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194 tance to the argument whether the book of Judith be a mere fable or not. We may even concede it to be very probably only a "religious romance," though Prideaux "was inclined most to think it a true history." But it is undoubtedly a very ancient composition, perhaps written even before the Babylonian captivity, to which it makes no allusion; and the author could scarcely have represented Bethulia to be then inhabited by the Simeonites, unless it had been so in reality.

Turning to other writers besides those of the sacred Scriptures and the Apocrypha, we are not without some further aid to carry on our inquiries. We have already referred to Josephus, as an author held in considerable estimation, though his works, as Dean Prideaux observes, "have in them many great and manifest mistakes," which compel us to receive his statements with great caution. No part of them is so particularly open to this remark as the eleventh book of his 'Antiquities of the Jews,' wherein, as Prideaux adds, "he frequently varies from Scripture, from history, and common sense, which manifestly proves it to have been the least considered and the worst digested of all that he hath written." (Connexion of the Old and New Testament, vol. i. p. 290.) In this eleventh book, so justly stigmatized, Josephus has particularly shown his want of judgment in adopting the fables of the apocryphal book of Esdras respecting the return of the Israelites from their captivity, rather than the narrative in the canonical book of Ezra. Yet even he in so doing has passed over entirely the marvellous dream of the ten tribes going into a "further country where never mankind dwelt, that they might there keep their statutes, which they never kept in their own land." On the other hand, his testimony, such as it is, directly contradicts it, though it is not otherwise conformable to the arguments we have ventured to sustain. According to his statements, when Esdras, as he terms Ezra, received the epistle of king Xerxes, permitting his return to Jerusalem with the favours granted him, he "sent a copy of it to all those of his own nation that were in Media, and when these Jews had understood what piety the king had towards God, and what kindness he had for Ezra, they were all greatly pleased, nay, many of them took their effects with them and came to Babylon, as very desirous of going down to Jerusalem; but then the entire body of the people of Israel remained in that country; wherefore there are but two tribes in Asia and Europe subject to the Romans, while the ten tribes are beyond the Euphrates till now, and are an immense multitude,