The Decalogue, Chronicles, and other narrative parts, may have been written under the order of Hilkiah and Ezra, shortly after the Babylonian slavery; yet there is great reason to believe that many poetical rants called prophecies, and even some parts of the Pentateuch, were written after the Jews began to congregate at Alexandria, when the events which the itinerant Jewish bards pretended to foretel, had already taken place: for instance, Ezekiel makes the Lord say, "And I will make _Pathros_ desolate." Can the cunning alteration made in the first syllable of this word conceal the evident allusion to that "wonder of the world," the famous light tower of Pharos, which was built by two of the Ptolemies! Daniel could not speak of the third being "like unto the Son of God," before the dogma was invented that god had a son.* Moreover, if it can be shown (as hath been affirmed) that the prophecies were partly translated and modelled from Greek originals, at a period subsequent to the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, what becomes of their antiquity? We repeat that most of the books of this collection contain abundant proofs of their having been fabricated from materials as aforesaid, at various periods between the Babylonian captivity and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans, in the time of Vespasian. We have seen that the passage of the Red Sea is drawn from the fable of the triumphal march of Bacchus, when from Egypt he went to conquer India. Josephus, though he often renders the romances of his countrymen still more monstrous, was ashamed to make a miracle of this story, and compares it to the passage of the Pamphylian Sea, by Alexander. In a jovial mood Bacchus drew wine from a rock by a stroke of his rod; but herein the imitator deviates from the original, wisely preferring water to wine in an arid wilderness. The manna miracle has long been detected and exposed. Josephus tells us that, in his time, it was found in great quantities in Arabia; and the plant that produces it is now cultivated in Sicily and Southern Italy. Bishop Talleyrand, in a letter which he is said to have written to the Pope, after their quarrel, told his holiness that the real manna of Moses was the plunder he got in the desert by his robberies and murders; these were counted so many godsends. * The Talmud acknowledges that the forgeries of Daniel, Esdras, and others, were prodigious.