the severest and strictest of all in
respect to their religious worship, imposing on this people, in order to
keep them to their duty, a thousand peculiar and painful observances, on
pain of death. Whence it is very astonishing that it has been constantly
preserved during many centuries by a people, rebellious and impatient as
this one was; while all other states have changed their laws from time to
time, although these were far more lenient.

The book which contains this law, the first of all, is itself the most
ancient book in the world, those of Homer, Hesiod, and others, being six
or
seven hundred years later.

621. The creation of the deluge being past, and God no longer requiring to
destroy the world, nor to create it anew, nor to give such great signs of
Himself, He began to establish a people on the earth, purposely formed,
who
were to last until the coming of the people whom the Messiah should
fashion
by His spirit.

622. The creation of the world beginning to be distant, God provided a
single contemporary historian, and appointed a whole people as guardians
of
this book, in order that this history might be the most authentic in the
world, and that all men might thereby learn a fact so necessary to know,
and
which could only be known through that means.

623. Japhet begins the genealogy.

Joseph folds his arms, and prefers the younger.

624. Why should Moses make the lives of men so long, and their generations
so few?

Because it is not the length of years, but the multitude of generations,
which renders things obscure. For truth is perverted only by the change of
men. And yet he puts two things, the most memorable that were ever
imagined,
namely, the creation and the deluge, so near th