uncertain; so we had best
follow Josephus's own account elsewhere, Antiq.;B. XI. ch. 3. sect. 4,
which shows us that according to his copy of the Old Testament, after
the second of Cyrus, that work was interrupted till the second of
Darius, when in seven years it was finished in the ninth of Darius.

[15] This is a thing well known by the learned, that we are not secure
that we have any genuine writings of Pythagoras; those Golden Verses,
which are his best remains, being generally supposed to have been
written not by himself, but by some of his scholars only, in agreement
with what Josephus here affirms of him.

[16] Whether these verses of Cherilus, the heathen poet, in the days of
Xerxes, belong to the Solymi in Pisidia, that were near a small lake, or
to the Jews that dwelt on the Solymean or Jerusalem mountains, near the
great and broad lake Asphaltitis, that were a strange people, and
spake the Phoenician tongue, is not agreed on by the learned. If is yet
certain that Josephus here, and Eusebius, Prep. IX. 9. p. 412, took them
to be Jews; and I confess I cannot but very much incline to the same
opinion. The other Solymi were not a strange people, but heathen
idolaters, like the other parts of Xerxes's army; and that these spake
the Phoenician tongue is next to impossible, as the Jews certainly
did; nor is there the least evidence for it elsewhere. Nor was the
lake adjoining to the mountains of the Solvmi at all large or broad,
in comparison of the Jewish lake Asphaltitis; nor indeed were these so
considerable a people as the Jews, nor so likely to be desired by Xerxes
for his army as the Jews, to whom he was always very favorable. As for
the rest of Cherilus's description, that "their heads were sooty; that
they had round rasures on their heads; that their heads and faces were
like nasty horse-heads, which had been hardened in the smoke;" these
awkward characters probably fitted the Solymi of Pisidi no better than
they did the Jews in Judea. And indeed this reproachful language, here
given these people, is to me a strong indication that they were the poor
despicable Jews, and not the Pisidian Solymi celebrated in Homer, whom
Cherilus here describes; nor are we to expect that either Cherilus or
Hecateus, or any other pagan writers cited by Josephus and Eusebius,
made no mistakes in the Jewish history. If by comparing their
testimonies with the more authentic records of that nation we find them
for the main to conf