Herodotus places Homer 400 years before himself; thus bringing the “father of history,” as he is termed by Cicero, to about 500 years before the advent of our Saviour, so that the difference of date between the author of the Pentateuch and the oldest Greek historian cannot be much less than 1000 years. I pass over the pretended antiquity of the Chinese and Parsis records: these have been disposed of very satisfactorily, and however much _fancy_ may dwell upon the losses to literature inflicted by the Caliph Omar, when he destroyed the Alexandrian library,[1] in the year 640, a very little reflection will convince us that as these treasures, real or assumed, had been ransacked for ages, by the brightest spirits of Greece and Rome, everything worthy of note has been handed down to us. ----- Footnote 1: The library destroyed by the Caliph Omar, was situated in the temple of Serapis, and consisted of 300,000 volumes; in addition to which there existed in the Bruchion quarter of the city of Alexandria, a second collection of 400,000 books, which was accidentally lost by fire during the war with Julius Cæsar. Alexandria (founded 332 B.C.) stood in an intermediate position between the east and west, and united the commerce of Europe, Aralia, and India; here came first into collision the Greek and Oriental mind; here the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament was written; and the collections formed by the ancient kings of Egypt were rapidly enriched and enlarged by the interchange of ideas with the Greek philosophers. ----- The _learned_ talk about the writings of the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Egyptians; but they do not produce a single scrap of tangible evidence in support of these pretensions. It may, however, be contended, that although there are no _writings_ extant, _traditional_ evidence is very strong; and this establishes a high antiquity for Lycurgus, who lived 900 years before the Christian era. The more, therefore, we inquire, the stronger the proof becomes, that Moses as a lawgiver flourished 600 years before the highest claimant to our veneration on the grounds of primitiveness; and thus we are entitled to assume that the Greek legislator took much that is excellent, in the laws ascribed to him, from his Jewish predecessor. Lycurgus lived about the time that Shishak, king of Egypt, destroyed the temple of Solomon, and carried away many captives: it is therefore no very extravagant supposition, that the Pentateuch of Moses was known to the great lawgiver. During the peaceful reign of king Solomon, the intercourse between the Jews and the Egyptians was frequent and extensive, for the great monarch, needing the assistance of skilful artificers for the construction of the Temple at Jerusalem, broke down that barrier of exclusiveness that had previously isolated his people.