before me, after I have first mentioned what Moses says of the creation of the world, which I find described in the sacred books after the manner following. FOOTNOTES 1 (return) [ This preface of Josephus is excellent in its kind, and highly worthy the repeated perusal of the reader, before he set about the perusal of the work itself.] 2 (return) [ That is, all the Gentiles, both Greeks and Romans.] 3 (return) [ We may seasonably note here, that Josephus wrote his Seven Books of the Jewish War long before he wrote these his Antiquities. Those books of the War were published about A.D. 75, and these Antiquities, A. D. 93, about eighteen years later.] 4 (return) [ This Epaphroditus was certainly alive in the third year of Trajan, A.D. 100. See the note on the First Book Against Apion, sect. 1. Who he was we do not know; for as to Epaphroditus, the freedman of Nero, and afterwards Domitian's secretary, who was put to death by Domitian in the 14th or 15th year of his reign, he could not be alive in the third of Trajan.] 5 (return) [ Josephus here plainly alludes to the famous Greek proverb, If God be with us, every thing that is impossible becomes possible.] 6 (return) [ As to this intended work of Josephus concerning the reasons of many of the Jewish laws, and what philosophical or allegorical sense they would bear, the loss of which work is by some of the learned not much regretted, I am inclinable, in part, to Fabricius's opinion, ap. Havercamp, p. 63, 61, That "we need not doubt but that, among some vain and frigid conjectures derived from Jewish imaginations, Josephus would have taught us a greater number of excellent and useful things, which perhaps nobody, neither among the Jews, nor among the Christians, can now inform us of; so that I would give a great deal to find it still extant."] BOOK I. Containing The Interval Of Three Thousand Eight Hundred And Thirty-Three Years. — From The Creation To The Death Of Isaac. CHAPTER 1. The Constitution Of The World And The Disposition Of The Elements.