In the preface to the _Antiquities_ Josephus draws a distinction between his motives for the composition of that work and of the _Wars_. He wrote the latter because he himself had played a large part in the war, and he desired to correct the errors of other historians, who had perverted the truth. On the other hand, he undertook to write the earlier history of his people because of the great importance of the events themselves and of his desire to reveal for the common benefit things that were buried in ignorance. He was stimulated to the task by the fact that his forefathers had been willing to communicate their antiquity to the Greeks, and, moreover, several of the Greeks had been at pains to learn of the affairs of the Jewish nation. It would appear that he is here referring to the Septuagint translation of the Bible, since he proceeds to summarize the well-known story of King Ptolemy recounted in the Letter of Aristeas, which he afterwards sets out more fully.[1] Josephus shares the aim of the Hellenistic-Jewish writers to make the Jewish Scriptures known to the Gentile world, and he inherits also, but in a much smaller degree, their method of presenting Judaism to suit Greek or Greco-Roman tastes, as a philosophical, i.e. an ethical- philosophical, religion. Perhaps he had become acquainted, either at Alexandria or at Rome, with Philo's _Life of Moses_, which was a popular text-book, so to speak, of universal Judaism. Certain it is that the prelude to the _Antiquities_ is reminiscent of the earlier treatise. Josephus reproduces Philo's idea that Moses began his legislation not as other lawgivers, "with the detailed enactments, contracts, and other rites between one man and another, but by raising men's minds upwards to regard God and His creation." For Moses life was to be an imitation of the divine. Contemplation of God's work is the best of all patterns for man to follow. With Philo again, he points out the superiority of Moses over other legislators in his attack upon false ideas of the divine nature; "for there is nothing in the Scriptures inconsistent with the majesty of God or with His love of mankind: and all things in it have reference to the nature of the universe." He claims, too, that Moses explains some things clearly and directly, but that he hints at others philosophically under the form of allegory. And to these commonplaces of Alexandrian exegesis he adds as the lesson of the history of his people that "it goes well with those who follow God's will and observe His laws, and ill with those who rebel against Him and neglect His laws." To exhibit to the Greco-Roman world the power and majesty of the Jewish God and the excellence of the Jewish law--these are the two main purposes which he professes to set before himself in his rendering of the Bible story, which occupies the first half of the _Antiquities_. No Jewish writer before him had treated the Bible to suit Roman predilections, which attached supreme