Against Apion | Page 6

the best of these priests, and those that
attended upon the Divine worship, for that design from the beginning, but made provision
that the stock of the priests should continue unmixed and pure; for he who is partaker of
the priesthood must propagate of a wife of the same nation, without having any regard to
money, or any other dignities; but he is to make a scrutiny, and take his wife's genealogy
from the ancient tables, and procure many witnesses to it. (7) And this is our practice not
only in Judea, but wheresoever any body of men of our nation do live; and even there an
exact catalogue of our priests' marriages is kept; I mean at Egypt and at Babylon, or in
any other place of the rest of the habitable earth, whithersoever our priests are scattered;
for they send to Jerusalem the ancient names of their parents in writing, as well as those
of their remoter ancestors, and signify who are the witnesses also. But if any war falls out,
such as have fallen out a great many of them already, when Antiochus Epiphanes made
an invasion upon our country, as also when Pompey the Great and Quintilius Varus did
so also, and principally in the wars that have happened in our own times, those priests
that survive them compose new tables of genealogy out of the old records, and examine
the circumstances of the women that remain; for still they do not admit of those that have
been captives, as suspecting that they had conversation with some foreigners. But what is
the strongest argument of our exact management in this matter is what I am now going to
say, that we have the names of our high priests from father to son set down in our records
for the interval of two thousand years; and if any of these have been transgressors of
these rules, they are prohibited to present themselves at the altar, or to be partakers of any
other of our purifications; and this is justly, or rather necessarily done, because every one
is not permitted of his own accord to be a writer, nor is there any disagreement in what is
written; they being only prophets that have written the original and earliest accounts of
things as they learned them of God himself by inspiration; and others have written what
hath happened in their own times, and that in a very distinct manner also.
8. For we have not an innumerable multitude of books among us, disagreeing from and
contradicting one another, [as the Greeks have,] but only twenty-two books, (8) which
contain the records of all the past times; which are justly believed to be divine; and of
them five belong to Moses, which contain his laws and the traditions of the origin of
mankind till his death. This interval of time was little short of three thousand years; but as
to the time from the death of Moses till the reign of Artaxerxes king of Persia, who
reigned after Xerxes, the prophets, who were after Moses, wrote down what was done in
their times in thirteen books. The remaining four books contain hymns to God, and
precepts for the conduct of human life. It is true, our history hath been written since
Artaxerxes very particularly, but hath not been esteemed of the like authority with the
former by our forefathers, because there hath not been an exact succession of prophets
since that time; and how firmly we have given credit to these books of our own nation is
evident by what we do; for during so many ages as have already passed, no one has been
so bold as either to add any thing to them, to take any thing from them, or to make any
change in them; but it is become natural to all Jews immediately, and from their very

birth, to esteem these books to contain Divine doctrines, and to persist in them, and, if
occasion be willingly to die for them. For it is no new thing for our captives, many of
them in number, and frequently in time, to be seen to endure racks and deaths of all kinds
upon the theatres, that they may not be obliged to say one word against our laws and the
records that contain them; whereas there are none at all among the Greeks who would
undergo the least harm on that account, no, nor in case all the writings that are among
them were to be destroyed; for they take them to be such discourses as are framed
agreeably to the inclinations of those that write them; and they have justly the same
opinion of the ancient writers, since they see some of the present generation bold enough
to write