Preface (cxxxi)

IN the preceding Book, I have traced the lives of the Hebrews of old time before the appearance of Moses, men beloved of God who proved that title true by crowning themselves with the rewards of every virtue. Their pious doctrines also and instructions I described, and moreover their perfectly true and religious beliefs concerning God, which we have confessed that we Christians had come to love and to desire. And now, following the order of succession, I will pass on to the civil polity in the time of Moses, which after that first stage in religion presents a second, namely that which, is provided with legal ordinances quite peculiar to the Jewish nation.

For we shall prove at the proper opportunity that the institutions of Moses were suited to Jews alone, and not to the other nations of the world, nor were possible to be observed by all men, I mean by those who dwelt at a distance from the land of Judaea, whether Greeks or barbarians.

But now I am going to set forth this mode of life, I mean the life in the time of Moses, not in words of my own, but as before only in the words of the very authors who have been approved among the Jews for their hereditary learning: for I think it is proper for me to present the testimonies on which my proofs rest, in the same way as I began, through the authors properly belonging to each subject.

As therefore I called up Phoenicians, and Egyptians, and Greeks as witnesses of the matters well known among themselves in their own country, so it seems to me that the present occasion properly claims these Jewish witnesses, and not that I should myself be supposed to be giving a superficial sketch of matters foreign to me.

But before coming to this point, I think it necessary to set plainly before my readers, how the oracles of the Jews passed to the Greeks, and what was the method settled for the interpretation of the sacred writings entrusted to them; showing also the number and character of the interpreters, and the great zeal of the king, whereby those oracles came to be translated into the Greek language; for the explanation of these matters also will not be unadvisable in regard to my proof of the Preparation for the Gospel.

For when the light of the salutary preaching of our Saviour was all but ready to shine forth unto all men in the Roman empire, more than ordinary reason required that the prophecies concerning Him, and the mode of life of the pious Hebrews of old, and the lessons of their religious teaching, hidden from long ages in their native tongue, should now at length come forth to all the nations, to whom the knowledge of God was about to be introduced; and then God Himself, the author of these blessings, anticipating the future by His foreknowledge as God, arranged that the predictions concerning Him who was to appear before long as the Saviour of all mankind, and to establish Himself as the teacher of the religion of the One Supreme God to all the nations under the sun, should be revealed to them all, and be brought into the light by being accurately translated, and set up in public libraries. So God put it into the mind of King Ptolemy to accomplish this, in preparation, as it seems, for that participation in them by all the nations which was so soon to take place.

For we should not otherwise have got from the Jews those oracles which they would have hidden away for their jealousy of us; but these in consequence of the divinely ordered interpretation were vouchsafed to us in a translation by the men who were approved among them for intelligence and hereditary culture.

These things are described by Aristeas, a man who besides being learned was moreover engaged in the transactions of the time of the second Ptolemy, surnamed Philadelphus, in whose reign the translation of the Jewish Scriptures, made through the zeal of the king, was awarded a place in the libraries of Alexandria. But it is time to listen to the author himself relating the matter word for word in the following manner: