Apart from the history contained in the books of the Old Testament, there is absolutely no record of the Jews as an independent people, except that contained in the writings of Josephus (about A.D. 100); and, although that author may be tolerably trustworthy when relating matters near to his own time, yet in his description of Jewish antiquities he evidently, as he himself asserts, rests only on tradition. For instance, he alone records the story of Alexander entering the holy place at Jerusalem and offering sacrifice on the altar; but Arrian, in his “Anabasis of Alexander the Great,” where he specially treats of the life and actions of this great conqueror, says not one word about such a place as Jerusalem, or about such a story as that recorded by Josephus. Curtius, who wrote a far more detailed account of the life and conquests of Alexander, mentions neither Jerusalem nor the story of Alexander and the holy place. Herodotus, about B.C. 430, when narrating the two raids of the Scythians through Syria, as far as Egypt, says not a word about any Jews. Xenophon, who wrote 150 years after they were said to have returned from Babylon, or about B.C. 386, appears to have been unconscious of their existence, only mentioning the Syrians of Palestine. Neither did Sanchoniathon, Ctesias, Berosus, nor Manetho even once mention them as a nation. Diodorus also, when writing of the siege of Tyre by the soldiers of Alexander, neither mentions the Jews as a nation nor Jerusalem as their chief town. In fact, we have no account of them at all, except that contained in the Old Testament and that in the writings of Josephus, until we find them subject to the Romans, under Antiochus Epiphanes, about B.C. 165, when in all probability they had just settled down into a dependent nation, having been driven into Syria by the Babylonians, whose fertile valleys these Arabian nomads had attempted to colonise. Being surrounded on all sides by nations whose religions so very far surpassed their own in development, it did not take long for the Yahoudi (afterwards called Jews) to become affected by the mythological dramas of their neighbours; and, in carefully examining the mythical records of their tribe, we find that they very soon became acquainted with, and in some cases offered worship to, almost all the purely Semitic and Chaldean, as well as to a few of the Egyptian, deities. Their principal god always remained as before, El (אל) signifying the zodiacal sign _Aries_, the heavenly ram and first of the twelve zodiacal figures. Combined with Yah (יה), the abbreviation of Yahouh (יהוה), their tribal deity, it formed a compound word, Eloh (אלוה), or Elyah (אליה, the ו and י being interchangeable), the plural of which was Elohim (אלהים), a word used frequently in the Bible to signify the supreme God. Bearing in mind the fact that the fables of the Bible are not actual history, but merely so many accounts of the ever-recurring phenomena of the sidereal heavens, and that in