. See the note on
Antiq. B. XVI: ch. 11. sect. 1.
[5] The Jews at Antioch and Alexandria, the two principal cities in all
the East, had allowed them, both by the Macedonians, and afterwards
by the Romans, a governor of their own, who was exempt from the
jurisdiction of the other civil governors. He was called sometimes
barely "governor," sometimes "ethnarch," and [at Alexandria] "alabarch,"
as Dr. Hudson takes notice on this place out of Fuller's Miscellanies.
They had the like governor or governors allowed them at Babylon under
their captivity there, as the history of Susanna implies.
[6] This Classicus, and Civilis, and Cerealis are names well known in
Tacitus; the two former as moving sedition against the Romans, and
the last as sent to repress them by Vespasian, just as they are here
described in Josephus; which is the case also of Fontellis Agrippa
and Rubrius Gallup, i, sect. 3. But as to the very favorable account
presently given of Domitian, particularly as to his designs in this his
Gallic and German expedition, it is not a little contrary to that in
Suetonius, Vesp. sect. 7. Nor are the reasons unobvious that might
occasion this great diversity: Domitian was one of Josephus's patrons,
and when he published these books of the Jewish war, was very young, and
had hardly begun those wicked practices which rendered him so infamous
afterward; while Suetonius seems to have been too young, and too low
in life, to receive any remarkable favors from him; as Domitian was
certainly very lewd and cruel, and generally hated, when Puetonius wrote
about him.
[7] Since in these latter ages this Sabbatic River, once so famous,
which, by Josephus's account here, ran every seventh day, and rested on
six, but according to Pliny, Nat. Hist. 31. II, ran perpetually on six
days, and rested every seventh, [though it no way appears by either of
their accounts that the seventh day of this river was the Jewish seventh
day or sabbath,] is quite vanished, I shall add no more about it: only
see Dr. Hudson's note. In Varenius's Geography, i, 17, the reader will
find several instances of such periodical fountains and rivers
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