626
I believe that Joshua was the first of God's people to have this name, as Jesus Christ was the last of God's people.
627
Antiquity of the Jews.—What a difference there is between one book and another! I am not astonished that the Greeks made the Iliad, nor the Egyptians and the Chinese their histories.
We have only to see how this originates. These fabulous historians are not contemporaneous with the facts about which they write. Homer composes a romance, which he gives out as such, and which is received as such; for nobody doubted that Troy and Agamemnon no more existed than did the golden apple. Accordingly he did not think of making a history, but solely a book to amuse; he is the only writer of his time; the beauty of the work has made it last, every one learns it and talks of it, it is necessary to know it, and each one knows it by heart. Four hundred years afterwards the witnesses of these facts are no longer alive, no one knows of his own knowledge if it be a fable or a history; one has only learnt it from his ancestors, and this can pass for truth.
Every history which is not contemporaneous, as the books of the Sibyls and Trismegistus,[226] and so many others which have been believed by the world, are false, and found to be false in the course of time. It is not so with contemporaneous writers.
There is a great difference between a book which an individual writes, and publishes to a nation, and a book which itself creates a nation. We cannot doubt that the book is as old as the people.
628
Josephus hides the shame of his nation.
Moses does not hide his own shame.